America Trends

There has been an association between cats and women throughout history.  It’s not always been a positive one as so many histories have been dominated by the male perspective.  Even in our era, as cats have taken their place alongside dogs, as popular home companions, they were derisively referenced in the 2024 campaign, as their guardians were referred to as ‘childless cats ladies.’  It has been a long and difficult history for the cats that we now embrace in our society.  This phenomenon is only about a half century old and still the behavior of what are referred to as street or feral cats, two different categories, are maligned for the environmental damage they do to birds, small mammals and reptiles.  Yet, the evolution of the cat itself, from the wildcat, can be directly traced to their value in protecting granaries from vermin, like mice and rats. It’s a fascinating story told brilliantly by Professor Rod Phillips, of Carleton University, in Canada, in his new book, “Cats: A History.”  He is our guest today.

What comes to mind if I say San Francisco–the hippies and Grateful Dead of the 1960’s, the locus of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, the Internet revolution of the 1990’s, the urban decay of the pandemic era or the AI revolution that is clearly upon us?  Well, I think the best answer is all of the above.  The city is a complicated mix of culture, technology, business and a growing class divide.  There may be no better chronicler of the city than Jonathan Weber who has been covering this beat for different media outlets since the early 1990’s.  All of his knowledge and sense of place are married in his great new book, “City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco.”  He dispels the notion that many of us have had that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are interchangeable.  They are very different places. Both have been crucial to modern-day America.  When you think San Francisco remember that e-publishing, social media, video streaming, cloud software and the sharing economy really came to life there. Enjoy this fascinating conversation.

We are far from the days when Phyllis Schlafly led the Eagle Forum pushing back on the feminist leaders of the Left in the 1970’s.  However, she gave voice to issues like the pro-life movement, opposition to gay rights, and others that animated the first wave of pushback.  Today, with many conservative Christian women speaking out loudly and proclaiming their concern about traditional values slipping away in America, the success of their movement in self-evident by looking at who has the levers of power in Washington, D.C. today.  Our guest, Katie Gaddini, author of “Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right”, formerly an adherent to the cause, steps back to provide an honest and nuanced look at the various types of women who now make up a real power center for the Right in America.  You will hear about the Influencers, the Black conservatives, the Make America Healthy Again stalwarts and many others on today’s podcast.  Caricatures and stereotypes will be broken.

 We know we are going to die, as difficult as that concept is to get our arms around, but we may imagine that our life’s work, our stuff, must be preserved because it will live on forever, particularly as we can now capture it in digital form.  Some might say that we are living in an era of permanent memory: everything is stored, searchable, and retrievable, especially now as AI systems ingest vast archives of human speech, images and text.  But our guest on this podcast, noted Professor of History at Stanford University, Thomas Mullaney, author of “How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information” provides us with a more unsettling truth: information doesn’t naturally endure.  It breaks down, scatters, becomes unaffordable to recover, and far more than we would like to admit, simply vanishes.  As you’ll discover the forces of entropy (he’ll define it in this context) are more powerful and natural than the order we try to create and sustain.  It just is.  He’s a fascinating man and it’s a topic I was privileged to explore with him.

 The term ‘grey divorce’ referring to the increasing trend of couples over the age of 50 ending long-term marriages, often for reasons driven by personal growth, financial independence, and growing apart, after spending much time together during the pandemic, is one of several topics we discuss on today’s podcast.  Divorce, by the numbers, is actually below the often-cited threshold of fifty percent dissolution of marriages in this country, but then again far fewer people, as a percentage of the population, actually live in households with two married adults.  Given that I wondered about a number of issues, like the true meaning of no-fault divorces, whether infidelity is a leading cause of divorce and how second and third marriages fare in our society, Attorney Melissa Needle of Needle/Cuda Family Law practice in Connecticut, was a great resource as she delved into each topic.  She gave me a new trend to consider: GLP-1 divorces.  Curious?  Listen in.

 In a moment of crisis for American democracy and liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession.  Now we’re questioning where free speech ends and hateful discrimination begins.  Is it possible that law can check antisemitic impulses which have generally been below the surface, yet never extinguished, while avoiding the tendency to censor political speech? History should remind us of the trapdoor we’re opening unless we find the balance.  In his brilliant book, ‘Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America,” Johns Hopkins Professor Jewish Studies, James Loeffler, unpacks the historical precedents and contemporary dangers as both the right and the left test those boundaries.  In all of this can we dissent from policies in Israel at the hands of the Netanyahu government and still want the best for two ‘righteous victims, as Golda Meir once called the Jews and Palestinians.  Our own delicate political moment in America creates many fault lines.  Antisemitism certainly seems to be one of them in this moment.

So many businesses are in flux struggling to keep pace with exponentially revolutionary technologies, like generative AI, and the people they employ are in the same spin cycle with them.  How do they work through this cataclysmic period?  According to Steve Reiner, author of “Business Changes Fast, People Change Slow: A Leadership Guide to Accelerating Organizational Change and Building a Competitive Advantage,” it all starts from the top.  The leader of the company and upper- level executives have to effectively and consistently communicate the goals and objectives of the company and how all of this change will lead to better results which accrue to the benefit of all the people in the organization.  It is not an easy thing to do,but must be done with a plan over a period of time, so as not to disrupt the cohesion of the organization.  It’s a freewheeling conversation which will drive home the points Steve makes in his book.

