Category Archives: Podcasts

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Podcasts, Radio

Tick, Tick, And More Ticks

Many people know at least one person suffering from Lyme’s disease, a quietly expanding tick-borne epidemic that has now spread throughout the United States into Canada.  It is more than 40 years since the disease was first identified yet there is still no human vaccine available, despite the multiple vaccine options that you can purchase for your dog.  So what happened to the LymeRix vaccine that was developed in 1990s, and why was it so abruptly withdrawn from the market?

 Kris Newby, is a Stanford-educated science writer and senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under the Skin, whose book Bitten has won three international book awards. 

Kris Newby

Brian Owens, an award-winning science journalist for Nature, New Scientist and The Lancet, was commissioned to investigate the causes, treatments, and controversy surrounding this insidious but often overlooked disease and recently published his book, Lyme Disease in Canada.  In it, Owens cites hope in a new French vaccine that is being developed in partnership with Pfizer for use in 2024.

Brad Owens

Find out what you should know about Lyme’s disease before being bitten!

Recorded 2/22/22

Tick,Tick, And More Ticks

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Events, Podcasts

SMELL – an olfactory orgy

Smell is one of the primal ways that we humans first navigate the world.  Yet smell largely remains a sensorial mystery because of the intricate way that scent, emotion and memory are intertwined in the brain.  Research into olfaction, the science of what happens between the nose and the brain, has intensified in the past couple of years due to the huge number of people who lost their sense of smell due to COVID.  Luckily, this condition, anosmia, is usually temporary.

How much do our noses really matter in making sense of the world?  Consider your coffee – just one sniff contains 800 separate volatile chemicals!

To help us understand this important but often overlooked sense, we talk to Sandeep Robert Datta, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and Venkatesh Murthy, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science. They will be joined by Dr. Eric Holbrook, Director of Rhinology at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital.

  • Sandeep Robert Datta
  • Venkatesh Murthy
  • Eric Holbrook

Recorded January 11, 2022

SMELL: An Olfactory Orgy 1
Events, Podcasts

The Art Of Possibility

Benjamin  Zander, renowned conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra and  Boston Youth Philharmonic orchestra, and co-author of The Art of  Possibility.  Zander considers the everyday miracles that can  happen despite catastrophe.   

Recorded 12.14.2021

Benjamin Zander
The Art Of Possibility

Cambridge Forum’s purpose is to inform, explore, entertain and challenge preconceptions on a wide range of current and timeless subjects. Forums are recorded live with audience participation, and freely distributed to the world through NPR, GBH Forum Network, and CF podcasts.

Environment, Podcasts

What I Learned In Prison

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning  journalist has been teaching classes in drama, literature, philosophy and history in the college-degree program offered by Rutgers University to inmates in the New Jersey prison system.  His latest book, OUR CLASS: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, is a haunting and powerful account of the voices trapped within a cruel penal system that too often defines their lives.

Recorded 11.16.2021

What I Learned In Prison 1

After studying some of August Wilson’s plays, Hedges class at East Jersey State Prison decided to write their own play Caged which played to sold out audiences at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ and went on to be published.  In Our Class, Hedges chronicles the class’s grief and suffering, as well as their personal transformation in crafted detail, giving voice to those who our society often demonizes and abandons. 

Stephan Whitley is a former student and a successful graduate of Rutgers who was locked up in multiple New Jersey prisons and is now engaged in criminal justice reform work. 

The stink, the mice, the yelling. My time in solitary was the most savage moment of my life.

from Stephan Whitley’s essay at nj.com

Cambridge Forum’s purpose is to inform, explore, entertain and challenge preconceptions on a wide range of current and timeless subjects. Forums are recorded live with audience participation, and freely distributed to the world through NPR, GBH Forum Network, and CF podcasts.

Archive, Podcasts, Radio, Search For Meaning

JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation

In her unexpected NYT bestseller, Jesus and John Wayne, historian Kristin Du Mez traces how a militant ideal of white Christian manhood has come to pervade evangelical popular culture in America and as a result how the evangelical church is failing many mainstream Christian Americans. 

Joining the conversation are historians Jemar Tisby and Jon Butler. Jemar Tisby is author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism, published in 2021. He is the founder of The Witness and co-hosts the Pass The Mic podcast. Keep up with his latest musings via his newsletter, Footnotes.

Jon Butler is Professor Emeritus of American Studies, History, and Religious Studies at Yale University. His books include Becoming America and the prize-winning Awash in a Sea of Faith and Huguenots in America.  His new book is God in Gotham:  The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. 

Recorded 9/20/2021

Jesus And John Wayne 1
Jesus And John Wayne 2

Over several decades, Hollywood’s icons of strong men portrayed by actors like John Wayne and Mel Gibson in Braveheart, transformed core biblical teachings such as loving one’s neighbors and enemies, with a militant battle cry.  Mainstream evangelical leaders preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity – of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. This culminated in the hero worship of Trump who embodied their idea of militant masculinity, as protector and warrior. Even if this meant betraying their own moral values. 

