Podcasts about City University

The Gilded Age has nothing on the present when it comes to a huge—and growing—portion of wealth being controlled by a smaller and smaller group of men—and they're doing their best to keep it that way. Must everything that goes up come down?Guest: Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at City University of New York's Graduate Center.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.Podcast production by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort.Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Gilded Age has nothing on the present when it comes to a huge—and growing—portion of wealth being controlled by a smaller and smaller group of men—and they're doing their best to keep it that way. Must everything that goes up come down?Guest: Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at City University of New York's Graduate Center.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.Podcast production by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick Fort.Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ancram Center for the Arts announced its 2026 season with five ambitious works that explore the themes of our times: polarization but yearning for de-escalation, finding love in an age of anxiety, art's capacity to hold grief and remembrance, the human ethics of scientific advancement, and the psychic damage of war, even when soldiers return without a scratch. Co-Director Paul Ricciardi says “The times we are in call for questioning conventions and creative courage.” He adds, “We also lean in on the unique shared experience that theater offers to take stock and reflect on what keeps us open and humane while living in uncertain times.” To tell us more about this work, we welcome Paul Ricciardi - a Professor of Theatre Arts at the City University of New York - Kingsborough Community College - to the RT to tell us more.

Thom Francis welcomes poet, author, and educator Melody Davis to the Poets Speak Loud stage at McGeary's in downtown Albany, NY. She was the featured poet at the long-running open mic series on April 30, 2018. +++++ On April 30, 2018, Davis was the featured poet at the long-running series hosted by Mary Panza. She began her reading with work from her book One Ground Beetle: A Year in Haiku (Bad Cat Press, 2017), with prints by Harold Lohner. It was "Show & Tell" with Melody reading a haiku or two, then holding up the book to show the colorful print on the facing page. The haiku were on trees, clouds, birds, round stones, Albany, and work meetings. She then read from her collection of poems Holding the Curve (Broadstone Books), “Caillebotte's Laundry” and “Walter, the Lawyer.” Melody Davis, a writer and art historian, is the author of three poetry collections, including a special edition artists' book, One Ground Beetle, with Harold Lohner; and Holding the Curve. Her work in the history of photography has been published widely. In 2015, she published Women's Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America with the University Press of New Hampshire. Davis has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Henry Luce Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, MetroArts (PA), and she was a finalist in the National Poetry Series. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was an Associate Professor of Art History at the Sage College of Albany.

Today our guest is Brandon Bakke, assistant principal at Gig Harbor High School and author of Lessons from the Bench. Brandon shares the core ideas behind his new book, a nine-lesson framework for bench players and role players in any organization who want to understand how to contribute meaningfully to a team's success. He also explains why broadening the definition of success to include relationships, not just outcomes, gives role players a powerful and often overlooked way to contribute, and why leaders have a responsibility to explicitly connect every person's role to the larger goal the team is chasing. In this conversation, Brandon offers important reminders for educators and leaders: Most people will spend time on the bench at some point in sport, in work, in life, and how you operate in that role matters more than most people realize. When people don't know why their role is important or how it connects to the bigger goal, effort declines and disengagement follows, that is a leadership problem to solve. Athletics and other team environments are some of the only places where people can fail, struggle, and grow. Removing that adversity robs people of their greatest potential growth. Learn More About CharacterStrong:  Access FREE MTSS Curriculum Samples Request a Quote Today! Learn more about CharacterStrong Implementation Support Visit the CharacterStrong Website About Brandon Bakke:  A former high school and college basketball coach and player, Brandon played at Fresno State University from 1991–1996. He is a former high school head coach, and brings 29 years of experience in education—primarily as a high school administrator. He currently serves as an administrator at Gig Harbor High School in Washington State and previously worked as the Director of Secondary Education for CharacterStrong. Brandon has spoken to thousands of educators and students across the country on building school culture, leadership, student mental health and well-being, and is an author and speaker who champions leadership, teamwork, and character development—both on and off the court. He is also the author of The Ordinary Extraordinary Soldier: The Letters and Journey of WWII Mechanic SSG George Henderson, 80th Infantry Division. Brandon earned his BA in History from Fresno State University. He earned his MA in Educational Leadership from City University of Seattle. 

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can't understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law's research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

Dr. Abby Emerson is a former fifth-grade teacher and now an assistant professor of childhood education at Hunter College at the City University of New York. She is the author of the book, From Anti-Racism to Abolition: Professional Learning for Liberating Schools, which is a book coming out this fall for educators who are curious about how to better use professional development to work towards racial justice in schools. Abby and I take this episode to discuss seeing structural racism in our education system, among many other deep topics. If you want to see racial justice in education, you'll want to tune in.For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode189.

Despite the frenzied debates about what history we should be teaching in the United States, until recently most African American and mainstream history museums have continued to tell an uplifting story of racial progress and achievement.  The United States has lagged behind museums in many other parts of the world which now give greater attention to recognizing past wrongs and injustices.  In the July 7th episode I'll be talking with Sociology Professor Amy Sodaro from the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York about three new museums that feature the history of slavery and racial injustice.  This is the subject of her latest book, Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race and Slavery in U.S. Museums. 

The War between Israel and the US on one side and Iran and Lebanon on the other is in its fourth month. Despite claims from the White House that a deal is imminent, the war and the destruction have continued. Indeed the concept of a cease fire is undermined with every attack. The global economy is struggling with the increased energy costs due to the closing of the Straits of Hormuz. And people continue to die. So on today's show we update the news on the war, explore any potential pathways to end the war and examine the impact of the war particularly on both Iran and Lebanon. [ dur: 58mins. ] Yeghia Tashjian is the Regional and International Affairs Cluster Coordinator of Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy & International Affairs (IFI) and a part time Instructor at American University of Beirut. He is the author “The International North-South Transport Corridor and the Belt and Road Initiative in the South Caucasus,” published in the edited volume of Routledge Handbook of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia (2025). Ervand Abrahamian is Professor Emeritus at City University of New York. He is the author of A History of Modern Iran and Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth About North Korea, Iran and Syria. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of numerous publications including Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution co-authored with Jacob Mundy. This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre. Politics and Activism, War / Weapons, Middle East, Iran, Israel, Lebanon , US

The Mercantilist Restoration - https://anthonyfatseas.substack.com/p/the-mercantilist-restoration-how?r=1ni7opInterview recorded - 10th of June, 2026On this episode of the WTFinance podcast I had the pleasure of welcoming back Professor Richard Wolff. Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has been described as probably America's most prominent Marxist economist. He is the host of Economic Update and the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan. During our conversation we spoke about the current situation in the economy and geopolitics, the uncertainty in the economy, BRICS enemies of the West, the end of the US hegemony and more. I hope you enjoy!0:00 - Introduction3:37 - Current thoughts on economy and geopolitics8:51 - Geopolitical uncertainty linked to economy?15:42 - Iran conflict resolved?22:27 - BRICS enemies of the West33:56 - US hegemony42:03 - One message to takeaway?Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). Wolff was also regular lecturer at the Brecht Forum in New York City.Prof Wolff is the co-founder of Democracy at Work and host of their nationally syndicated show Economic Update. Professor Richard Wolff:Democracy at work: https://www.democracyatwork.info/Website: https://www.rdwolff.com/X: https://x.com/profwolffYouTube: @RichardDWolff WTFinance -Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wtfinancee/Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/67rpmjG92PNBW0doLyPvfniTunes - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wtfinance/id1554934665?uo=4Twitter - https://twitter.com/AnthonyFatseas

"If you're ever getting the feeling that there's something more or that something new is possible, pull on that string." True growth often starts when life forces a difficult decision. Success comes from being willing to experiment, adapt, and trust that new opportunities can emerge from uncertainty. Whether building a business, overcoming setbacks, or embracing new technology, progress comes from staying curious, focusing on results, and creating systems that allow people to spend more time doing what they do best instead of getting trapped in daily operations.  Matt Gallo shares how a struggling CrossFit business became a lesson in leadership, marketing, and resilience. He explains how his team grew their gym during COVID by focusing on community and member results when others pulled back. Matt also discusses the rise of AI automation, why many business owners are overwhelmed by technology, and how simple systems can create more freedom, better customer experiences, and sustainable growth.  Matt is an entrepreneur, coach, and business systems strategist with a background in health, wellness, fitness, and community leadership. Over the years, he has developed expertise in coaching, budgeting, event management, and helping organizations improve performance through better systems and processes. Today, through TrueFlow AI, Matt helps business owners leverage automation and artificial intelligence to streamline operations, enhance client experiences, and create greater freedom while staying focused on the work they do best. Matt holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music Composition from the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Expert action steps: 1. Stay curious and keep learning. 2. Practice unconditional love and compassion. 3. When you sense a new possibility or opportunity, explore it instead of ignoring it.  Learn more & connect: https://trueflow.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-gallo-2a070829/ Also mentioned: CrossFit culture and entrepreneurship Leadership through adversity Community building during crisis Business partnerships Delegation and systemization AI automation and business efficiency Revenue diversification Sovereignty and personal freedom Customer experience as a competitive advantage Visit https://www.eCircleAcademy.com and book a success call with Nicky to take your practice to the next level.