 Laurence Kotlikoff, PhD. is considered one of the 25 leading economists in the world according to the respected magazine, ‘The Economist.’  And he’s been the clearest and most consistent voice as to the fiscal gap that America has accrued by way of its public debt, roughly $40 trillion, and its ‘off the books’ obligations to Americans by way of social insurance programs, particularly in an aging society with a below replacement birth rate.  He will try to engage your thinking around what he deems the fiscal gap accounting which he developed so you get a picture of how bad our fiscal circumstance is.  It is difficult to overstate the woeful picture we have built by increasing the debt year after year for more than fifty years, absent a few years when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich worked to rein it in in the 90’s.  The answers are by no means simple or without pain.  It will require a new approach to both health care and Social Security.  Unfortunately, no one is talking about it and no politicians have the courage to be associated with the fiscal medicine we will have to take.  Let’s start with the reality which Professor Kotlikoff, of Boston University, lays out today on this podcast.

There may well be strong arguments for statutes of limitations, basically a deadline to file civil or criminal suits, in various areas of the law because evidence can be lost, memories fade, and witnesses may no longer be available. In the case of child sexual abuse, however, memories of what happened may be awakened many years, decades even, later when there is a triggering event or the adult self finally wants to come to terms with the trauma that has affected them throughout their lives.  Yet, these statutes of limitations still exist in many states, and the federal statutes are very weak in this area.  Clearly, the problems in the Catholic Church and the new attention drawn to the issue from the #MeToo movement and the Jeffery Epstein case are providing greater impetus to allowing victims to come forward when it’s right for them, in their circumstance, and not on an arbitrary timeline.  To discuss this issue with us is Attorney Kelly Reardon of New London, Connecticut who has a remarkable background and much experience in this area of the law.

 You’ve heard of an open and shut case.  That’s what the fifty- year history of full- fledged female participation in the military has given us.  So why now is there any question that they have, and are fully capable, of playing any role they have been given the opportunity to advance to, including major ranks and positions in all the Armed Forces? To answer these perplexing questions is Eileen Isola, an editor of the new book, “Necessary Turbulence.”  She graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1985.  Now retired from the service, she went on to become a decorated combat pilot and an international airline pilot.  In this podcast she provides empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the women who make up 17 percent of the volunteer military.  Yet, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is waging a protracted war against women in the military through a host of means which we explore.  It’s shameful, demoralizing and self-defeating.

 Many say that AI will keep you from working because your skills can be replaced by this technology in ways that make it faster and cheaper for companies to accomplish the work.  Well, here’s another way AI may affect your job. Have you heard about the resume robots?  Many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) that scan for hyper-specific keywords which are often pulled straight from the job description.  These ATS systems can act as a digital filter replete with hidden biases that may silently purge candidates based on age, race, gender or disability before a human ever sees their name.  Two recent lawsuits pulled back the curtain on how AI powered hiring tools are failing American workers and companies.  To explain what is frustrating so many worthy applicants of their opportunity to obtain an interview, let alone a job, is Attorney Gary Phelan, a partner at Hurwitz Sagarin & Slossberg LLC in Milford, Connecticut.  It opened my eyes as to why I hear young people say they have gotten immediate rejection or no response at all in their job search.  Very interesting and disturbing.

There has been a lot of ink spilled trying to explain the climate weirdness which has spread all across the globe.  And while some of the metrics may still be questioned, the near universal effects agreed upon by climate scientists and visible to the naked eye are upon us.  So how well do we really understand what is happening and why?  Pable Ribeiro Dias, Ph.D. in his new book “Climate Changed:  The Science of Sustainability and How Each of Us Can Do Our Part,” is the primer and reference resource we’ve all been waiting for on this vital subject.  He admits that given he is an engineer, not a climate scientist, he had to undertake a rigorous, scientific study of the subject and become knowledgeable about it so that he could provide us with a clear map of the environmental challenges of the 21st century, what really works (and the trade-offs) and practical steps we as individuals and the world community must take to tackle this existential threat.  He’s done all of that.  Give a listen.

 The thirty-year history of the WNBA has been a raucous roller-coaster and controversy continues to swirl around the league, as it welcomes new teams, new revenue streams, greater audience interest and yet retains ongoing socio-political challenges based on sex, sexual orientation and color. It is fair to say that the league could not have achieved the status of the longest-running professional women’s sports league in US history without a certain cache that has been growing over the years.  The league is trying to grow into the fact that players are key and that how you compensate them and build fan attachment to them is central to the growth of the sport.  In tandem with the growing success of college women’s basketball, much of the mythmaking, say around Caitlin Clark, for example, was established before she came into the WNBA.  There’s much concern that while she’s the driver of added appeal for many, it’s been difficult to fully capitalize on her popularity.  We discuss the history of the league and those matters that have been in the news recently with Tamryn Spruill, a longtime writer about the sports and author of “The W: A History of the WNBA” on today’s podcast.

