In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #271 | Guests: Gilda Daniels and Myrna Peréz | Show Summary: Angie's guests tackle the many obstacles to our most precious freedom: access to the ballot box. Donald Trump has convinced many voters not to trust the Post Office with their ballot, and overseen destruction of mailing systems. Gerrymandering is the norm across the country. And a rising number of poor districts and neighborhoods of color report hours-long voting lines. Angie's guests: Gilda Daniels is the author of Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America; she's a former Deputy Chief in the U.S. Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division, Voting Section. She served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and is currently a professor of law at the University of Baltimore Law School. Myrna Peréz heads the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. She has testified before Congress and several state legislatures on a variety of voting rights related issues. She is a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School and has also served as an adjunct professor of clinical law at NYU School of Law.

Show #270 | Guests: Prof. William Howell and Prof. Terry Moe | Show Summary: Donald Trump, elected in a populist uprising, has eschewed the normal conventions of politics. But the idea of what's “normal” needs to be examined in its own light. For example – “normally”, laws are drafted in Congress and sent to the President for signature. What if that were a two-way street? What if the President could propose legislation for Congress to approve? William Howell is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago; he's the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the university's Harris School of Public Policy. Terry Moe is at Stanford University, where he's the Wm Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Together they've created an audacious proposal: what if we looked at the reality of “normal” politics – deadlocked, partisan, vulnerable to the worst of populist instincts – and literally rejiggered the Constitution to fix it? Their book is Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy.

Show #269 | Guest: Robert Reich | Show Summary: What if the Left/Right divide were more distraction than destruction? Economist and academic Robert Reich says the real threat is the wealth divide. Runaway economic injustice can spell the end of democracy, while we're busy hating each other over social divides. We talk about his latest book, and the Netflix documentary Saving Capitalism. Robert Reich has immersed himself in the US economy for decades. He served in the administrations of three presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was on Barack Obama's transition team of advisors. He's a prolific book author, beginning in 1982 with Minding America's Business. His latest was released earlier this year: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. Reich is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He co-founded the American Prospect, where he serves as chairman.

Show #268 | Guests: Dr. Joseph Pierre, Dr. Nancy Rosenblum | Show Summary: Q-anon; the Bill Gates vaccine plot; 911 truthers: this week's In Deep is an escorted dive into the murky world of conspiracies. What mental processes lead to belief in Q-Anon, or chemtrails, or vaccines as a corporate plot? With more conspiracies gaining ground – what's the effect on democracy? Joseph Pierre is with the UCLA School of Medicine; Harvard's Nancy Rosenblum is the co-author of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. They'll walk us through understanding, coping with, and compensating for conspiracy theorists in America.

Show #267 | Guest: Dan Partland, director and producer | Show Summary: The American people divide into three groups. One group is certain there's something deeply wrong and deeply dangerous with Donald Trump. A second group is concerned but unsure. The third group of our citizens cannot be persuaded that he's a danger to our lives and country. This hour won't do much for that last group. But for groups one and two, a new documentary will be of deep interest: Unfit: the Psychology of Donald Trump. Angie talks with the show's director and producer, Dan Partland. Dan is a Multi-Emmy winner of documentary and non-fiction TV, whose work includes series such as A&E's Intervention, The Sixties on CNN, and American Race with Charles Barkley for TNT. Dan's work also includes landmark films of the independent cinema such as the feature documentary A Perfect Candidate along with Sundance winners Welcome to The Doll House and The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.

Show #266 | Guest: Susan Fowler | Show Summary: Susan Fowler was born determined. From a life of childhood poverty she pushed her way to an Ivy League school. She swam upstream against misogynist Silicon Valley culture to land jobs in line with her energy and intellect. Then she blew it all wide open with a blog post in 2017, detailing the day-to-day sexism she'd had to confront as an engineer at Uber. That viral post, coupled with #MeToo, transformed both her own life and the halls of misogynist power. Fowler has capitalized on the phenomenon to advocate for equality, support, and fairness in Silicon Valley. She's worked for labor reforms, including a push to eliminate arbitration agreements. The New York Times cited Fowler’s "unique brand of courage, clarity of mind, and moral purpose" in hiring her as its technology opinion editor. Susan Fowler sat down with Angie Coiro to discuss her new book, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber.