Peso Pluma Biography Flash a weekly Biography. Peso Pluma's latest few days have been a mix of cultural milestone, steady business moves, and the kind of low‑key social media presence that says, I am planning my next chapter more than chasing headlines day to day. The single most biographically significant development is his role as padrino de graduacion at the City University of New York's first Mexican American graduation ceremony at Lehman College in the Bronx. According to Lehman College's official news release, Peso Pluma took the stage as the honorary godfather of the ceremony, celebrating Mexican American graduates and performing as part of the event, positioning himself not just as a chart‑topping artist but as a symbolic figure for Mexican and Latino representation in U.S. academia. That kind of institutional recognition, at a large public university, will likely stand as a meaningful footnote in any future biography, marking his transition from hitmaker to cultural reference point in the United States. In music and media circles, discussion of his broader impact has been amplified by long‑form coverage like the Takeout and Talk interview with music journalist Tomas Mier on YouTube, where they break down how Peso Pluma and Mexican music have taken over the world. While that episode is commentary rather than news, it reinforces the narrative that his earlier breakout years are now being treated as a movement, not a moment, which matters for how future biographers frame his legacy. Over the past few days, mainstream outlets and major music news sites have not reported any confirmed new album drop, major scandal, or high‑profile controversy tied to Peso Pluma. Any rumors circulating on fan accounts or unverified social media, including speculative talk about surprise collaborations or personal relationships, remain unconfirmed and should be treated as speculation unless and until they are reported by primary outlets such as Billboard, Rolling Stone, or major Latin American news networks. For now, his brand continues to ride on sustained streaming power, touring history, and his status as a face of the corridos tumbados wave rather than on any single breaking news event this week. That wraps up this episode of Peso Pluma Biography Flash. Thank you for listening, and make sure you subscribe so you never miss an update on Peso Pluma, and search the term Biography Flash for more great biographies. Thanks for listening. This has been a Quiet Please production. Get the best deals https://amzn.to/3ODvOta

In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Peter Beinart speaks with Professor Dana El Kurd (University of Richmond) and Professor Nader Hashemi (Georgetown University) about how the current war increases Iran's “soft power," why Saudi Arabia and the UAE are reacting differently to Iran and Israel, and why American hegemony remains in the Middle East.  ​​Dana El Kurd is an associate professor at the University of Richmond in the Department of Political Science, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). Peter Beinart is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is also a Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, an Editor-at-Large at Jewish Currents, and an MSNOW Political Commentator. His newest book (published 2025) is Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. He publishes regularly on https://peterbeinart.substack.com/. Original music by Jalal Yaquoub.

00:08 J.W. Mason is Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College of the City University of New York, and a senior fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative. His new book, co-authored with Arjun Jayadev, is Against Money. The post JW Mason Against Money appeared first on KPFA.