Many people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 were hoping that he could restore the economy back to levels before the pandemic and somehow bring inflation down. That hasn’t happened and affordability is hanging around the neck of Republicans like an albatross going into the mid- term elections.  Still others wanted a tougher immigration policy, but no one bargained for citizens getting swept up in ICE raids and others getting gunned down like in Minneapolis, Houston and Maine.  Another group thought Donald Trump would keep us out of foreign adventurism and yet we are now bogged down in a conflict with Iran.  So, what have we gotten?  Personal retribution, personal enrichment and raw political power and extension of presidential authority to what end?  That’s what a bipartisan group of former government officials, former military officers and academicians try to determine in the book, “Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote for This.” The founder of the group and co-editor of the book, Ira Shapiro, joins us to discuss.

 Individually and collectively, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were the pulse, the heartbeat, and the cultural pacesetters of the 1960’s.  They each influenced the course of popular music for generations, but until now, there hasn’t been a serious investigation into the ways their rivalry and collaboration affected the other. In his new book, “Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other–and the World,” Jim Windolf, features editor at the New York Times, does a deep dive into the personal and musical cross-pollination between the two.  Would Dylan have gone electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 if he didn’t want to cross over from folk to rock and roll because of the wild success of the Beatles?  Would the Beatles, particularly the edgy John have begun writing lyrics for songs like “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood” if not for the lyrical genius he aspired to in Dylan’s works?  Windolf chases down every encounter, influence and collaboration between the two most dominant change agents of a rapidly transforming world. It’s a great read and a fun interview with Jim.

Carole King was always a great writer of pop melodies from the early days of Teen Pan Alley, at the Brill Building, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, when she and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, a lyricist, gave us classics like “Up on the Roof”, “Natural Woman,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion” and hundreds more.  Her transformation in 1971 to a recording artist giving us one of the most successful albums in history, “Tapestry,” was something many who knew her might not have anticipated.  She was shy and not confident about her vocal abilities and star power.  And, yet, the authenticity of that album, as she found her voice, both in the lyrics and melodies, in many of the songs, made her name synonymous with the singer-songwriter era, of the early 1970’s.  And her musical soulmate, James Taylor, is largely responsible for the confidence she gained in becoming an artist, as well as a writer.  Jane Eisner captures her life and career in the book, “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move.”  Her impact today?  Well, Taylor Swift inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for the second time, first as a songwriter and then as an artist, and said she was the greatest pop songwriter of all time.  High praise, indeed.  Her legacy lives on.

We are all in the doom loop of what has become known as the ‘annoyance economy’.  You know the drill–long hold times on calls and the ‘friendly’ AI assistant unwilling to get you to a human, hidden junk fees, voluminous spam offers, health insurance wrangling that pits you against health care giants, corporate-friendly cancellation processes that are designed to make you throw up your hands and pay the damn bill regardless of the validity of your claim, airline policies from ‘budget’ carriers that are anything but (and it’s impossible to navigate their websites or talk to a human) and subscriptions that seemingly never end.  While it may be a source of amusement in conversations with friends, the projected costs to us in time and money are projected to be $165 billion a year. The frustrations are becoming so universal, based on the polling, that some politician who wants to run on these issues would have a powerful platform. Joining us today to discuss the ever- growing annoyance economy is Juliana Kaplan, a senior labor and inequality reporter at BUSINESS INSIDER.  You’ll serve as an amen choir once we point out the abuses that create frustrations beyond measure in today’s fast digitizing economy.  By the way the term itself annoyance economy, was coined by Neale Mahoney, a Stanford economist, and Chad Maisel, a policy fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive research organization.

Our guest has resurrected the word ‘instigators’ and given it a powerful and positive connotation. In this case, she is bringing attention the historical importance of Black women, ages 18 to 45, whose role continues to be that of pushing our society forward for social justice and historic reforms of all kinds.  Atima Omara, author of “The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy and What We Can Learn from Them”, challenges us to consider any progressive movement–be it abolition, voting rights, labor justice, the environment, the rights for LGBTQ and those advances relating to persons with disability–to recognize the central role the ‘instigators’ have played throughout our history.  Even the Flint, Michigan water crises and the attention and action brought to it came about because of these brave young Black women.  We revisit some of the history and current day impacts that these women have had and continue to on our society as they resist being pushed to the margins with a range of creative efforts to bend the nation’s moral compass toward justice.

Google Trends reported a 2,400 percent increase in searches for “AI girlfriends” recently.  Millions of people are currently in what they consider to be serious relationships with AI.  Thousands have engaged in ceremonial weddings with their AI companions and stay as faithful to them as they would a human partner.  Could legal marriage to AI be far off?  To many of us such concepts are unusual to say the least.  However, it’s hard not to see how so many in our society could take their screen addiction to another level as they seek some form of connectedness.  While in sci-fi we have imagined most of our encounters with such AI beings might be as enemies, what’s to say it couldn’t also be as ‘friends’?  In her new book, “The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship,” our guest, Victoria Hetherington, takes a deep dive into something many of us have a hard time contemplating.

Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory.  Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success.  In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away.  This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team.  It all could have ended right there, but for the determination of Bob King and Bill Hodges to bring him to Indiana State University in Terre Haute, a school whose basketball team couldn’t even fill its arena.  I’m old enough to recall the March 1979 NCAA Tournament finals game that pitted Larry Bird against Magic Johnson.  The rest of the story involved these two men, very different in so many ways, bringing the NBA back from a perilous moment when the league was at risk of never achieving comparability with football and baseball.  Keith O’Brien, author of “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,” is a great storyteller and he joined us recently for a virtual book talk for my town’s library, which is now available as a podcast.

 You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions.  In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories from the Old Guy at the End of the Bar.”  The book is a spirited read full of life lessons, based on his years working on ranch crews, winning buckles in cow work competitions and as a campfire teller of tales both tall and small alike. In the book, he and his contributor Mathew Klickstein, lay out the common sense cowboy’s 12 rules for life.  Number one on the list is “the secret to a long life is getting up every day with a purpose.  Young or old, working or retired, everyone needs a purpose so find yours.”  There so much more to benefit from in this podcast.  He’s also got a great voice and graces the book cover with his elegant handlebar mustache.  He’s the real deal.

There was a time when scientists could only read our biology, then came an advance with their ability to edit it and now it’s a moment to write a whole new chapter in evolution through synthetic biology, made possible in large part, you guessed it by artificial intelligence.  Breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and synthetic biology are coming together to make this an unprecedented time in the history of life. Evolution, and its randomness, have left us with bodies that could benefit from our ability to make adjustments–like repairing faulty genes and having the ability to intervene in the complex systems that drive disease.  Sounds futuristic?  And a bit scary?  The technology is neutral.  It’s how it is applied.  In benevolent hands, and with regulatory safeguards, it may make possible advances unimaginable just decades ago.  Our guest, Dr. Adrian Woolfson is the author of “On the Future of the Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence.”  This is probably your first time diving into this fascinating topic.  Advances suggest it will become part of the scientific lexicon before you know it.

 Recently, noted author Walter Isaacson devoted a whole book to what he called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, you know, the one that reads ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While the beauty of the prose in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is most often quoted, our guest historian and Professor of History, Robert Parkinson, tells us in his new book that what follows in the form of 27 grievances against the King and his enforcers, represents the real crux of the reason we declared our independence in the first place. In “Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence,” Parkinson details the reasons we decided we must break away from England at the time.  It is the first book in 120 years devoted to the meat of the Declaration of Independence.  On the 250th anniversary of this world changing event, we thought we’d have him get to the heart, rather than the spirit, of the matter.  He makes a bold case and by listening, you’ll have a great conversation piece for your 4th of July celebration.

In an unprecedented compilation, half of the faculty at Harvard Law School contributed essays, short and readable, about the work America has to do to build on the dreams and aspirations of our Founders as set out in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Both of them commit our nation to shared governance, shared rights and shared accountability under the law for ‘one people’, as diverse as we were then and even more so today. Joining us on this podcast is Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J.Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard.  He, along with Alexandra Natapoff, the Lee S. Kriendler Professor of Law, at the same venerated institution, edited a first of a kind book, “America Unfinished: An Essay Collection from Harvard Law School Faculty.” Some of America’s most brilliant legal minds weigh in on the moment and give their reasoned consideration to issues like the many failures of the Article 1 branch, the Congress, where war powers reside in the Constitution, the pros and cons of our decentralized electoral system and the role of the judiciary–especially the Supreme Court—in keeping the constitutional order functioning.  It is an important book and a great conversation.

 President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground.  After a year of on again, off again tariffs and testy interplay with allies on many of the levies, is it having the desired effect of creating new investment and employment in the manufacturing sector?  Our guest, Paul Lavoie is the vice president for Innovation, Corporate Partnerships and Career Success at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.  As the State of Connecticut’s former chief manufacturing officer, he was named one of top 5 Chief Manufacturing Officers in the world.  He answers a range of questions about the current manufacturing policy in the United States and offers his six steps to bend the curve back toward growth in that sector of our economy.

Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources.  While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these.  One proposed in the state of Utah is larger than Manhattan.  Really!  The objection to these data centers has formed in red and blue states.  The concerns relate to the impact on water supplies needed to cool them, particularly in the Southwest, the spikes in electricity costs, the noise emitted and the giveaways that communities and states have bestowed upon them even if the economic impact on the local workforce is not very impactful.  Large tech companies are feeling the backlash and trying to develop community impact packages that deliver more to the sites where they are being built.  More than 4,000 are already in operation and 3,000 more are being planned or under construction.  To discuss this issue of growing importance is Darrell West, of Brookings, co-author of the book, “Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence.”

 Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty.  Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues are paramount, he believes that the outdated policies that focus on one of these issues alone worsens the trade-offs between each of them.  He is calling for a bold new vision of globalization, one in which we accelerate the green transition to achieve a sustainable planet, shore up the middle class in order to restore democracy’s foundations, and hasten economic revitalization in the developing world to put an end to poverty.  It’s a sweeping agenda.  Are the leaders atop the major nations of the world up for the challenge?  We’ll discuss this topic today.

If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation.  It is a malaise, of sorts.  You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about.  These are high order issues that people are struggling to address.  They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products and yet often the answers are elusive.  Our guest, University of Chicago professor, J. Eric Oliver, has taught a legendary course–The Intelligible Self–that students describe as life-changing.  He has encapsulated his thoughts in this new book, “How to Know Your Self: The Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.” He draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, physics and ancient philosophy to explore the mystery of the self.  Interspersed in this conversation and the book are practical insights into the process of living better.  Let’s take a deep dive into a topic we all struggle with.

Secretary of Defense (or ‘War’, as he prefers) Pete Hegseth is a poster child for the way military education likes to inculcate recruits and students into a macho culture of masculinity.  The Pentagon has a vast educational network through which to teach these lessons.  It includes basic training, service academies like West Point, JROTC, ROTC and dozens of military schools and war colleges.  This has given the military brass outsized power in shaping our young men and, by extension, society at large.  In “God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood,” investigative journalist Jasper Craven explores how the military formed and fuels increasingly volatile strains of American masculinity. While many people benefit greatly from the structure and discipline of military training, others have scars from it having been cut off from the development of the other traits that define men, like empathy and caring for others.  It’s provocative exploration of men in our society as the messaging about the training and service focuses more and more on a warrior culture.

 America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe.  Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024.  And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally.  While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem to proliferate daily so are attempts to monitor, filter and block content. Or at least encouraging people with large platforms to give their audiences over to purveyors to speech which is objectionable to many.  Our guest, Jeff Kosseff, and his co-author, Jacob Mchangama, in their new book “The Future of Free Speech,” call on us to become better informed consumers of what we read and watch but to avoid the desire to have the government censor content.  More speech is the antidote to what is a growing public sentiment about our public discourse.  As one who grew up in an era of fewer choices and more gatekeepers, who curated our news, I am torn between the benefits of our ‘say anything’ culture and the perils of out and out censorship.  Clearly, I do not want government limiting speech, but I do wish that those who platform certain speech, and we as consumers, were able to develop policies and make decisions that do not further inflame our fragile democracy at this moment.  Civil discourse anyone?  We try here.

The host of America Trends, Larry Rifkin, has in the later stages of life taken up keyboards and songwriting.  He is putting out his third album of originals, in collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, as part of the music project he calls Rockaway.  The album, titled “Wrong Side of Love”, contains 16 songs that still offer political and social messaging, as in the first two albums, but redirects much of its focus toward love–its textures, complications and quiet endurance.  Jon Krofssik, the technical director behind the podcast, steps out of the shadows to conduct the interview with his long-time friend and broadcast partner. Rifkin discusses how he and the much younger and multi-talented, Alasdair MacKenzie, formed this interesting collaboration, thanks to the kindness of his daughter, Leora, and son-in-law, Peter, and how another young man, Matt Terribile, of Ace Tone Productions, gave Rifkin the confidence to put these tunes out as demos some years back.  The story is interesting and the songs of a yacht rock flavor with a contemporary sound, are different one to the next.  You’ll hear a number of them on this podcast.  The album will be available in digital stores, including Spotify and Apple Music, on Tuesday, June 9.

The pardon power that the President has is, as Constitutional prerogatives go, about as absolute as it can be.  Coupled with the friendly majority Donald Trump has on the United States Supreme Court, which gave him immunity from prosecution for many crimes charged in connection with his pardons, and you have what some call a pardon-palooza going on in his second term.  Most egregious to some, like this observer, was the blanket pardon of all those involved in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol (not to mention the ‘stupid on stilts’ weaponization fund.) Remember when his former Attorney General, Pam Bondi, in her confirmation hearing, said that such pardons would be handled on a case -by- case basis.  President Trump has been doling out pardons for political loyalty, pay-to-play corruption, and even state prosecutions, over which he has no say.  It boggles the mind how far we’ve come from the framers’ intent which was to give the President the ability to show mercy and heal national wounds.  This President isn’t the first to expand its use to miscreants, but as tens of thousands of requests for clemency go unanswered the friends and family plan grows and metastasizes.  Now he’s telling staff not to worry about whatever questionable actions he requests because they will be pardoned on his way out of the Oval Office.  To discuss this trend is Professor Mark Osler of the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an expert on the topic.