Show #265 | Guest: Conor Dougherty | Show Summary: Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties where the homeless make their homes. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale. Angie sits down with New York Times economics reporter Conor Dougherty to discuss his new book, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, a penetrating look into the crisis of housing in America.

Show #264 | Guest: Diane Ravitch | Show Summary: Privatized schools were sold to the American public as a cut above— an avenue to the best education, drawing from under-performing public schools that doomed children to lower standards. At the same time, says education authority Diane Ravitch, Common Core was touted as the best route to at least basic educational success for all young students. Both, Ravitch says, have failed spectacularly. Privatization has turned schools into profit machines less concerned with student success than the bottom line. Public schools have been gutted in their wake. And Common Core has caused tremendous problems for students and teachers. Diane Ravitch served in education posts under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Her latest book, Slaying Goliath, takes on what she calls the "Disrupters," intent on promoting the privatization of our struggling education system. Unafraid of naming names, she cites the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Waltons (Walmart), Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, on the right and the left, as well as corporations, foundations, etc. sacrificing the public in favor of profit.

Show #263 | Guest: Kelly MacGonigal | Show Summary: What if the key to feeling vividly alive and energetic in your body is closer than you think? No matter what your past experience with exercise has been—from finding it a chore to falling in love with a favorite activity—it is possible to find happiness and meaning through movement. Acclaimed Stanford research psychologist Kelly McGonigal, who once offered readers a transformative new approach to stress, now looks beyond the gym and around the world to find the secrets of joy in movement. To Tanzania, where one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the world live; to a Julliard dance class for Parkinson’s sufferers; to London, where volunteers combine fitness with community service. Her new book The Joy of Movement draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology to illustrate the link between well-being and movement.

Show #262 | Guest: David Talbot | Show Summary: A deeply personal interview with David Talbot, bestselling author of The Devil's Chessboard, Season of the Witch, and numerous others. After Talbot suffered a debilitating stroke, the journalist and historian turned inward, and came away with shifting priorities and a touching, honest, and suprisingly uplifting examination of mortality.Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke

Show #261 | Guest: Steve Inskeep | Show Summary: With an election year upon us, we are reminded that we have been through this before. The United States in the mid-1840s, for example, was a country in the middle of a major transformation, pushing its boundaries to extend from coast to coast to claim what many in that era asserted was America's Manifest Destiny. A new book by NPR's Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep tells us this story through the tale of a political power couple who personified the ambition of that era. His book, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity and Helped Cause the Civil War, finds some similarities with today's political situation in the United States. Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show #259 | Guest: Tamim Ansary | Show Summary: Thought leader Tamim Ansary returns for a discussion of his sweeping new nonfiction work, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict and Connection. Tamim Ansary sprang into prominence with Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Now he turns that scrutiny to the histories of smaller groups of people into today's globally connected, fully-interwoven human populace, and discovers something prescient: even before disparate human cultures ever met, their innovations always influenced one another… and now that influence is only speeding up. The world's major cultural movements— Confuscianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Nomadism—have, he says, reached a new interrelationship inevitable in the march of human history. We are in a new time of revolutionary reinvention, as differing cultures overlap and transform rapidly due to global connectedness. What does this new proximity portend? Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show #258 | Guests: Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein | Show Summary: Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein examine the transformative power of education through the eyes of a dozen incarcerated men and women trying to earn college degrees, in their groundbreaking film College Behind Bars: Documenting The Bard Prison Initiative's Impact On Prisoners. Novick and Botstein, long-time associates of legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, invested years into filming inside the New York State prison system. College Behind Bars airs on PBS November 25 and 26, 2019.

Show #257 | Guest: Charles Postel | Show Summary: Charles Postel's new book, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, compares and analyses today's wealth and power disparities in light of their origins in the Gilded Age of a century ago. Charles Postel, Professor of History at San Francisco State Univerity, is also the author of The Populist Vision.

Show #256 | Guest: Cyrus Grace Dunham | Show Summary: For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations–lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman–until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable. Moving between Grace and Cyrus, Dunham brings us inside the chrysalis of gender transition, asking us to bear witness to an uncertain and exhilarating process that troubles our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we are constituted. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.