He's one of the most famous serial killers in American history... but how much of H.H Holmes' gruesome crimes were sensationalised by the press at the time?Our guest today is Dr. Harold Schechter, professor at Queen's College, City University of New York. He is the author of dozens of non-fiction books, including ‘Depraved: the Definitive True Story of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-Of-The-Century Chicago.'Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when heartbreak becomes the starting point for a whole new purpose? In this episode of Unstoppable Mindset, I sit down with Heather Christie, author, educator, entrepreneur, and founder of Love Notes, a storytelling movement built around real stories of real love. Heather shares how commuting alone to New York City as a teenager shaped her independence, why she walked away from her creative dreams after marrying young, and how writing helped her rediscover herself after the end of a 30-year marriage. We explore storytelling, resilience, creativity, publishing, relationships, and the power of authentic human connection. You will hear how Heather transformed loneliness into hope through Love Notes, an off-Broadway storytelling series that is now expanding across the country and helping people reconnect with the many forms love can take. Highlights: 01:25 - Learn how early independence shaped Heather's confidence and resilience. 16:03 - Discover why staying true to yourself matters in life and relationships. 19:29 - Hear how heartbreak inspired a search for real love stories. 27:21 - Learn how writing helped Heather reconnect with her creativity. 32:35 - Discover the mindset that helped her push through years of rejection. 47:17 - Hear what Heather believes is at the heart of real love. About the Guest: Heather Christie is a speaker, writer-producer, educator, and the creator of LoveNotes! — Real Stories. Real People. Real Love.®—an Off-Broadway storytelling show that's expanding through satellite productions alongside an award-winning anthology. An award-winning YA author, she wrote What The Valley Knows and The Lying Season, which debuted as an Amazon #1 bestseller in Young Adult Soccer Fiction. Her essays have appeared in Salon, NextTribe, Writer's Digest, Baltimore Style, Scary Mommy, Elephant Journal, The Good Men Project, Grown & Flown, Baltimore Child, Parent.co, Her View From Home, the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop, and The Lighter Side of Real Estate. Heather holds a BA in Literary Studies from UT-Dallas and an MFA from Pine Manor College. She is CEO of SocRoc Soccer and an adjunct lecturer at the City University of New York. Ways to connect with Heather: Website: www.LoveNotesWorldwide.com & www.HeatherChristieBooks.com Instagram:@_heatherchristie/lovenotes_worldwideFacebook: @heatherchristiebooks / @LoveNotesWorldwideLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-christie-mfa-4b976049/LoveNotes! AnthologyWhat The Valley Knows (book)The Lying Season (book) About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson  00:06 John, thank you for being here with me on Unstoppable Mindset. I hope today's conversation left you with a fresh perspective, a new insight, or at least something worth thinking about. If you're ready to go deeper into the ideas that shape how we see ourselves and others, I have a free gift for you. Head over to Michael hingson.com and download my free ebook, Blinded by Fear. It explores the invisible beliefs that hold us back and shows you how to reframe them, so you can move forward with clarity and confidence. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast, leave a review, and share this show with someone who can use a reminder that growth starts with mindset. When people think differently, we all move forward together. Thanks again for listening. Keep learning, keep questioning, and keep choosing to live with an unstoppable mindset. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unstoppable Mindset. Today we get the opportunity and the honor of chatting with Heather Christy, and Heather, Heather is an author. She and her brother have formed a company, so she's clearly an entrepreneur. She's acted, she's a keynote speaker, and I don't know what all we're going to find out in the next hour or so, but definitely an exciting person to get a chance to chat with. So, Heather, welcome to Unstoppable Mindset. We're glad you're here. Speaker 1  01:47 Thank you, Michael. I'm so honored that we're going to have a conversation today. Michael Hingson  01:52 And Heather lives in New York City, she lives in Manhattan, or as we all know it, the city. And before we started this, we were talking about the fact that winter is coming everywhere. Ah, well, what do you do as long as you don't get too much snow back there? Speaker 1  02:11 Yeah, the winters have been pretty mild here the last couple years, so see what happens. Michael Hingson  02:16 Yeah, time will tell. Well, why don't we start? Tell us about the early Heather growing up in some of those things. Speaker 1  02:22 Okay, well, as a young person, I, I wanted to be an actress, and I grew up in a really small rural town, about two hours due west of New York City, in Pennsylvania. It's called the Holy Valley. Michael Hingson  02:37 What town? Speaker 1  02:39 Oh, it's called Oli Oley Valley, it's actually a Michael Hingson  02:42 valley. Okay, Speaker 1  02:43 historic site. And so I had a really interesting sort of upbringing, because I, before it was really in vogue, I was on a work-study program, and I would spend half my day in this small Pennsylvania town, and then I would jump on a bus - it was called the Bieber Bus back then - and drive to New York City on the bus, and that was like two to two and a half hours each way, get off in the, you know, huge metropolis of New York City, go on auditions, go sees, or if I had a booking, I'd do the booking, and then I would jump back on the bus and go all the way back to rural Pennsylvania, and that's how I spent like all my high school years was back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and then I actually graduated early. I graduated halfway through my senior year. I had enough of my credits done that I'd actually, the first half of my senior year, I went to community college, and I took a class in the evenings, so I could be done by Christmas break, and the only requirement I still needed to fulfill was my physical fitness, so I ended up moving to New York City, and then I would take my physical fitness classes at Steps Dance Studio, and then I was still able to graduate with my class in June, but I was living in New York City from January on of what would have been senior year. Yeah, so it was like the early me, and the one thing that was sort of interesting when I was on the work study, my mom was a mathematician, and my dad was a an ER doctor, so they actually tutored me. My mom tutored me in math, and my father tutored me in chemistry. And then, like my history teacher back back in the day, we had Walkmans, and he would record his three lessons on a Walkman, and I would listen to them on the bus back and forth from New York. Michael Hingson  04:43 Yep, Lockmans were the big thing back in time. Sony created a very clever thing, but as with everything, the technology has advanced beyond that. Now Speaker 1  04:58 that's right. Yeah, now my kids. Wouldn't even recognize a Walkman, Michael Hingson  05:02 they wouldn't recognize a cassette either. Speaker 1  05:05 That's right, yeah, it would be like an ancient artifact. Michael Hingson  05:08 What's really strange is there are a lot of people who don't even really know anymore what CDs are. Speaker 1  05:14 That's true, yeah. Michael Hingson  05:16 Much less, well, and DVD is sort of going the same way, it hasn't quite got there, but we, we are new now, moving more into streaming and things like that, but, gee, what a crazy world. Well, so you went through high school, basically commuting to New York. What did your parents think of that? Speaker 1  05:35 Well, I was one of four children, I was the oldest child, and what's remarkable is in the beginning, my mother would go with me, but it was hard to do that, and have you know three other children at home, so by the time I was 15 I was doing it on my own, and when I.. it's just like such a different culture that children are raised in now, there's sort of this idea that we, we can't let them kind of do their own thing, you know, like there's, we're so follow every move and thing they do, but that was like a lot of independence my parents granted me at such a young age, and so they thought, I mean, it was great, and they gave me the support I needed, but at the same time they allowed me to be really independent at a pretty young age. I know when I tell people, "Oh, yeah, I moved to New York City when I was 17 by myself, they're like, "And your parents let you do that? And New York, and this was in the late 80s, early 90s, and New York was like a whole different place, like when I get off the bus at Port Authority back then, like now that whole strip Times Square is kind of sanitized and disified, but back then it was, it was a little rough, Michael Hingson  06:56 it was a lot of X-rated things, and all that, I did some commuting more in the early 90s. I sold products, and I would travel back to New York, because that's where I sold to. I traveled from California, and I remember it was there was a lot of stuff on 42nd Street that was very X-rated, and so on, a lot different than the musical 42nd Street, but that's okay. Speaker 1  07:20 That's right, yeah, Michael Hingson  07:21 but it is a lot, a lot cleaner now than it was, and I remember times I would go out of my hotel and there would be people who would say you really shouldn't be walking around on your own, and why not, and they said, well, because it's pretty dangerous here, and you know, the the angels that that were out there insisted on escorting me everywhere I went, just because they were concerned about me, and I wasn't, although I understand the the situation, but I wasn't going to go in the middle of Central Park at night either, so you know, Speaker 1  07:58 right, and I was a lot the same for me. I remember, though, getting.. I would get off the bus at the Port Authority, for people who know you, New York City, it's on Eighth Avenue, and then I would feel like I wasn't like fully safe until I could get to Lord and Taylor, which was on Sixth Avenue. Yeah, and then it felt like everything got a little bit safer and calmer, the energy changed. Michael Hingson  08:23 Yeah, Speaker 1  08:23 that Michael Hingson  08:24 was a lot different. You could always go to St. Patrick's Cathedral for refuge too. So, but yeah, the Port Authority was an interesting place to go, and I understand. Well, how did.. how did all that affect you, and how did, how does what you did back then kind of affect you in the way you think today, especially with children and so on? Would you give them that same level of independence today? Speaker 1  08:52 That's a really interesting question. And my children are a little older than I was at that time now, but I do think about when they were 15, 1616, years old, and if I'm to answer the question really honestly, I don't know that I would have. I just feel like, and I don't know what's changed about society that makes it that way, that and part of it I think is maybe like the news cycle just is constantly highlighting everything that's wrong and fear based that that's what we see and it's in our faces so much more because we have all this access to it through social media that it it creates sort of this, this like undercurrent in parenting that, that we're, that we're oftentimes afraid, like, what could happen to our children. So, I don't know if I actually would have let them commute like that by themselves, you know? Like, yeah, I don't think I would have. Michael Hingson  09:56 Yeah, it's definitely different now than it was then, and. And I think you're right with especially the news cycle and also in reality there's there's so much gun violence and other stuff going on and I ask people when we talk about it I ask is it really that there's more now or it's just more visible in the news, and I'm not sure that it's just visibility. I think there is more stuff going on, and it's not being stopped nearly as effectively or as aggressively as it should be, and it does make it a scarier world. It's tougher, I think, by far to be a kid now than it was when you were a kid, much less I believe when I was growing up. We just didn't see the kinds of things that we see today, and I don't think it's all just exposure from the news. I think there's there's some truth to the fact that that there are other issues going on, Speaker 1  11:00 right, that it actually is a more dangerous world that we live in. Michael Hingson  11:03 Yeah, and I think that it is something that we do have to think about, and hopefully someday sanity will come back to it all. I agree, I'm of the opinion that eventually it will, but you know, so that's cool. But, but still, we have to do what we do, but I also think that we can't stifle our children, we have to give them the opportunity to grow. It may be that you might, when your children were the age you were, you might have decided, well, one of us just has to go with you all the time, and we're going to just to keep an eye on you, or you have other people that help, but I think being so aggressively smothering that you don't let children grow is a problem too. Speaker 1  11:53 Yeah, I agree. I think that's, I mean, there's that saying, and maybe I'll get it right, or maybe I'll get it wrong here, that we need to give our children roots and wings, Michael Hingson  12:02 yeah, Speaker 1  12:02 and that's the challenge, is to find the balance, Michael Hingson  12:06 yeah. Well, and so for you, you were given a lot of independence. How did that shape kind of your attitude, and how does it shape the way you look at life today? Speaker 1  12:20 Well, that's a really great question, and for all the independence that I had as a young person, and maybe, maybe I was given too much independence in some ways, because I, I ended up marrying very young, and and I often wonder, like, had my parents not given me as much independence, if I would have done that, but yeah, I still think I'm very independent now, and I've tried to instill that in my children as well, and I think they're, they're really great kids, and they've launched really well, which I know is a common problem with today's young adults, is the this sort of inability to to launch, and I, I feel really good. My both my kids have done that and done it well. Michael Hingson  13:15 Well, and all you can do is your best, Speaker 1  13:19 right? Michael Hingson  13:20 I think we don't do this nearly as much as we should, but it ultimately comes down to, you know, kids want all sorts of independence, and so on. Parents are, are.. I'm talking about parents who really think about what they do, they may not want children to have that much independence, but I think the key is that you really need to communicate with your kids and teach them what's going on and why, Speaker 1  13:48 right. I think that's it's to be open and transparent with, with our children is very, and to have like the hard conversations and give them a safe space in which they can speak to Michael Hingson  14:02 the other side of that is that we should hold them to the same standard and say when you have issues and so on, we're here, we're not going to judge you, you need to have the hard conversations with us too. And I don't think we do nearly as much of that. I know when I was growing up, we had a lot of conversations. Of course, I was blind. I've been blind my whole life, and I encountered a lot of different things growing up, and my parents were glad to talk with me about blindness, and glad to talk with me about different things about independence, and it also was true that they allowed me to be independent. I mean, I rode my own bike around the neighborhood, and some other.. I'm not the only blind kid that did that in the world, but in my town I was brand.. and I think that, you know, I'm. Sure, that I was watched, but parents didn't interfere. I mean, I even fell off the bike a couple times until I really learned how to ride it, but they allowed me to have the opportunity to grow, and I think that there is a way to do that without, without, well, without stifling your kids, and that you can, you can let kids grow, and we should really emphasize curiosity a lot more than we do. Speaker 1  15:29 I agree, I think that's really important, is to give kids the space to grow and encourage curiosity. Michael Hingson  15:36 Yeah, we don't probably do that nearly as much as we ought to, well, so you mentioned you got married at 19. Well, I guess that's a little young, but, but you did that, huh? Speaker 1  15:48 I did. Yes, I did. I married young. Michael Hingson  15:54 How did that work out? Speaker 1  15:56 Well, it, it worked out for a little, well, it worked out for a while. I stayed married a really long time, but I eventually divorced 30 years later, and part of that had to do with I was, I did marry young, but my ex-husband also had some addictions that you know in time just became too hard to manage, so that ended the thing, and he Michael Hingson  16:29 wouldn't, and he wouldn't deal with them Speaker 1  16:31 well. At one point, I mean, we'll ask a lot of times in relationship with addicts, you kind of, there are times when they deal with them, and then times when they don't, Michael Hingson  16:39 right? Speaker 1  16:40 Yeah, so ultimately it dissolved. Michael Hingson  16:44 It's too bad when things happen. Speaker 1  16:47 That's right, yeah, but I'm grateful for the the union, because it produced my two great kids. Michael Hingson  16:56 And what, what else did being married for 30 years teach you? Speaker 1  17:01 Well, wow, that's a great question. I think probably it taught me most of all it's a lesson learned, sort of, that you really need to be true to yourself and listen to yourself, because I think deep down we know, and my I was always trying, like, to try harder, if I just try harder, you know, things will get better, but there's part of me deep down that knew I was sort of trying harder for everybody else but myself. And when I left New York, I had given up everything I'd worked on, and in, you know, in hindsight, when I look back, I, it was in a way I sort of abandon all my dreams and hopes, and ultimately I don't think that's a good thing when you give up yourself for someone else. Michael Hingson  17:50 So, after you got married, what did you do? Where did you go? Speaker 1  17:54 Well, my ex-husband was a professional soccer player, so we ended up going around the United States, he played for a couple different teams, and I went to college, and I finished my degree at the University of Texas, and then I, I did a couple things, I was a flight attendant, and I eventually fell into real estate, and worked in real estate for a long, long time, but along the way, I, there was a, there was a point where I kind of really missed that young creative person that I had started out my life as, and I'd always loved books and lacher, and my undergraduate degree was in literary studies, and I started writing stories, and then at midlife went back to graduate school for a master's of fine arts in creative writing, and and started writing. So I was, I was always doing a bunch of things. I was a real estate broker, I was managing a company, and then I was, I was writing, and began writing novels on the side. Michael Hingson  18:58 What was your bachelor's degree in Speaker 1  19:00 literary studies. Michael Hingson  19:02 Oh, okay, Speaker 1  19:03 