 Deborah Schwartz, a healthcare attorney, saw how medical insurance companies put profit over patient and the impacts it had.  While inside the health insurance industry, she tried to change the practices she saw which were antithetical to better health outcomes, but since leaving the field, she’s writing about in her new novel, “EmmaCare” and sounding the alarm about what she saw.  By whatever measure, claim denials, coupled with prior authorizations and other practices, are growing and put the onus on the patient to fight for and appeal judgments from the insurers even when their doctor prescribes various drugs and procedures.  It’s a maze that leads to financial strain and bankruptcy, delayed or denied care and mental and emotional stress.  We all know that our health care system is broken.  These practices are chief among the issues, though there are many more.  So, what can we do?  Aside from a universal health care model which is unlikely in this country at this time, how do we proceed?  We’ll discuss on this podcast.

 Most families require two incomes these days to survive.  Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace.  And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so?  Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments?  And why should they?  Our guest Mason Donovan, along with Mark Kaplan, have written a book titled ” The Parenthood Advantage:  Building Corporate Cultures that Value Working Parents.”  Their cogent argument is that working parents have skills that make them MORE valuable.  Things like adaptability, efficiency and empathy.  And yet most workplaces have yet to figure out how meaningfully to accommodate them.  And the legal culture in America has never significantly strengthened laws around parental leave, daycare and other practices which might support these dual roles, so they harmonize better on a day- to- day basis.  It’s an important subject that we explain in depth on this podcast.

 Have you ever heard the word gerontocracy?  Well, according to our guest, you’re living in one.  The point may be best illustrated by the last two presidential campaigns where we elected an elderly man, Joe Biden, to be our president in 2020 and when feeling that he was too old to serve another term, we replaced him with another old man, Donald Trump.  It’s not only happening in our politics among the candidates, funders and voters (oh it’s true that older Americans outvote and other demographic groups), but also in business and other endeavors.  Many of them, baby boomers, were brought up on the youth culture of the 1960’s and cannot see themselves giving up their positions and privileges.  This trend has an impact on many things, including the ability of young people to move on up, the differential in social safety nets between young and old and the types of short- term issues our politics might address at the expense of long-term ones, like the warming of the planet.  It’s a fascinating topic and our guest, Samuel Moyn, a Yale professor describes its many implications in detail in his new book, “Gerontocracy in America:  How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth–and What to Do About It.”  He is our guest today.

 Our guest feels that we are in the midst of the greatest transformation in high education in over a hundred years. The factors at play are the demographic shifts in the country, the economy and technology.  Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University and co-author of the new book, “From Upheaval to Action:  What Works in Changing Higher Ed,” says that we can even look at twenty percent of colleges closing their doors in the period ahead.  COVID was an accelerant in this process, but certainly not the only reason.  The person we think of as a college student–between 18-24 living on campus seeking a four- year bachelor’s degree–is no longer the prototypical one.  And new approaches to getting what he calls a ‘just in time’ education’ will supersede the old model of a ‘just in case’ approach.  He explains.  There are new certificates and badges for competency that colleges offer, as do online providers and employers. The competition to engage the learning process beyond high school is vitally necessary in this era of constant change and the competition to provide it is getting fiercer.  Much of it is online.  President Levine wrote this book with Scott Van Pelt.

 Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on day one of his second term in 2025. One of those executive orders was the beginning of the end for the agency known as USAID.  It was started in 1961 by President Kennedy in order to advance human survival around the world, stabilize economies in the developing world and make the path to peaceful democracy smoother.  It was, and for all these intervening years remained, a noble cause credited with saving the lives of tens of millions around the world by treating and preventing serious health issues such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and more.  And while not a focus of Project 2025, somehow it became a target for dissolution by President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team.  Decades long dedicated staff, with expertise in this field, were summarily fired with the new Administration caring little of past success and future necessity.  Nicholas Enrich, a former civil servant who worked at USAID through four administrations, focusing on Global Health initiatives, had seen enough before he, too, was dismissed and had written some powerful memos that became part of the public record.  He documents what happened and why he continued the fight in his new book, “Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.”

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that pushed many institutions, including corporations, to confront racial inequality.  Looking back at 2020 to 2024, companies issued public statements embracing racial justice causes in the hopes of protecting their reputations from claims that their practices perpetuate inequality, particularly in regard to race.  In response to a furious conservative backlash, many began to withdraw those commitments.  The pendulum of retraction has swung quickly.  Our guest, Fordham Law Professor, Atinuke Adediran, author of “Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress,” notes that even when companies pledge to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes, those pledges often serve to narrow the scope of social responsibility. Often, these public pronouncements are put in place to preserve corporate financial interests while appearing responsive.  It’s an interesting discussion in these times of pushback against DEI practices in America.

Much has been written about the ill effects of our over-reliance on our on-life life with endless content, algorithm-driven polarization and pressure to publicly present oneself.  In this podcast, our guest, Patricia Martin, author of “Will the Future Like You: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention,” argues that the damage goes even deeper.  It is eroding the ability to form and sustain one’s identity.  Are we hyper-focused on presenting a version of ourselves that will get likes and friends in a virtual world or have we done the hard work to figure out who we are at our core?  What makes all this more difficult is the fact that many of the institutions designed to help us foster that growth and understanding of our identity are crumbling.  We’re reminded that identity is formed in three ways–how we see ourselves, how others see us, and our will to shape ourselves.  The balance in this triad is now skewed and leading to a host of issues for the generations growing up in a digital world.

