Freelance journalist Oliver Broudy explores environmental toxicity and the community of The Sensitives — people with powerful, puzzling symptoms resulting from exposure to chemicals, fragrances, and cell phone signals, that have no effect on “normals.”
Recorded June 12, 2020
Press Release
Over fifty million Americans endure environmental illnesses that render them allergic to chemicals. Innocuous staples from deodorant to garbage bags wreak havoc on sensitives. With over 85,000 chemicals in the environment, danger lurks around every corner.
THE SENSITIVES: The Rise of Environmental Illness and the Search for America’s Last Pure Place is available for sale at this bookstore.
Dr. Ann McCampbel, ([email protected])(website) a Santa Fe, New Mexico based environmental illness medical advocate joins the conversation.
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Living without working
Economist Daniel Susskind is author of A WORLD WITHOUT WORK: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond.
Vikram Mansharamani is author of THINK FOR YOURSELF: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence.
Recorded 5/29/2020
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LOCKED-DOWN AMERICANS: Isolation and Loneliness
Social distancing is hard on us because we humans are social animals, bio-electronically wired for connection. While the present pandemic didn’t cause the isolation the characterizes our era, it certainly exacerbated it. In 2018, 28% of adult households in the U.S. were single person households, and 63% of the adult population remained unmarried. But we are not happier, on the contrary: over 35% of adult Americans report themselves to be chronically lonely, up from 20% in 1990.
How do we surmount this current crisis and help to create healthy connections going forward, in our own lives and in the lives of our children?
J. W. Freiberg’s latest book Surrounded by Others and Yet So Alone looks at the problem of chronic loneliness through his unique lens as a social psychologist (PhD, UCLA) turned lawyer (JD, Harvard Law School). His case studies are infused with the latest brain science, which reveals that loneliness is actually a sensation, like hunger or thirst, not an emotion like anger, which we can talk ourselves out of.
Recorded May 15, 2020
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The Alchemy of Us
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AINISSA RAMIREZ is a material scientist who is passionate about getting everyone excited about science, so much so that she calls herself a “science evangelist”. In her latest book, she looks at eight world-changing technologies and examines how we shape inventions out of matter, and then how those inventions, in turn, shape us – from clocks to silicon chips!
Recorded 5/1/2020
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.
In Search of Meadowlarks
To mark Earth Day, John Marzluff will outline a personal approach to sustainable agriculture.
Through an ornithologist’s lens, he observes current farming practices to see if we can broker a more harmonious relationship between our birds, farms, food and land.
RECORDED 4/16/2020
Joining the conversation will be Ronnie Cummings, author of Grassroots Rising and International Director of OCA, Organic Consumers Association, and Michael Chuisano, owner and farmer of The Naked Farm in New York where he grows a variety of produce, including lettuce, beets, radishes and arugula using a bio-intensive, no-till agricultural method.
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Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy
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Joseph Nye, a leading scholar of international relations, considers presidents and their foreign policy from FDR to Trump who come up short in the morality polls.
“Foreign Policy” magazine named Nye one of the top 100 Global Thinkers.
Recorded 4/3/2020
In Do Morals Matter?, Joseph Nye provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in U.S. foreign policy during the post-1945 era. Working through each presidency from Truman to Trump, Nye scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions: their intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. Alongside this, he evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which ones do not.
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Nature Underfoot: Learning to live with tiny life
RECORDED 3/19/2020
John Hainze, an entomologist, ethicist and former pesticide-developer calls for greater respect and moral consideration for humans and their natural world.
Are creepy crawlers and unwanted plants deserving of empathy as partners dwelling with us on earth?
Fruit flies, dandelions, and crabgrass are the bane of many people and the target of numerous eradication efforts. In his compelling reassessment of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Hainze considers the fascinating and bizarre history of how these so-called invasive or unwanted pests and weeds have coevolved with humanity and highlights the benefits of a greater respect and moral consideration toward these organisms.
Joining the conversation will be James Barilla, author of MY BACKYARD JUNGLE: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover who turned his Yard into Habitat and Learned to live with It which considers the habitat of a typical urban back yard as a microcosm of burgeoning cities like Rio de Janeiro. He teaches creative non-fiction and environmental literature at the University of South Carolina.
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Migrating to Prison
For much of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. As a result, roughly 400,000 people a year now spend some time locked up pending civil or criminal immigration proceedings.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández‘s new book takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. It tackles the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is a professor of law at the University of Denver and an immigration lawyer. He runs the blog Crimmigration.com.
Recorded for broadcast 2.19.2020
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The Age Of Illusions
Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University discusses his new book about the post-Cold war follies and delusions that culminated in the age of Donald Trump in conversation with journalist Christopher Lydon, host of Open Source radio.
THE AGE OF ILLUSIONS
How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
How, within a quarter of a century, did the United States end up with gaping inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, and an increasingly angry and alienated population, as well, of course, the strangest president in American history?
Recorded 1/14/2020
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