Show #255 | Guest: Lawrence Lanahan | Show Summary: The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide is an eye-opening account of how a city creates its black, white, rich, and poor spaces, and suggests these problems are not intractable. Lawrence Lanahan has worked in radio and print journalism for over a decade, including five years producing for WYPR, Baltimore's NPR station. At WYPR, he won a duPont Award for "The Lines Between Us," a year-long multimedia series about inequality.

Show #254 | Guest: Richard A. Conn, Jr. | Show Summary: The Earthbound Parent: How (and Why) to Raise Your Little Angels Without Religion is a meditation on how to encourage children to discover the world and their place in it for themselves. Richard A. Conn, Jr. is an international lawyer and private investment fund manager. He has advised governments on legal restructuring, has delivered a keynote to the United Nations, and is involved in various not-for-profit activities, including one that has taught chess to 1.2 million U.S. public school students.

Show #253 | Guest: Kelechi Ubozoh | Show Summary: Mental health advocate Kelechi Ubozoh discusses her new book We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health--Stories and Research Challenging the Biomedical Model.

Show #252 | Guest:Riane Eisler | Show Summary: Riane Eisler is the acclaimed author of The Chalice and The Blade, an investigation into the cultural roots of social systems and gender roles. Her new book, Nurturing our Humanity, lays out a new understanding of human possibilities, showing how we can structure our environments to support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity.

Show #251 | Guest: Haben Girma | Show Summary: Haben Girma, daughter of refugees and the first Deafblind woman to graduate from Harvard Law, has been honored for her activist work by President Obama, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Raised by two Eritrean refugee parents who survived a 30-year war, Haben learned to value courage and community early. In her lifetime so far, she has traveled the globe, mastered non-visual techniques for navigating both salsa and the electric saw, climbed an iceberg and faced a bull, and attained the prestigious degree that helps her advocate for increased access and equity for disabled persons. She does this all, joyfully, using innovations that allow her to move readily through abled spaces as a deaf and blind woman. Angie sits down with Haben to discuss her brilliant new book Haben: The Deafblind Women Who Conquered Harvard Law.

Show #250 | Guest: Mark Schapiro | Show Summary: Angie sits down with researcher and journalist

Show #249 | Guest: Richard A. Clarke | Show Summary: Cyberwar—or cyber-anything, has always carried a whiff of science fiction about it. But it's not fiction, it's certainly not entertainment, and, terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke warns us— multiple cyberwars are underway already. The battlefronts range from simple identity theft to the disruption of nuclear programs and medical care. The Pentagon even has a word for this new front line: the fifth domain. That's where ongoing skirmishes for our security as individuals and as citizens are being fought. Richard A. Clarke has long experience in American security matters. He's served as a key advisor on intelligence and counterterrorism to three US presidents. In 1998 President Bill Clinton appointed him as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism for the U.S. National Security Council. His latest book, The Fifth Domain: Defending our Country, Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats, calls on that long experience to tackle one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in modern security.

Show #248 | Guest: Professor Ronald Purser | Show Summary: Angie sits down for a fascinating hour with Ron Purser, Professor of Management at San Francisco State University, to discuss his new book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became The New Capitalist Spirituality. The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. Business savvy consultants pushing mindfulness training promise that it will improve work efficiency, reduce absenteeism, and enhance the “soft skills” that are crucial to career success. Some even assert that mindfulness training can act as a “disruptive technology,” reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. So far, however, no empirical studies have been published that support these claims.

Show #247 | Guest: Dr. Louise Aronson | Show Summary: Elderhood: old age. Many of us can expect to live more years as “elders” than in either childhood or adulthood, a span of up to 40 years, yet that era of our lives has long been treated as more a symptom and burden—elderhood outright ignored or demonized. In her extraordinary new book Elderhood, already praised by readers like Mary Pipher and Abraham Verghese, Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson offers an honest and full-hearted re-examination of the later decades, with all of their joys and frustrations. Drawn in part from her medical practice and expertise, in part from personal experience, history and popular culture, Elderhood, exalts the worth of life’s third stage, inviting readers into a new relationship with the so-called “twilight” years of life.