Du Mez, an historian at Calvin University, delves into the hypocrisy and disconnect between purported Christian ethics and the rise of sexual abuse, corruption and scandal within the evangelical church.  She argues that the current brand of Christian nationalism which has come to dominate national politics and family values in recent times, is “more John Wayne than Jesus”.

Have you recently left your religion for reasons of disgust and hypocrisy relating to abuse, corruption or misogyny? Is there still an important place for organized religion in America?

Events, Podcasts, Search For Meaning

HOW GOD WORKS: THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE BENEFITS OF RELIGION

Did you know that people who engage in spiritual practices tend to live longer, happier lives?  What’s more you don’t have to be “religious” to avail yourself of the multiple benefits – many of these rituals work on the mind regardless of belief.

Psychologist David DeSteno discusses some fascinating findings from his latest book How God Works.

Science shows that by taking part in certain religious practices and rituals, regardless of faith – or lack thereof – we improve our emotional and physical wellbeing.

Consider that: 

  • Prayers of gratitude make people more honest and generous, creating a cycle of paying it forward.
  • Buddhist meditation reduces hostility and increases compassion
  • The Jewish practice of sitting shiva reduces the pain of grief
  • The Christian ritual of saying grace before meals increases empathy
  • Shinto rituals around childbirth enhance bonding for mothers and reduce the incidence of postpartum depression

Recorded 9/7/2021

Science Behind Religion 1
Science Behind Religion 2

David DeSteno is a psychologist at Northeastern University where he studies the mind’s foundation for moral behavior.

Cambridge Forum provides free and open discussions about the pertinent issues and ideas confronting us, in the world today.

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

Mississippi: Then And Now

Bob Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021), a veteran of the civil rights struggle,  draws an analogy between the early voter registration drives in Mississippi during the 1960’s  and an innovative school curriculum called The Algebra Project.  The vote gave poor people access to political power;  quantitative reasoning, Moses argues,  enables students to have access to today’s economic arrangements. 

For more information on current efforts to develop a national “We the People – Math Literacy for All” Alliance that is calling on the nation for Direct Federal Investment and Involvement in supporting mathematics literacy for all K-12 students, and particularly for students performing in the lowest quartile on state standardized exams, please visithttps://www.mathliteracyforall.org 

Robert Parris Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021) was an American educator and civil rights activist, known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and he was one of the main organizers for the Freedom Summer Project.

Mississippi: Then & Now – Bob Moses 1993

Additional resources:

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

I’ll Make Me A World

Filmmaker Sam Pollard is a dedicated chronicler of the Black experience in America, moving freely across film and long-form television as well as narrative and documentary. His films explore complicated American figures and the extended aftershocks of racial inequality.

His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.  For one of his episodes in this series, he received an Emmy.  Eight years later, he returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.  For the series, Mr. Pollard received The George Peabody Award.  Between 1990 and 2000, Mr. Pollard edited a number of Spike Lee’s films:  Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Girl 6, Clockers, Bamboozled. 

I’ll Make Me A World: Sam Pollard 1999

Samuel Pollard is an American film director, editor, producer, and screenwriter. His films have garnered numerous awards such as Peabodys, Emmys, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2020, the International Documentary Association gave him a career achievement award. Currently he teaches filmmaking at NYU’s Tische School of the Arts.

Film at Lincoln Center: Meet Sam Pollard

Black Voices Matter, Cambridge Forum classics, Podcasts

Epic Journeys Of Freedom

Historian Cassandra Pybus traces the lives and adventures of the runaway slaves who absorbed the dreams of liberty from their masters during the American Revolution and fled to the British to find freedom.

Where did these hopeful and courageous idealists go? And what kind of lives did they make for themselves? 

Cassandra Pybus spoke at Cambridge Forum in 2006 about her groundbreaking research into the history of the American Revolution when thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Her book, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled to make liberty a reality in their own lives.

Epic Journeys Of Freedom: Cassandra Pybus 2006

Cassandra Jean Pybus is an Australian historian and writer. She is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, and has published extensively on Australian and American history.

Black Voices Matter, Events, Podcasts

The Life and Times of Madame C.J. Walker

A’Lelia Bundles, Emmy-winning NBC news producer and journalist shares stories from her best-selling book about her great-great grandmother, Madame C.J. Walker, one of the first black women entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

The child of former slaves, Walker rose from uneducated field hand to
internationally successful business woman, political activist and
philanthropist by creating a line of hair products for black women.

What is the legacy of Madame C.J. Walker?

A’Lelia Bundles is at work on her fifth book–The Joy Goddess of Harlem–a biography of her great-grandmother’s international travels, philanthropy, parties and friendships with some of the most famous musicians, writers, and artists of the 1920s. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker was named the 2001 best book on black women’s history by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Recorded 2002 at the National History Museum, Lexington, MA

BBC: Madam CJ Walker: ‘An inspiration to us all’

Life & Times of Madame C.J. Walker