Category Archives: Archive

Archive, Events, Podcasts, Radio

The End of Meat?

Can Americans survive without their hamburgers? This juicy question raises many fundamental issues – nutritional, moral and environmental.

Recorded 9/25/2019

Watch the video here.

Cows are big methane machines and not very efficient ones, and everyone agrees that we need to reduce our carbon footprint. As people are becoming better informed about choices and what they’re putting into their bodies, they are looking at the “costs” from a health perspective, for animals and for the environment. Changes are afoot.

Who knew that Burger King would be offering the Impossible Whopper made from plant-based protein instead of meat? And veganism, which used to be a fringe-movement, has now morphed into a hip lifestyle. Scientists are already working on cell-based meat products which will be on sale to the public next year.

To help us understand the issues, we have scientists, philosophers and businessmen. Dr. Walter Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard will be joined by Nina Gheihman, a sociologist at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and two entrepreneurs, Truman French and Tucker Pforzheimer, who are running a business, growing shiitake mushrooms on Martha’s Vineyard.

Can a burger help combat climate change?

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Archive, Events, Radio

Chinese Democracy in Crisis: The New Long March

In light of the escalating developments in Hong Kong with pro-Democracy demonstrators becoming increasingly galvanized in response to the Chinese government’s crackdown, we examine the current situation both inside and outside mainland China with regard to human rights.

Teng Biao, is a human rights lawyer currently attached to the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, at NYU and he will be joined by Uyghur-American Salih Hudayar and activist Kyle Olbert, who will discuss the challenges facing both the Chinese Communist party and the ethnic minorities who resist the Chinese policy of oppression which they say is being carried out under the guise of “counter-terrorism”.

Recorded September 11, 2019

Watch this forum on the WGBH Forum Network

Archive, Black Voices Matter

They were her property

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Historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers discusses her new book about the role of white women in American slavery. They Were Her Property reveals that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market.

RECORDED April 17, 2019

In They Were Her Property, Jones-Roger writes that women typically inherited more slaves than land, and that enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Archive, Events

Grand Canyon For Sale

Recorded September 19, 2018

Stephen Nash, renowned author of books about science and the environment, warns that America’s public lands will “tumble away” unless people act.

Nash discusses the precarious future of our national parks, monuments and wilderness with MIchael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club.

Faced with the very real prospect that development, coupled with climate change, will dislocate wildlife populations and vegetation across many thousands of square miles of the national landscape, we ask “what if anything can we do about it?”

Archive, Events, Radio

The New Cold War?

Journalist James Kirchick’s latest book The End of Europe, considers the implications of Putin’s victory in the recent Russian election and other cultural and political developments in Europe.

James Kirchick is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute and a correspondent for the Daily Beast. He will be joined in discussion by Professor David Szakonyi, an Academy Scholar at Harvard and a Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

Recorded April 4, 2018
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Archive, Events, Radio

Romance in the Information Age

New Atlantis editor Christine Rosen, actor Johnny Lee  Davenport, and art historian Curt DeCamillo tackle the issue of how our social media and personal technologies influence our emotions.

Friendships and love affairs were once the glorious domain of pen and  paper, where lovers poured out their souls. Now they have become mere  electronic transactions executed and terminated in a few texted taps. Yet we are still hitting poets.org over and over again, in search of  the right words. So what have we lost and gained with digital intimacy?

Do texting and tweeting diminish our emotional communications? Do our gadgets change the way we feel, act, and think?

Recorded February 15, 2018 
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Archive, Black Voices Matter, Events, Radio

Race Still Matters

Political activist, author and Harvard University professor Cornel West speaks on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his national best-seller Race Matters. First published in 1993 following the L.A. riots, the book has since become a groundbreaking classic on race in America.

Race Matters speaks to despair, black conservatism, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. Now more than ever, Cornel West argues, Race Matters is a book for all Americans, as it helps us to build a genuine multiracial democracy in the new millennium.

Recorded 12/5/17

Race Matters 1
Race Matters 2
Archive, Events

Who Can You Trust?

If you can’t trust those in charge, who can you trust?

From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn’t the age of distrust – far from it.  Rachel Botsman writes about and researches how technology is transforming trust and what this means for life, work and business.

Recorded November 21, 2017

Watch this video on the WGBH Forum Network

Archive, Environment, Events

The War Against Science

A conversation with environmental scientists Joel Clement, H. Curtis Spalding, Brown University and Andrew Rosenberg, Director for Science and Democracy at Union of Concerned Scientists  on the War Against Science.

Recorded November 15, 2017

Joel Clement recently resigned his post as a senior Department of Interior official over the suppression of facts about implications of climate change on human populations. He cited the department’s  “poor leadership, waste, and failures on climate change.”

“I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.”

Archive, Events, Radio, Renewing American Democracy

Exceptional America

exceptional2What divides Americans from the world and from each other?

Stanford Law professor Mugambi Jouet discusses his new book Exceptional America which tackles why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war.

Why is America so polarized? How does American exceptionalism explain these social changes?

Read chapter 1 of the book.

Mugambi Jouet teaches at Stanford Law School and is a frequent media commentator. His research focuses on U.S. criminal law, constitutional law, and policymaking from a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing history, sociology, political science, and the humanities.

Recorded May 17, 2017

Listen to EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA, 1 & 2