Show #246 | Guest: Shannon Watts | Show Summary: The “NRA’s Worst Nightmare” is an army of moms led by former stay-at-home mother of five Shannon Watts from Indiana, who ignited a grassroots advocacy movement against gun violence which now touches every single one of the 50 states. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began as Watt’s project after the tragic news of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting broke. With her youngest in elementary, Watts felt compelled to act, but quickly realized that the epidemic of gun violence which wrought tragedy on so many families was primarily being legislated by large groups of men. Looking for the voice of other women protecting their families, she found nothing—so she started something profound. Can 80 million moms make a difference? From blocking legislative hallways with strollers and electing gun-sense candidates, to getting “open-carry” out of Starbucks and running for office themselves, the large-scale impact of Moms Demand Action suggests that they can. In her new book Fight Like a Mother, Watts shares exactly how to have that kind of impact for our future, even if you have no previous experience advocating for a cause. Watts’ story of taking back public policy from the gun lobby is one that began with sudden initiation and continues to yield powerful change. We are all just one good reason away from fighting for what we believe in. Watts had five.

Show #245 | Guest: Jamil Zaki | Show Summary: Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In his groundbreaking new book, The War For Kindness, Jamil Zaki shares cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that can be strengthened through effort.

Show #244 | Guests: Laura Hawkins, Camilla Fox | Show Summary: Laura Hawkins is the executive director of the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley. Camilla H. Fox is the founder and executive director of Project Coyote, a national organization that promotes compassionate conservation and coexistence between people and wildlife.

Show #243 | Guest: Jenny Odell | Show Summary: Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her new book is How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Show #242 | Guest: Tony Horwitz | Show Summary: It has been twenty years since Tony Horwitz's bestselling Confederates in the Attic brought America's modern North-South divide into the light, inviting readers on a trek through Civil War country. Now Horwitz retraces the footsteps of a New York Times correspondent who went South as a "spy" for the paper, a full decade before the War. Horwitz traces the route of sleuthing correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted; like Olmsted, collecting as he goes the voices and impressions that informed spectrums of race, money, politics, and power in the pre-war era. Olmsted was driven by what he learned to create spaces welcoming to all, culminating in his landscape design for Central Park. Horwitz, in his turn, has written Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. He probes Olmsted's travels and dispatches looking for lessons for today's brutally divided America. Two journeys, more than a century apart, illuminate our current divide.

Show #241 | Guests: Dr. Joseph Marshall, Dr. Judy Chu | Show Summary: What's the best a man can be? And how has that ideal changed over time? What accounts for the rising profile of ugly, even violent misogyny, and how does the American village work to grow healthy men in its shadow? In Deep turns its eye to the future of masculinity in America. If past is prologue, what can we anticipate for coming generations struggling with the expectations of manhood? Stanford lecturer Dr. Judy Chu, an expert on boyhood, and Dr. Joseph Marshall, founder of the Alive and Free anti-violence program and the radio show Street Soldiers, shed light on this complex challenge.

Show #240 | Guest: Elizabeth Cobbs | Show Summary: History writers have a choice: relaying a story bound by fact and record to produce a non-fiction account, or bring the people and times alive with a narrative arc. Acclaimed author Elizabeth Cobbs has succeeded in both. Her best-selling historical novel The Hamilton Affair gave life and depth to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Eliza. Her nonfiction account of World War I telephone operators, The Hello Girls, became an off-Broadway musical. Now she's turned her deft hand to American hero Harriet Tubman in her new book The Tubman Command. This "Moses" of the Underground Railroad risked her life regularly to conduct escaped slaves to freedom. Cobbs fleshes out the facts of record into a fully-rounded tale of a strong woman, her times, and her love.

Show #239 | Guests: Roz Chast and Patricia Marx | Show Summary: Novelist, New Yorker and TV comedy writer Patricia Marx and memoirist and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast are close friends and collaborators. They range far and wide in this conversation with Angie, ostensibly about their new book Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?

Show #238 | Guests: David Downs, Dr. Danielle Ramo | Show Summary: Join Angie and guests David Downs, Editor-in-Chief of Leafly.com and co-author of Marijuana Harvest, and Dr. Danielle Ramo, director of research operations at Hopelab, and adjunct faculty in psychiatry at UC San Francisco.