yeah. Michael Hingson  19:04 So, you never did get degrees in what either of your parents did. Speaker 1  19:09 No, no, no, Michael Hingson  19:10 you weren't that into math. Speaker 1  19:12 No, not at all. No, I always liked words, words. Michael Hingson  19:16 Yeah, I understand. I do pretty well with math, but by the same token, I've been learning more about words, having now written three books, and appreciate it. I also like to collaborate, so when I write, I generally write with someone. I think that the team approach works, at least it does for me, and there are a lot of people who don't use a second person on their team, other than their publishers, editors, and so on, but for me the collaborative way works, which is fine. Speaker 1  19:49 I've had a little bit more experience later now in my creative career, because I've, and maybe we'll talk about this in a little bit, but I've started producing storytelling shows, so I. Work with the storytellers in helping them in their stories, so that's a much more collaborative exercise, and one one I really enjoy. Michael Hingson  20:09 Yeah, well, well, let's, let's, you know, we could talk about it now. What the heck, we don't have to do this in a linear way. Tell me about storytelling. What you think about storytelling. Why is it so important, and so on. Speaker 1  20:25 Well, for me, so the storytelling that I do, I'm working on this project called Love Notes, which real stories by real people about real love, and that came to me during the darkest, loneliest period of my life. It was, you know, after the disillusion of this 30 year marriage, and I was really despondent and, and disillusioned, and thinking, you know, like, does love even exist, and what does it look like, and I just, I just really didn't even believe in love anymore, and being in the storytelling community, I produced some storytelling shows, stories about motherhood. I put out a call to writers and actors and just regular people to share their true love stories, and so from that, people started sending me all these true stories, they had to be 1000 words or fewer, and so to answer your question, like, what does storytelling do in, in this case, I think story, storytelling, it's different than other mediums, like the personal essay or the novel, it's, it's a, it's a testament, it's a first person testament, and what's really great when you see the different storytelling communities around the country is anybody can do it, and so that's part of the beauty of storytelling. Michael Hingson  22:00 I think the key is, though, it has to be a genuine story. Making it up isn't the same thing, Speaker 1  22:06 right? And that's the difference, right? Because people will write a short story or story thing, but in storytelling, you're exactly right, Michael. It needs to be a true story, and that's what makes it so compelling, and I think so relatable, is that people can see themselves in other people's stories, so like in my case it was a way, it was like the evidence, the proof of love, like what it really looks like as it walks around in the world, Michael Hingson  22:36 so that's it, sounds like changed your view of love, and that you believe in love again. I Speaker 1  22:46 do, I do, and it's it, and even like during the first season of Love Notes, because we do an off-Broadway show here in Manhattan, and we have an anthology, a companion anthology. I remember that first year, like some I'd wake up in the morning and just like be not despondent but upset, like, oh, like this doesn't happen. And then literally there was like a little voice in my head that would say, oh well, don't you remember Stacey's story or Sarah's story? And it was like just like the the universe providing this evidence and this this proof and just hearing enough stories and story after story, yeah, it really did fortify my belief in love, and that love is for everyone, and it comes like from all these different angles, and when you least expect it, and it shows up in so many different forms. Michael Hingson  23:43 Yeah, well, and I think there's there's a lot of merit to that. I know when I was writing this last book that I wrote, which is entitled Live Like a Guide Dog: True Stories from a Blind Man and His Dogs, about being brave, overcoming adversity, and moving forward in faith, I spent a lot of time talking about each of the eight guide dogs that I've had and the lessons I learned from them, and also using those lessons in the book to show the importance of different aspects of what happens in our lives, but I have maintained for years I've learned a lot more about life and learned about leadership and teamwork. I've learned a lot more from these dogs than I ever learned from all the experts in the world, and that's primarily because we'll have some interesting observations. One, I allow my dogs to express themselves, but they also learn what the rules are. Because dogs really want to hear from humans, they want humans to set the rules, they want humans to be the pack leaders, by and large, and they want humans to be the ones to say this is what I expect, but when. That relationship forms, and it forms well. There's it's second to none, and you learn so much. Dogs love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally, but they're open to trust, and we're not. And we really should learn to be more open to trust, and just so many different kinds of things. It has really given me a lot of pause to think over the past several years, while we were writing the book, and, and I, and I think about it now. There are a lot of neat stories in there that really ultimately are love stories in one way or another, and I think that makes a lot of sense. Speaker 1  25:36 Oh, that's so.. I'm actually a new dog owner, well, not too new, I.. I'm for the first time in my adult life have a dog, and I just.. it's such a wonderful, like, experience, and it's opened me up to, yeah, like so many different levels of love. Michael Hingson  25:53 Yeah, dogs want to establish a relationship, but as I said, I don't think that they are open to just trusting they do pretty much love unconditionally, unless something just totally traumatizes them. But trusting is a different story, and that's a trust that has to be earned both ways. It's not just us earning their trust, but they're earning our trust, and the people who really take that to heart and develop that relationship and think about it, find that they have a bond that's really second to none. It's as close to knit a team as you could ever find. Speaker 1  26:35 That's beautiful. Michael Hingson  26:37 So, it's a lot of fun. What kind of dog do you have? Speaker 1  26:40 I have, well, because remember I'm in a small New York City. I have a teacup poodle. Michael Hingson  26:46 Oh, so it isn't a Saint Bernard, okay? Speaker 1  26:49 And she's, she's an eye, she's a, she's a character. She, she acts like she's a cross between a teacup and a pit bull when she's in the, when she's out on the street. She does not like she's a scaredy cat on the street. She would prefer to be carried when we're on the street, so she's got sort of a split personality, but she, and she doesn't take too many people. So, just like you were saying, I can identify with that, like the whole trust element, and she's, she only trusts a few people. Michael Hingson  27:25 Yeah, well, trust isn't something that happens overnight. I've maintained for a long time. I think it takes a good year for me when I am meeting a new guide dog. I think it takes a good year for the trust to become so seamless that we really know what each other is thinking, and I think that we really do understand each other. There's a lot of empathy there, Speaker 1  27:52 that's really great. So, Michael Hingson  27:53 I think it's, it is kind of cool. Well, so, but going back to you getting married and all that, so you gave up for a while a lot of your dreams, that that must have, whether it was conscious or not, been a little bit frustrating. Speaker 1  28:08 Yeah, and I didn't realize it at the time. It was only later, like when my younger self sort of came calling, and I had given up a lot for this marriage that didn't really turn out the way I had hoped, and yeah, so writing was a way for me to find myself again, was not only a refuge during that time in my life when I wasn't really happy, but it also really opened up that whole creative part of myself, which felt really good, and it's, you know, it's been something now I've been working on for the last decade and a half, Michael Hingson  28:57 but it sounds like you didn't really, or at least consciously you didn't really know that you were unhappy. Speaker 1  29:03 No, I didn't, and that's a really interesting observation that that you make, because you know, I had my children, I loved my children, and I loved being a mom, and I had a really fulfilling career, but there was something missing, you know, and I wasn't really able to put my finger on that until I started writing, and then it became more and more obvious that, yeah, this is the part that was missing, this, you know, who you had thought you were going to be a creative, you, you had denied that, and you're right, so it wasn't really conscious, but, like, once I sort of, it started to become more noticeable to me, then it sort of came back with a vengeance. Michael Hingson  29:49 How much writing did you do before you got married? Speaker 1  29:53 Before.. well, I really didn't, because I was more in the.. I read a lot. Lot, and, but I was more into that, the acting, so I didn't really, I mean, I would write some really bad poetry, but not anything. I know some writers will say they were writing from the time they were six years old, but I, it didn't come to me till much later. Michael Hingson  30:16 So, what got you started back writing after your marriage ended, what was the trigger that made that happen? Speaker 1  30:25 Writing and the marriage, it was like the last 10 years of, of my marriage, I was writing, and it's, I sort of wrote my, my way out of the marriage in a way, but what was the trigger, and I do remember there wasn't an absolute trigger. I had a friend who had self-published a book. Michael Hingson  30:45 Okay, Speaker 1  30:46 I was like a friend of a friend. And one afternoon, it was a summer afternoon, we were over at her house because she had been hired to go to an elementary school and do a presentation, and so we were brainstorming and about what she could do at this presentation, and I went home from that, and I was like, I felt like so energized again. I was like, wow, well, I could do this, I could write a children's book, and so I sat down, and I wrote this book called Beatrice Bumblebee is busy. I didn't know anything about publishing, and I thought to myself, okay, well, now I'll just write it, and I'll send it to publishers, and I'll get it published. Well, it was promptly rejected by every single publisher, and I knew nothing about the publishing that point, but it was enough of a spark. And then I did start just sort of playing around, and I had this scene in my head of a girl, like a young girl who's been in a car accident, and she's on the side of the road losing consciousness, and she has this terrible secret that she wants to tell her boyfriend, and this, the scene, it was like a dark, wet Pennsylvania night, and it was an autumn, and like, I could see the mist, and so I had written this scene, and I remember giving it to my father, who was a huge reader, and he's like, well, Heather, this is really good. Why don't you keep trying to work on it? And, and so I did, and I love school, so I was like, well, I don't know how to write, like, how can I learn how to write? And then I sort of discovered, oh, well, there's these MFA programs, and so I ended up applying, and and going back to school, and then it was in my MFA program, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, but yeah, so the actual trigger was a friend who had published a self-published a book, and it really kind of triggered something in me. Michael Hingson  32:38 Whatever happened to Beatrice Bumblebee is busy, Speaker 1  32:41 she is in a drawer, but I do keep.. I have here on my bulletin board. I'll pull it down if we're on camera. I have this little bumblebee, it's like a rhinestone bumblebee that I keep stuck on my bulletin board as just a reminder that the address in my life. Michael Hingson  33:07 Well, are you ever going to publish it? Speaker 1  33:10 Oh, I don't think it's very good, Michael. Michael Hingson  33:12 Okay, well, maybe you should go back and rewrite it, but Speaker 1  33:16 then, and maybe if I have grandchildren someday, maybe I'll, I'll be, yeah, that's kind of interesting that you say that. Maybe I will go back and just look at it. It would be fun to look at it all these years later. Michael Hingson  33:32 Yeah, well, so you got rejected a whole bunch, which is a pretty common story. What did you learn from that? Speaker 1  33:42 Well, and I do, I do talks at different places, and one of the talks I say is I started with the, you know, Calvin Coolidge said most of humanity's problems can be solved with two simple words, press on, and and that's what I learned through the process. My first book was on submission for like 520 weeks before it finally found a publisher, and it was every degree of rejection that you can get when you're publishing, you know, I'm, and for people who understand the publishing hierarchy, you know, the coveted placement is to land a book deal with one of the big five traditional publishers, and then from there it works its way way down, and we had gotten close on some of the big fives and other places where we'd made it to acquisitions, and we finally ended up with a small indie publisher, but it took so long, and it was so soul crushing in a way, and not so much the first book, and the first book I was still like super, super hopeful, and then once it was published, it did go on, and it won the new. National Indy Excellence Award, and I kind of was always thinking of it as a, you know, a stepping stone, a stepping stone, and that the second book would, would land the big publishing deal, and the second book took just as long, and it ended up right back with the same publisher, so the rejection taught me, yeah, that you just need to keep going. I mean, sometimes people hit really easily, or you know, the way the wind's blowing that day, whatever's on trend or top of mind, and, and sometimes it doesn't, but you have to do it because you, you love it, and you're called to do it. Michael Hingson  35:46 When you were getting rejected, did you get any substantive feedback that helped, or do do publishers do much of that? Speaker 1  35:54 Well, actually, I did, especially on my second book, and on the first book, too, it depends how interested they are in the book, and I did have a couple that were pretty interested and gave what's called like an editorial letter, and oftentimes they won't even do that unless you're under contract, but I did have a couple that had liked it enough, so on my second book, especially my agent and I then took that information and did some like hard edits and rewrites, but that's not always the case. I mean, and I have a lot of friends who are also in the business, sometimes you don't get any, any feedback. Michael Hingson  36:39 So now all together, how many books have you written? Speaker 1  36:42 Well, I've written two, and then I've edited and curated the anthology, the Love Notes anthology, Michael Hingson  36:48 right? Speaker 1  36:49 Which, and I've written a small bit of that. Um, yeah, so I'd like to say three books. Michael Hingson  36:54 Are there more books in you? Okay, Speaker 1  36:58 for sure. We have, you know, we'll. well, first, the second, the second Love Notes edition, I'm definitely editing and curating the stories for that, and that's through a small publisher. And then I have been really sort of toying around with, like, what's my next book, and my first two books were young adult romance, mystery, and thriller, and I kind of think I'm done with that genre, so I have talked about an adult, adult fiction, or even a that would go kind of hand in hand with Love Notes, the my story type of book, you know, rebuilding after divorce and being on, you know, what the space that love notes came out of, and going on, you know, hundreds of dates, and what that, that looked like, but that's in a very sort of nebulous state. It Michael Hingson  37:54 will be fun to see what happens. You'll have to keep us all posted, Speaker 1  37:58 yeah, for sure. Michael Hingson  38:00 But you've, you've described your creative journey, your whole creative journey is basically transforming heartbreak into healing. Tell me more about that. Speaker 1  38:14 Yeah, like I touched on earlier, Love Notes came out as sort of this really dark, lonely time in my life. My 30 year marriage had ended. My children had both left for college, and I'd relocated to New York City. So I was living alone for the first time in my adult lifetime. I was 19 years old, and New York can be a really.. for as many people who live here, it can be a really lonely place. I was really, really starting over, and I started dating at midlife, is, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, and I was going on a lot of dates, and just really discouraged by the whole process, and, like, I had sort of mentioned earlier, that's where I kind of was like almost indignant, like you know, I want proof, like show me proof that that love is real, and and that's where this this call to like look for people's love stories came from, so I do say it, it truly came out of a place of of loneliness and darkness, and then hope, though, too. You know, I was hoping I wanted to, I wanted, I wanted the stories to give me proof. I wanted them to be the evidence, and then, and then that sort of became a calling that, well, then I want to share that with other people and give other people hope, and that's been the most gratifying part for me is when somebody like they come to the show and the shows are really great, these storytelling shows, and now I've started to franchise them, so we have them popping up in some other cities, and I've gone around to some of the other cities, in fact, if you have any listeners who. When I produce a love note show, but the audience members, they're like, "Oh, wow, this, this was.. they don't expect it, first of all, coming into it, and everybody walks out feeling good, and that is like so gratifying to me, that, like, you know, in this, in these like divisive times, that they can come to a show, they can recognize part of the human experience, and they can walk out feeling uplifted and Speaker 2  40:25 hopeful, and that some readers, Speaker 1  40:27 you know, in the book do that too, like having read the book, and someone will reach out and say, "Oh, well, that just really gave me hope. So, hope that answers the question a little bit. Michael Hingson  40:40 Does it? Does it? Does get so the two books that you've written are what the Valley Knows and The Lying Season. Tell me more about those. What the interesting titles, to say the least. Speaker 1  40:52 Yeah, okay, so the both books are they're not ones, they're not a sequel and a prequel, but I would call them a series, because they're both in this fictional town of Millington Valley, which is much like the small town I grew up in, the Oley Valley, and it's all set around this high school, so the peripheral characters in the book stay the same, like the English teacher and the principal, but the kids, you know, because kids are only in high school for four years at a time, so different kids kind of like move through both of the books, they're both mysteries or are thrillers, and they both have like a big kind of like moral