 I ran a few small state house and senate races in Connecticut back in the day.  It was an era of news releases, radio ads, bumper stickers and small events in the district.  To be honest, I cannot imagine the pressures of running campaigns today given the fractured and interactive media of this era, constant need to raise funds and to respond to incoming attacks every hour on the hour.  Early in our conversation with Eva Posner, the CEO and Founder of Evinco Strategies, who does this for a living, she admitted that it’s exhausting.  Messaging strategies today have to be so targeted that your approach has to be pinpoint and not shotgun, as in my day. She describes her reluctant use of AI as part of her toolbox but needing to do it so as not to give an important advantage to her political opponent.  We get to the issues of 2026 and the overall political climate, and she said something quite interesting as we went along about her team’s inability to out organize voter suppression.  Listen in while she explains what that means.  It’s a good listen.

The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, and considered to be the most important civil rights legislation in American history, was effectively jettisoned by the ruling of the United States Supreme Court last week, according to our guest, David Daley, one of the leading experts in the country on the Act itself, and partisan and racial gerrymandering. The majority opinion in the case was written by Justice Samuel Alito and while he calls it an updating of the statute, others like Professor of law Richard Hasan, an elections law expert, begged to differ calling it an “earthquake” decision which sharply erodes the Voting Rights Act.  With Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act already scrapped years back by the Roberts Court, and on the heels of the Louisiana vs. Callais decision last week, one is left to wonder what is left of protections for Black citizens across the South to ensure that their voices will count.  I have had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Daley several times in the past.  Never have I heard his words as impassioned and compelling as those he brings to this podcast.  You will walk away with history surrounding this vitally important legislation, the immediate real- world impacts of this decision, and what the road ahead looks like for gerrymandering and voting rights.  He is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count” and “Antidemocratic,” his latest book.

Greek mythology.  Greek tragedy.  Greek philosophy.  Any of us who took a course or two on Western civilization remembers the name John Davies Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  We may not revisit them, but they revisit us in many of the traditions that are woven through to our modern- day concept of the world. And for anyone who wants to grasp where they still stand today in time, place and in Western traditions of thought, may I recommend a book?  It’s John Davie’s “Greek to Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World.”  He is our guest today and to some it will feel like a primer, others a refresher, but altogether a fascinating step back in time that connects to our present day.

Whistleblowers in our society our either considered heroes or traitors.  In any event they have a massive impact in our history.  For those who compile such lists of modern-day whistleblowers often Mark Felt, Deep Throat from Watergate is number two and Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers, is number one.  Ellsberg’s son, Michael Ellsberg, and Daniel Ellsberg’s long-time assistant, Jan Thomas edited Daniel Ellsberg’s unpublished works into a new book, entitled “Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope.” Daniel Ellsberg is best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers regarding the truths behind our ill-fated involvement in Vietnam. However, as a perusal of this new book demonstrates, he was a man with a curious mind who devoted much of his long lifetime to raising concerns about nuclear annihilation and the ways that the human species may indeed bring on its own demise.  My discussion with his son, Michael, will explore the depth of his thinking and what we can all learn from a man I consider to be a hero for what he did and the warnings he tried to convey throughout his life.

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940’s, when the urgent economic problems were totally different from those of our times.  In her book “The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters”, Cambridge professor, Diane Coyle, helps us understand how inadequate our system for assessing the economy is as it is undergoing a radical digital transformation.  Particularly lagging is the key measurement, that being the measure of Gross Domestic Product, the GDP.  When policymakers rely on such an antiquated tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is really taking place in today’s digital economy?  In our discussion, Professor Coyle makes a compelling case for a new measurement that takes into consideration current economic realities.  The practical, real- life examples we discuss will provide insight into the importance of doing so with urgency.

 Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, has been seen as a stabilizing force in the Catholic Church after a tumultuous papacy of Pope Francis.  And while he is disciplined, thoughtful, and measured in his words and deeds, perhaps more traditional than Pope Francis, he has also been very vocal about his concerns about the actions of political leaders in the United State and elsewhere, as evidenced by his back and forth recently with President Trump. His watchword as Pope seems to be to spread the Jesus’s gospel of peace in an era of conflict.  How he combines his traditional liturgical leanings with a willingness to comment on the negative effects of war over diplomacy,  his concern about the ravaging of the environment, and the plight of immigrants here and abroad, will be an interesting juxtaposition as the years go on.  With us today to discuss what to expect from this Pope is Paul Kengor, Ph.D., author of “American Pontiff: Pope Leo XIV and His Plan to Heal the Church.”