Show #237 | Guests: Amy Everitt, Monica McLemore | Show Summary: Perhaps the central political and rights issue of our time, the matter of abortion continues to ignite passions and protest throughout the country. n Angie sits down with two experts on the subject, Amy Everitt, vice president for Special Projects at NARAL, and Monica McLemore, PhD, professor of women's health at UCSF, for a discussion of the language, laws, political trends and tactics concerning the divide.

Show #236 | Guest: Eddie Muller | Show Summary: Join Angie for an enjoyable discussion of Hollywood, Femmes Fatales, and the doomed losers of Film Noir with the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller.

Show #235 | Guest: Makana | Show Summary: Slack Key Guitarist Makana: The Soft Spoken Activist. Makana returns to In Deep for an update on his unique career mix of political activism and music. The resurgent arms race between superpowers is on the agenda, along with live performance of his newest songs.

Show #234 | Guests: Hadar Aviram, Joel R. Paul | Show Summary: How to untangle the swirl of investigations of and around President Donald J. Trump, is the subject of this fascinating hour with Professors Hadar Aviram and Joel Richard Paul, both of Hastings College of the Law.

Show #233 | Guest: Jill Abramson | Show Summary: One of the news media's most qualified voices examines critical information battlegrounds: old media vs. new, documented veracity vs. clickbait. Jill Abramson follows four companies—The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE— over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment in her new book, Merchants of Truth. The two venerable newspapers wrestle the challenge of an aging readership; the two upstarts confront a ballooning but fickle audience of millennials. She profiles the defenders of the legacy presses and the larger-than-life characters behind the new speed-driven media competitors. Those players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron, Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, Jonah Peretti, and Shane Smith as well as their reporters and anxious readers. What does all this portend for the discriminating reader?

Show #232 | Guest: H. Bruce Franklin | Show Summary: Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe. Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.

Show #231 | Guest: Roger McNamee | Show Summary: The warnings are coming from inside the house. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Roger McNamee are denizens of the same enchanted world: Silicon Valley's inner circle. And they used to all be on the same page, each playing their part growing Facebook into an internet phenomenon— until it hit unprecedented reach and influence. Then they weren't on the same page any more. McNamee was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Facebook, as both a musician and an investor. But he grew disenchanted as he watched the negatives pile up: privacy issues. Screen addiction. Disinformation and political manipulation. Even spying. Digging into the technology and psychology involved, he grew more alarmed at "business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs". Now Roger McNamee has teamed with others from the tech world to challenge our new normal - to persuade us that internet titans Facebook and Google present an urgent existential threat to users and society. His new book Zucked makes a persuasive case.

Show #230 | Guest: Don Reed | Show Summary: That Don Reed Show has just extended its run at The Marsh in Berkeley, CA. He crosses the Bay to talk to Angie about his stories, his stand-up, and even a character or two he admits is - wait for it - "too white."

Show #229 | Guest: Joel Simon | Show Summary: America does not negotiate with terrorists—but should keep it that way? Last year there were nearly nine thousand international terrorist abductions. The US refuses to pay ransoms, holding that it would only fuel more kidnappings. Other countries pay-up to free their citizens taken hostage. Statistics tell the grim result: according to

Show #228 | Guest: Wesley Yang | Show Summary: From the “Tiger Mother” to take-out, Asian-American culture is so deeply entrenched in our understanding of the American fabric, we sometimes don’t know we’re talking about it when we’re talking about. Collecting a decade’s worth of essays, from his award-winning analysis of the Virginia Tech murderer to his cult classic looks at mandarin zombies, pickup artists, and immigrant strivers, Wesley Yang’s highly anticipated new book, The Souls of Yellow Folk is a watershed of engaging and provocative new perspectives on what it truly means to have and hold an American Dream.

Show #227 | Guest: John B. Judis | Show Summary: Why has nationalism made a comeback? Angie sits down with John B. Judis, editor-at-large of Talking Points Memo, to bore into the history and political mechanics of this recurring phenomenon. His new book, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration and the Revolt against Globalization, puts our current divisive political environment into the context of prior movements, and sheds light on the unique confluence of forces energizing Nationalim around the world.