question at their center, both sent it set in this Millington Valley, which is a small Pennsylvania town, Michael Hingson  41:45 right? And they're, they're for juveniles, primarily. You said, I think, right. Speaker 1  41:52 Well, they are. They'd be considered young adults. What the valley knows, that's told from three point of views: two kids, and then one of the kids' mothers, so it has a lot of crossover appeal. So you and that book originally started at six point of views, and that was when I was in graduate school, and I remember my professor saying to me, Well, Heather, that's that's just too ambitious to try to do for your first book, you need to cut it down, and, and just whoever's story has to be there, that's the point of view you, you include, and so it kind of fell into the young adult category by accident, but I have a lot of adult readers who, who it really resonates as well, Michael Hingson  42:43 yeah. You know, I know a lot of people say, especially the early ones, the Harry Potter books are for more young adults, and so on, but I certainly had no problem enjoying them as a full-fledged, real-life middle-aged adult. So I think there's a lot that we can learn by stretching and not necessarily just falling into the trap of reading one kind or, or one sort of book that's, oh, this is for more adults or this is more for for children. Think there's a lot to be learned all the way around. Speaker 1  43:17 I think you're, you're right, Michael, and that's it's kind of like a modern thing that we do, like classifying books as adult fiction, like when we think about Catcher in the Rye, like what would that be considered now? Because the protagonist is a young adult, would it be considered a young adult book? But yeah, that's a really great point that you're making. Michael Hingson  43:40 Well, so you, you wrote these books, and you said that, so they've been published, and I assume they're out there. Do you know if they're audio books also? Speaker 1  43:52 Well, yes, and but here's the thing, I, because I didn't get to pick the publisher, I mean, the, you know, I didn't get to pick the narrator, so the what they both, okay, so what the bally knows is narrated. Yes, I don't like the narrator's voice. I know that's a terrible thing to say, because I would love for people to go and listen to the audio book, but I don't know, and maybe it's just me. And then the second book the publisher actually used like an AI kind of, I don't know exactly how it works, and I didn't really even know it happened till I went on Amazon one day, I was like, oh, they made an audio book of this, and it was in like an AI voice, so, so the answer is yes. Both of them are on audiobook. Love Notes is not the other bar. Michael Hingson  44:49 It's interesting, I'm on several lists that deal with audio books, and so on, and I hear people talking or. Emailing on the list all the time, and what people have often said is nonfiction books that are not what they're necessarily as much into as fiction books, they don't mind it being an AI voice, but when they're reading good fiction, where they really want to be absorbed, AI and synthetic voices text to speech just doesn't do it, and in fact I buy into that. I agree with that. I don't think that we have yet gotten computer synthesized voices to really take the place of human readers, and I don't know that we ever totally will, because we're so used to what people sound like, but it is an interesting thing that does come up. Speaker 1  45:47 Yeah, I agree with you. Michael Hingson  45:50 So, I prefer human readers in general. I've never been as great a fan of having a synthetic voice. Nothing against computers, but they just don't talk as well as humans do. Speaker 1  46:03 No, I agree with you too. I much prefer the human voice. Michael Hingson  46:09 Well, so you, when did you start writing love notes? When did that really start coming to fruition? Speaker 1  46:17 Well, love notes. We're coming into our third off-Broadway season this Valentine's Day, so it started that would, so it was started in 22 Michael Hingson  46:27 Oh, yeah. Okay, Speaker 1  46:29 so it's a relatively young project. We're going into our third year, but I'm super excited. We just cast the show for this upcoming performance, and that's really exciting. We have, you know, a bunch of local New Yorkers, but then we also have about the cast is 12 members, and six of them are from other parts of the country, so it's, it's got a, you know, flavor from from from all over. Michael Hingson  46:57 Now, is Love Notes available in any way online, or is it strictly just the shows, and they're not recorded and disseminated in any way. The Speaker 1  47:06 the all-star show, which is Valentine's Day at Symphony Space in New York City, the APM show is live streamed. Yeah, so it can be enjoyed from anywhere in the world. Michael Hingson  47:19 Okay, but outside of that one being live streamed, are there recordings of any of the shows that are out there for people to hear? Speaker 1  47:28 There are on my website, actually. Both the 2023 show and the 2024 show are available for resale. I think it's like $15 and you can, you can watch it's like it's a great, like date night kind of thing to watch the Love Notes show. Michael Hingson  47:48 Okay. Well, so from all that you have heard and seen and interacted with in doing Love Notes, how do you define real love today? Speaker 1  48:01 Oh that's it. Oh, Michael Hingson  48:03 that for a question out of left field. Yeah, Speaker 1  48:06 that's a great question. How do I define real love? So, I think real love shows up in a lot of different ways, and it.. and what's interesting in love notes, is I've seen all sorts of examples of it. I've seen the type of real love that ignites people when they're young, you know. Speaker 3  48:31 We'll love Speaker 1  48:31 that's the other thing people will say, "Oh, well, you were too young, that's why it didn't work out. But I don't think that's necessarily true. I think I think a little bit sometimes is luck of the draw, but the I've seen examples of people who met when they were 20 years old, and they've stayed together their entire lives, and that shows up in commitment and the ability to grow up together and to grow and evolve together, so I think real love shows up like that, but I've also seen real love, like the second time around type of love, and that sort of love, where people really need to be able to integrate their past and understand they're both two people carrying bags, and now they're going to carry those bags together, and so that shows up in a different way. Real love, and I've even seen it love showing up for people like in their 80s, third time around, or having never had partnered, and finding a partner very late in life, and that shows up in a whole different way, that's absolutely real too, but I think at the core of all types of real love is one, the ability to both people have to want the relationship, and they have. To be willing to work for the relationship, it's not just like what I want or you want, but it's oftentimes if they can ask the question, like what's the problem, and how is are we a team against the problem, or to be able to solve the problem, and I think that's sort of like the realist type of love that's out there, Michael Hingson  50:26 and I would, would also say it goes back to something we talked about earlier with, with dogs, dogs are are very much open to and do love unconditionally, and when we develop that kind of a relationship, it's as strong as any other kind of relationship that we can develop. When both sides of that relationship sense it and know it, it creates a bond that's, as I said earlier, second to none. Speaker 1  50:58 Yeah, that's a really great way of putting Michael Hingson  51:02 it. I would, I would not want to do anything to betray my guide dog or any of the guide dogs that I've had, but I've learned how to create those teams, and I think that's very important. One thing that that sticks in my mind dealing with dogs is when I lived in Northern California, we were very close to the Marin Humane Society, which is one of the more famous organizations of that type in the world. We were talking to one of the people at the Marin Humane Society one day, and they were talking about the fact that they're growing in class sizes and growing in the number of classes that they have to offer, but what they also point out is that 90% of the training isn't training the dog, it's training the human, which is really true. There's so much that humans don't really work to develop the relationship that they should, and that if they really truly understood it, it would, it would be a whole lot different relationship that they would experience, Speaker 1  52:05 yeah, that's a really nice way of looking at it. Michael Hingson  52:10 Well, so you have love notes that are growing by loops and bounds in a lot of ways, and you have, how many different places are doing the shows now? Speaker 1  52:24 Well, so far we have Indianapolis, Chicago, Redding, Pennsylvania, and then we have another Pennsylvania city, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we're in talks right now with Atlanta, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida. Michael Hingson  52:42 Wow, so it's growing, Speaker 1  52:45 it's growing, it's starting to spread. We're starting to spread some love. Michael Hingson  52:51 I get it. What do you think about that? Speaker 1  52:54 I think it's great. Like, I hope I'd love to see one in every city. Such a nice event that really brings the community together. Michael Hingson  53:04 So, how often do the shows run? Is it just like on Valentine's Day, or do they go throughout the whole year? Speaker 1  53:10 It can be any time of year, and it's usually just a one-day event. Sometimes there's multiple shows on one day, but yeah, it's just a one day. Oftentimes the local producer will partner with a local charity, so we try to give back in that way too, and they can choose the charity they want, or, or sometimes they're trying to fund like a scholarship fund, or or something like that. I do encourage that, and and we have like a mastermind group among the producers just trying to support each other as creative entrepreneurs. Michael Hingson  53:46 Well, you're you're seeing a lot of success with it. What kind of surprises have you experienced? This must be kind of a thrill, and a lot of, a lot of surprises for you. Speaker 1  53:58 Well, one of the surprises. well, I'm not surprised by it anymore, but I, I can, I'm certain, always surprised when I have a cast member who, at the very last minute, you know, they've gone through all the rehearsals, all the prep work, all the editing, and then at the very last second they pull out of the show, I've had that happen each show, so now I know how to plan for it, and know how to prepare, you know, producers for it. But yeah, that, that's always surprising to me. Michael Hingson  54:34 It's an adventure, isn't it? Speaker 1  54:35 Sure is. Yeah, gotta sing quickly on your feet. Michael Hingson  54:39 Yeah, you definitely have to do that. Tell us a little bit about Socroc, the company you and your brother formed, and what that's all about. Speaker 1  54:47 Sure, well, my brother was a professional soccer player, and he, when he retired, he moved to Manhattan, thinking he was going to be an actor, and as most actors. Oh, they need a second job to support themselves. Yeah, so became a personal trainer, and he was personal training, and some of his clients got word that he'd been a professional soccer player, and they begged him, they're like, can you teach our kids soccer? So it kind of happened by accident, and just a few balls and cones in Central Park, teaching soccer to little kids, and over the years it's grown and grown and grown and grown. We're in our like 20th year, and so during it was like maybe five years ago, he, it just got out of hand, like it was getting too big, and he needed help, and that was when I had gone through the divorce, and I like explained I'd been in business before, and I wanted a change, so he offered me, you know, a position to come and help him and run, so I run the business side of the soccer, and he runs the soccer side, and we're all throughout Manhattan, we, we do public classes in the parks and playgrounds, and then, like, now in the winter time, we rent space all around the city, and then we also partner with private schools and public schools throughout the city, and we do birthday parties and personal training, and we're starting a kids of all abilities program, and that's that's like our new initiative right now, and and then the spring we're expanding into actually into basketball too, BB Rock, we're calling Michael Hingson  56:29 it. Oh, that's cool. Well, you're doing a lot of different things, you speak, you're an author, you're an educator. We haven't talked about, I guess it's you work with Speaker 1  56:39 SUNY. I teach at the City University of New York, which is part of SUNY, and that work I really love. Yeah, Michael Hingson  56:47 tell, tell me about that. Then, Speaker 1  56:49 so they have an initiative, it's through the Manhattan Educational Opportunity Center, and SUNY provides grants for adult students returning who need to get their high school epilepticy, their GED. So I teach writing the writing section of the GED, and this I - these are the students I like the most, and I've taught at all levels, from freshman comp all the way up to graduate level MFA, and it's the GED adult student that I enjoy the most. So, I'll, when I, when I'm done with you, I actually will zoom up to Harlem, and I'll be teaching GED time tonight. Michael Hingson  57:35 Okay. Well, you're doing all of these different things. How do you keep yourself grounded, and how do you keep the creative juices going? Speaker 1  57:44 Well, that can sometimes be a challenge. Michael Hingson  57:46 I bet, Speaker 1  57:47 but I do. I exercise. That's one thing I really, I love to exercise, and I'm getting better at just taking time for myself, but I also feel like what I do isn't work, like I enjoy what I do, so I always try to bring a sense of gratitude to each day in that way. Michael Hingson  58:13 Yeah, well, and taking time for yourself is is important to do, and and now you have a teacup poodle to share it with, and I'll bet you guys have some interesting conversations. Speaker 1  58:26 Yeah, we sure do. She's a cutie, she's just lying on the little chair right over here. Michael Hingson  58:33 Yeah, my, my dog is over here on his bed, so he, he, he monitors me. Speaker 1  58:41 Yeah, she's been really good, because sometimes when I'm on the Zoom like this, she, she'll start to bark. She doesn't like paying attention to somebody else. Michael Hingson  58:48 Well, one of these days we'll have to end up in Manhattan and come and meet her. Speaker 1  58:54 That sounds Michael Hingson  58:55 be kind of fun. Speaker 1  58:57 That sure would. Michael Hingson  58:58 Well, so tell me, what's next for you? What do you envision going forward from here? Speaker 1  59:04 Well, my hope is actually, I would love, because there have so much fodder now, all these different stories, love stories. My hope is to launch a podcast, a Love Notes podcast that would feature the storyteller and their story, and then I would do an interview of the story behind the story, because people always have questions. They'll hear a story, or they'll read the story, and it's really short. It's like 700 or 1000 words, and they'll always want to know, like, well, what happened to them, or how did that end up. So I envisioned this podcast of love notes, real stories by real people about real love, and that would be like the the meat of it, and then they're at the end of each one, there'd be like a love letter, and people could write love letters that would be shared on the podcast, and tell Michael Hingson  59:55 me, Speaker 1  59:56 you know, like, dear Michael, this is why I love you, and then it would be a. Letter, so that's that's I'd like to see more satellite cities. I'd like to get the next edition of the book out, and then launch the podcast by Trifecta. Michael Hingson  1:00:13 Lots going on, needless to say. Well, if people want to reach out to you, talk about creating their own love notes, or as you said, you'd love to find people who want to help produce in various cities. How do they do that? Speaker 1  1:00:27 Well, probably the easiest thing to do is first, if they just want to learn more about the project in general, would just be to check out the website, and that's at www dot Love Notes worldwide.com and from there, then you can, you can get a hold of me, but I'll give my email address also, it's Heather at Heather Christy, C H R I s t i e books.com so either just hit the website or send me an email directly, and I, yeah, I'd love to talk to anybody who's got a story they want to share, or anyone who's thinking like maybe they'd love to bring a love notes to their community. Michael Hingson  1:01:19 Cool. Well, I hope people will reach out and that you'll get lots of interest from our podcast. It's a, it's a fun thing, and I hope that people will respond. So, all of you out there, email Heather. Speaker 1  1:01:34 That sounds great. And my last little plug: if anybody would love to watch the Love Notes show on January, february 14 for Valentine's Day. You can find that information on the website too. Michael Hingson  1:01:48 What I'm trying to remember, what day of the week february 14 is going to be in 2026 Speaker 1  1:01:53 It's a Michael Hingson  1:01:54 Saturday, great day to Speaker 1  1:01:57 do it. So you can watch it, and actually the live stream will stay live for a week, so if you're not able to watch it that night, you can watch it during the week. Michael Hingson  1:02:05 Oh, cool. Well, I hope people will do that, and I want to thank you for being here. But I want to thank all of you out there for being a part of this today. Heather has had a lot of interesting things to say, and I hope that you'll help her and help yourself by helping her to be more successful. I'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com that's M I C H A E L H I at Accessi B A C C E S S I B e.com We'd love it and would greatly appreciate it if wherever you are listening or watching the podcast, if you'll give us a five star review, but also, or a rating, but also give us a review. We love reviews, we appreciate reviews, and we really value all the people who have done it so far, and we ask that you do it again, or you do it for the first time. So, please let us know what you think by writing reviews. If you know anyone who ought to be a guest, we'd love it if you'd let us know. Heather, you as well. Anyone that you think ought to be a guest on Unstoppable Mindset, we would really love to be introduced. My belief is everyone has stories to tell, so don't be shy. We'd love to hear from you. But Heather, once again, I want to thank you for being here. This has been absolutely wonderful. Speaker 1  1:03:26 Thank you so much, Michael. It's been so much fun to talk to you this afternoon. Michael Hingson  1:03:32 What if the biggest thing holding you back isn't what's in front of you, but rather what you believe? Welcome to Unstoppable Mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. I'm your host, Michael Hingson, speaker, author, and advocate for inclusion and possibilities. This podcast explores how the beliefs we carry shape the way we live, lead, and connect with others each week. I talk with people who challenge assumptions, face adversity head on, and show what's possible when we choose curiosity over fear. Together, we focus on mindset, resilience, and the small shifts that lead to meaningful change. Let's get started, 1:04:24 I.