 There is a largely invisible pricing structure in the American health care system that dictates the types of medical procedures that are most valued and therefore best compensated.  It affects the way you interact with the system day after day.  In her short, but clear-eyed, dissection of why specialists and surgery are often the weapon of choice to fight disease, as opposed to front end interventions focused on prevention, Dr. Robin Blackstone, author of “American Health: Who Gets Paid” unwraps how the process works.  In it she shows how the system rewards procedural intervention and late rescue, while undervaluing early judgment, longitudinal care, prevention, and accountability at the time.  The result is a system that incentivizes volume over health, fragmentation over continuity, and crisis response over risk reduction. Dr. Blackstone, herself a surgeon, is now writing on medical topics that are vital and little understood.  Her newest book, touched upon as well in the conversation, is “Doctor AI: Reimagining Health Rebuilding Trust Delivering Health 4.0.”

 If you’re paying attention these days, and in the wake of the NCAA basketball tournament, it’s hard not to notice how legalized gambling has crept into every facet of American life.  You see it during sports games and with the full involvement of the leagues. You pass signs on the highway daily about games of chance being run by your state.  And you see the proliferation of Native American and other gambling facilities sprouting up far from Las Vegas. And the bookie on the street corner is still there.  What you may not see is the pernicious impact legalized gambling is having on young people, some of legal age and others not, as online gambling begins to ramp up across the country.  Joining us today to discuss it is Les Bernal, the National Director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a 501(c)3 network built to reveal the truth behind gambling operators to prevent more victims. He will open your eyes to the devastation caused by gambling for so many in our society.

When one of your friends tells you that pickleball is now the all-consuming passion in their life, what do you say?  Every day, thousands and thousands more people pick up a paddle and get hooked on the fastest growing sport in the land. What’s all the fuss about?  As a long-time tennis guy, I had to find out so I turned to Clare Frank, former firefighter turned pickleball obsessive.  She is the author of the new book, “Just One More Game.”  In it she describes why she’s fallen in love with the sport, its many health benefits, the types of players you will meet when you wander onto a court, the gear you’ll need, the injuries you should try to avoid and the hold it will have on your life.  We also discuss the growing sense that this sport may one day become part of the Olympics as its unfettered rise, among all age groups, continues.

 It’s true.  The headline in Fortune on-line screamed “The Treasury Just Declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it.” Well maybe the media missed it, but Congress and the President also have been asleep at the nation’s wheel on this issue for a very long time. The Treasury’s own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025, released just a few weeks ago, show $6.06 trillion in total assets against $47.78 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30, 2025.  And, folks, that’s just the public debt which you can see above the waterline.  When you add about the implied obligations to citizens going forward, like Social Security and Medicare obligations, the roughly $41 trillion in debt rises to around $100 trillion.  It is mind blowing.  So, what can the federal government do?  Simply put, it could curb spending, raise taxes or hope that economic growth can grow our way out of this mess.  Or you can look away, keep printing money and continue borrowing, until the interest payments on the debt wreck the economy or borrowers scatter to the hills.  We’re on the verge.  Our guest today, the Honorable David Walker is the former Comptroller General of the United States and CEO of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).  His words are clear and provocative as to the hole we have dug for ourselves. He thinks we need a good old talking to, as the citizenry, about our problem.  Will anyone listen?  You can begin today with this podcast.

 The test scores for 4th and 8th graders in math and reading have not been great lately.  The lag may be due to the time lost during the pandemic, but there may be another remnant of that time that is affecting things.  As teachers hurried to adopt EdTech practices in that time, much gave way to the computer becoming a dominant force in the classroom, not just in computer labs. The Chromebook was the symbol of this change.  This Google portable laptop option with cloud-based applications promised future-readiness, engagement and innovation for students. A few years down the road, there are crusader parents who sense different impacts on their children, including six-minute attention spans, normalizing the need for constant stimulation and academic mediocrity.  Not to mention that these devices track students’ personal data.  Julie Frumin, one such mom, founder of HealthierTech and a licensed family and marriage therapist, joins us to discuss.

While some states are making it easier to vote, with automatic registration when you renew a driver’s license, or aggressive campaigns to bring voter registration to you, other states are working aggressively to restrict voting by requiring proof of citizenship, which goes beyond basic voter identification.  And President Trump and the GOP-proposed SAVE Act is considered by many to be a solution for a problem that does not exist. It is not a Voter ID bill but rather a ‘show me your papers’ bill with the government seeking your birth certificate or passport to vote.  Birth certificates will often not include a woman’s married name, those born outside a hospital may not have one and only about fifty percent of Americans do not have a passport.  C’mon, this is a burden meant to suppress voting by some. The big concern raised by those who are attempting to put more restrictions in place is non-citizen voting.  Even conservative groups who’ve studies that issue find it to be a red herring, representing at most .004 percent over a sweep of time.  In this conversation with Anjali Enjeti, author of “Ballot,” I share my greater concern–that too few people go out and vote.  In fact, the numbers in municipal elections, which used to be in the 70-80 percent range in many places have dwindled to about 25 percent.  And presidential elections now hover in the 60-70 percent range. How do we really know the will of the people when a dwindling share decides to participate? I believe we should be making it easier, not harder, to vote.  At the end of the conversation, I mention that Australia has mandatory voting or you are fined.  Would that work in America?  We discuss it today on this podcast.