Show #226 | Guest: Jackie Speier | Show Summary: Congresswoman Jackie Speier, national hero and survivor of the Jonestown tragedy, reflects on over 40 years of public service. As a young congressional staffer, Jackie Speier’s incredible courage became evident during the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. Jackie was one of two people who prepared a will in anticipation of that trip to save cult defectors in Guyana, after rumors of abuse in the People’s Temple compound. On the day that Jim Jones’ group attacked then-Congressman Leo Ryan’s staff on an airport tarmac in South America, Jackie survived five separate gunshot wounds and a 22-hour wait for rescue, only to undergo two months of treatment and 10 surgeries in the aftermath. Five died, and nine were injured and left to die on that tarmac; mere miles away, another 900 perished in the murder-suicide that would be one of the largest mass deaths in history. Jackie refused to be merely a survivor of that incident. Unbowed, she campaigned her way onto the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, the California State Assembly, the State Senate and, in 2008, the United States Congress. Through tragedies personal and national in scope, this lionheart chose consistently to build the world around her rather than grieve it. As an advocate, she fights for consumer protection, child safety, women’s rights, financial privacy, justice, and human rights. Jackie’s memoir, Undaunted, tells that complete story for the first time.

Show #225 | Guest: Lara Bazelon - Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice after Wrongful Conviction | Show Summary: As the truism goes, everyone behind bars is innocent - if you listen to them. The problem is a lot of them are. Our justice system is often unjust; people are convicted by a system mired in racism, classism, and systemic faults. Lara Bazelon is a law professor, author, and contributing writer for Slate. Her op-eds and essays have also been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico, among other media outlets. Her book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, was recently published by Beacon Press. Her article, Innocence Deniers: Prosecutors who have refused to admit wrongful convictions was published last January in Slate.

Show #224 | Guest: Adam Hochschild | Show Summary: Journalist and public historian Adam Hochschild shares his insight into the forces shaping our world, through a study of first-person witness accounts. His new book is Lessons From A Dark Time and Other Essays.

Show #223 | Guest: Randy Shaw | Show Summary: The class divide in America's big city has a companion: a generational breach. Long-time housing activist and attorney Randy Shaw says that, through policy and politics, Baby Boomers have contributed to the urban housing crisis - leaving millennials out in the cold. Shaw traveled the country, visiting housing stakeholders in a dozen urban centers. He spoke with renters, homeowners, builders, politicians. His new book, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America, combines these interviews with policy critique and details on plans that work getting housing built. And he questions some long-standing conventional wisdom - for example, the inevitability of gentrification.

Show #222 | Guests: Chris Taich and Dr. Ruchika Mishra | Show Summary: Everybody dies. And we all know that - at least, intellectually. But how realistically do we approach our own ends? Statistically, it's a mixed bag. More elderly and hospitalized people have Do Not Resuscitate orders in place than ever before. But most American adults don't have a will ready. A third don't carry life insurance. Only one in five has told their friends and family how they'd like their own death dealt with. What does a "good death" look like? How helpful can we expect the medical profession to be when the time comes - for example, respecting that DNR order, or talking frankly with us about what's ahead? What can hospice offer a client and their family - and who's lucky enough to have access to that? Guests: Chris Taich is with the non-profit Pathways Home Health and Hospice, where she's the director of Clinical Support Services. She's spent many years in social work, assisting clients with the dying process and grief. Dr. Ruchika Mishra is Senior Bioethicist with the Program in Medicine and Human Values at Sutter Health here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Show #221 | Guest: D.D. Guttenplan | Show Summary: Who are the new progressive leaders emerging to lead the post-Trump return to democracy in America? National political correspondent and award-winning author D.D. Guttenplan's new book The Next Republic is an extraordinarily intense and wide-ranging account of the recent fall and incipient rise of democracy in America. The Next Republic profiles eight successful activists who are changing the course of American history right now: Jane McAlevey, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jane Kleeb, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Waleed Shahid, Corbin Trent, Zack Exley, and Zephyr Teachout. Additionally, the book ties in the election and first year of the Trump presidency to the current rise of populism of the left, and stakes a claim for seeing beyond the Trump ascendancy.

Show #220 | Guest: Eliza Griswold | Show Summary: Fracking, poverty, and justice delayed and denied. Journalist Eliza Griswold discusses her new book, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.