The suburbs have long been a symbol of American prosperity in the post-WWII era. Yet the contrast between suburban wealth and "inner city" poverty overlooks the stories of those living in suburbia who were unable to reach "the good life." In this episode Ben & Bob talk with Tim Keogh, whose new book In Levittown's Shadow: Poverty in America's Wealthiest Suburb (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2023), explores the history of suburbanization in Long Island, New York, and argues that post-WWII prosperity relied on those impoverished suburbanites who we've since forgotten. Dr. Tim Keogh is assistant professor of history at Queensborough Community College, part of the City University of New York. This is a rebroadcast of RTN #291 which originally aired as "A Forgotten History of American Suburbs w/ Tim Keogh" on December 4, 2023. This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.

What’s an American? In Part Two, we continue our journey by going way back…to a series of English kings that helped set the stage for the creation of America. Along the way we speak to William Federer, author of Who is the King in America? and purveyor of AmericanMinute.com. We also speak to Stanley Renshon – author, psychoanalyst and professor of political science at City University of New York. What's An American? (Part Three) airs Monday, June 1st, 2026. Episode powered by: The Licorice Guy ...the delicious gourmet licorice made in America. Use promo code "RPA15" for 15% off. Ethos - Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at ethos.com/rpa Alliance Defending Freedom - Learn more about how you can support free speech by texting RPA to 83848 or going to JoinADF.com/RPA.Support the show: https://redpilledamerica.com/support/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Saturday, April 18, 2026, Hudson Mohawk Magazine Network Roaming Labor Correspondent Willie Terry covered the Somos, Inc 40 Anniversary Conference in Albany, NY. Somos, Inc. is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to uniting the Latino community and advocating for equitable public policy. In this labor segment, Willie interviewed Akkeem Polack, Chairperson of the University Student Senate in New York City. Akkeem was at the conference advocating for comprehensive transportation needs for all City University of New York (CUNY) students.

Emanuele Arielli, Lev Manovich"Estetica artificiale"IA generativa, arte e mediaLuca Sossella Editorewww.lucasossellaeditore.itCosa significa fare arte quando una macchina sembra poterlo fare al posto nostro? Quando un algoritmo compone musica nello stile di Bach, genera un ritratto “alla Rembrandt” o scrive una poesia convincente? Domande come queste rimettono al centro questioni di fondo: che cosa rende un'opera autentica? Chi può dirsi artista? Che cosa influenza il nostro gusto?Estetica artificiale mostra come l'intelligenza artificiale generativa stia trasformando non solo gli strumenti della creazione, ma le condizioni stesse dell'esperienza estetica. Immagini, suoni e testi non vengono soltanto realizzati, ma variati e ottimizzati. E in questo passaggio arte ed estetica si ricombinano in modelli capaci di generare forme e di orientare gusti e preferenze.Lev Manovich, tra i massimi teorici della cultura e dei media digitali, ed Emanuele Arielli, filosofo e studioso di estetica, non si limitano a chiedersi se l'IA sia creativa: interrogano le condizioni stesse che rendono possibile parlare di autore, opera e gusto nell'epoca degli algoritmi. Ricostruiscono la metamorfosi del ruolo dell'artista e mostrano come le macchine non si limitino a generare contenuti, ma imparino anche dalle nostre reazioni e abbiano un impatto sulla nostra sensibilità.Attraverso teoria dei media, filosofia dell'arte e cultura visiva, gli autori tracciano la mappa di questo passaggio decisivo, offrendo una bussola per orientarsi in un'epoca in cui l'immaginazione diventa computabile e l'estetica, sempre più, una tecnologia culturale.Qui troverete dei materiali aggiuntivi relativi alla pubblicazione: https://lucasossellaeditore.it/progetto/estetica-artificiale/Lev ManovichProfessore alla City University di New York, è tra i massimi teorici internazionali della cultura e dei media digitali. È autore di decine di libri, tra cui Il linguaggio dei nuovi media, considerato un classico della teoria dei media contemporaneiEmanuele ArielliProfessore all'Università IUAV di Venezia, è filosofo e studioso di estetica. Tra i suoi libri: Idee virali. Perché i pensieri si diffondono e Farsi piacere. La costruzione del gusto.Diventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment. Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment. Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment. Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment. Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Throughout the United States there are buildings that had been home to Jewish houses of worship, schools, and other institutions. What has happened to these buildings? What can we learn from their history? In her book, Former Synagogues of the United States: Looking at Buildings That Once Housed Synagogues, Schools, and Other Jewish Institutions (Resource Publications, 2026), Ellen Levitt uncovers the 'hidden history' of America's Jewish built environment. Interviewee: Ellen Levitt is a teacher, writer, photographer, and tour guide. Her previous books include The Lost Synagogues of Brooklyn, The Lost Synagogues of the Bronx and Queens, The Lost Synagogues of Manhattan, and Walking Manhattan. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

08:08 — Peter Beinart is Editor-at-Large at Jewish Currents and writes “Beinart Notebook” on Substack. He is also a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism of the City University of New York. His latest book is “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.” The post Fund Drive Special: Peter Beinart on Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza appeared first on KPFA.

  In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Mozilla shipping Firefox 150 with 271 patched bugs found by Anthropic’s Mythos system, the first major real-world deployment of the AlphaGo-Moment cybersecurity tooling. He also covers a 9-year dormant Linux kernel root, a college student stopping Taiwan’s high-speed rail with a software-defined radio, GitHub MCP secret scanning going GA, the NVIDIA NeMo lawsuit surviving its motion to dismiss, the Hugging Face Reachy Mini app store, Anthropic’s Auto Mode for Claude Code, and the 4-gigabyte AI model Chrome silently installed on your computer. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with the AlphaGo Moment moving from theory into production. Mozilla shipped Firefox 150 this week with 271 patched bugs that Anthropic’s Mythos system found. Furthermore, the broader episode threads a clear pattern: AI tooling is reshaping security, developer workflows, and consumer software faster than the surrounding ecosystem can absorb it. The show closes on the four-gigabyte AI model Chrome installed on a billion machines without explicit consent. Mozilla Ships 271 Mythos Bugs in Firefox 150 Mozilla ran Anthropic’s restricted Mythos system against the Firefox 150 codebase before shipping. The result: 271 found bugs (180 high severity, 80 moderate, 11 low) baked into the release. However, the bigger number is the year-over-year jump. April 2026 shipped 423 total Firefox security fixes versus 31 a year prior. The breakdown for April: 271 from Mythos, 41 from external researchers, and 111 from other internal sources. Cochrane is sticking to his guns on calling this the AlphaGo Moment for cybersecurity. Skeptics argue Mythos is industrial-scale fuzzing because most found bugs sit in memory-safety territory. However, his counter is the velocity itself. Furthermore, he frames the resistance as carriage-versus-cars: humans-first research still grounds the tool, but throughput is the win. The Firefox CTO put it directly: defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. For developers asking whether Mythos changes anything if they already run fuzzers, Cochrane’s answer is yes, and not even close. Additionally, he notes Mythos is restricted-access. The broadly available tier is Claude Opus 4.7, which Mozilla used since February before getting onto the restricted program for the Firefox 150 cycle. Run Opus 4.7 first. Sponsor: GoDaddy GoDaddy has been sponsoring this show for over twenty years. Economy hosting starts at $6.99/month, WordPress hosting at $12.99/month, and domains at $11.99. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy for exclusive deals and to directly support the show. Copy Fail: 9-Year Linux Kernel Bug, 732 Bytes to Root A 9-year-old dormant Linux kernel bug got disclosed April 29 as CVE-2026-31431. Researchers published a 732-byte Python script that roots every major Linux distribution shipped since 2017. Additionally, CISA added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on May 1 with a May 15 federal deadline. The bug lives in the kernel’s crypto socket layer through the AF_ALG AEAD interface, originating in a 2017 in-place crypto optimization that lacked bounds checking. Cloudflare published their post-mortem this week. Their first instinct was to remove the kernel module entirely. However, service dependencies forced a workaround instead. Cloudflare resumed normal patched-kernel reboot automation across their 330-city fleet on May 4, with manual reboots and rollouts continuing after. Taiwan Rail Stopped by a 23-Year-Old With a Software-Defined Radio A 23-year-old Taiwanese university student with the surname Lin spoofed a TETRA general alarm signal on April 5, stopping trains on Taiwan’s high-speed rail. The accomplice supplied the radio parameters. Both were arrested by month-end. Lin posted NT$100,000 bail; the accomplice posted NT$80,000. The incident hit at 11:23 PM during the Qingming holiday weekend, stopping three revenue passenger trains plus one deadhead. Furthermore, the system has been in service for 19 years without rotating its cryptographic parameters once. Cochrane notes this is exactly the type of long-dormant infrastructure flaw that Mythos-class tooling catches, if anyone bothers to point it at the wires we already have. GitHub MCP Secret Scanning Goes GA GitHub’s secret scanning in the MCP server hit GA on May 5, with dependency scanning entering public preview the same day. Both released after a seven-week public preview run starting March 17. Additionally, the feature lets MCP-compatible coding agents (Copilot CLI, VS Code, JetBrains, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) detect exposed secrets before commits or pull requests. Findings are ephemeral. They surface only in the current chat session and don’t persist as GitHub alerts. Sources disagree on scope: GitHub’s GA changelog says repo-level or org-level settings work, while the docs say only org-level applies. Cochrane flags the open question of whether MCP prompt injections could be exploited to send discovered secrets elsewhere. Subquadratic Debuts a 12-Million-Token Context Window Miami-based Subquadratic emerged from stealth on May 5 with a $29 million seed round and a reported $500 million valuation. Their model, SubQ 1M-Preview, runs on a new Subquadratic Sparse Attention architecture (their technical writeup calls it Selective Attention; same acronym, different second word). The headline claim: a thousand-times reduction in attention compute at 12 million tokens versus frontier models. However, that figure is vendor marketing math. There is no peer-reviewed paper, no public weights, and no independent benchmark replication. Researchers are demanding independent proof. Furthermore, CTO Alex Whedon’s pull line, “Retrieval / RAG plumbing is a waste of human intelligence,” signals how aggressively they want to position against retrieval-augmented architectures. ChatGPT Goblins, China’s “Catch You Steadily”: Sycophancy Is Universal Last week’s ChatGPT goblin obsession has a Chinese-language twin. The model overuses a phrase translating as “I will steadily catch you.” Additionally, a new Stanford and CMU study called ELEPHANT shows social sycophancy is universal across all 11 LLMs tested with 2,400-plus participants. Models endorsed users 49 percent more than humans did, and 47 percent even on harmful prompts. Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek topped the rankings. Cochrane notes sycophancy is obvious once you’re aware of it but tricky to dissuade. Even with explicit instructions, longer context windows can reintroduce the behavior as the instructions get diluted. Furthermore, the trap is believing you’ve handled it. Once you think you’ve got it under control, you’re more prone to being influenced because you stopped watching for it. NVIDIA NeMo Lawsuit: Judge Tigar Denies Motion to Dismiss Three authors filed Nazemian v. NVIDIA in March 2024, alleging NVIDIA used The Pile and Books3 (approximately 196,640 pirated books) to train its NeMo AI framework. NVIDIA’s defense relied on the Sony v. Universal Betamax doctrine, arguing NeMo’s training scripts are general-purpose tools like a VCR. This week, Judge Tigar denied NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss in the Northern District of California. The headline quote: NeMo’s training scripts “have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement.” Furthermore, the judge rejected the VCR analogy outright. NeMo’s scripts are not general-purpose tools; they were allegedly purpose-built to ingest pirated material. Cochrane reads the Betamax framing as legal-jargon arbitrage rather than honest defense. The Humanoid Robot Market Is Smaller Than the Hype Michael Barnard at CleanTechnica argues that scenario-math against the global labor market puts realistic humanoid TAM at $200 billion to $1 trillion, not $20 trillion. Near-term wins cluster in warehouses, not homes. Additionally, the framework weighs dexterity burden against human-proximity safety burden. Real opportunities cluster where both burdens are low. Cochrane connects this to last week’s reservations about humanoids in the household. Furthermore, the risk profile is the issue: these robots aren’t prepared for every scenario, can’t make dynamic decisions, and one software update can change the definition of “safe.” Hugging Face Launches Reachy Mini App Store Hugging Face launched an open-source app store for the Reachy Mini robot this week, $299 for the Lite tethered version and $449 wireless. There are 200-plus community-built apps at launch from over 150 creators, with nearly 10,000 Reachy Minis cumulative shipped. Additionally, apps are forkable, with the default agent (ML Intern) able to modify, write, test, and ship code on any existing app. Examples at launch include an office receptionist built in under two hours, a Reachy Phone Home anti-procrastination app, baby-monitor-style apps, a cooking assistant, and a 78-year-old Joel Cohen’s voice-controlled CEO peer-group app. Pollen Robotics, the company behind Reachy, was acquired by Hugging Face on April 14, 2025. Bebop the Humanoid Robot Delays Southwest Flight 1568 A 4-foot, 70-pound humanoid robot named Bebop delayed Southwest flight 1568 from Oakland to San Diego by more than 73 minutes on April 30. The crew flagged the lithium battery as oversized. Furthermore, the battery was reportedly four times the cabin limit. Bebop belongs to Dallas-based Elite Event Robotics, which bought a full-price cabin ticket because the robot exceeded checked-baggage weight. Bebop danced for passengers at the gate before boarding. However, Southwest had Elite remove the batteries before departure, and replacements were overnighted to Chicago for the next event. Cochrane flags the obvious: batteries have always been flagged in aviation, so forgetting that with a humanoid robot in tow is a strange miss. Ouster Rev8: Native Color Lidar With Google, Volvo, Skydio Stating Intent Ouster announced the Rev8 OS Family on May 4 in San Francisco. The sensors fuse depth and color via SPAD detectors (single photon avalanche diodes) on Ouster’s custom L4 and L4 Max chips. Google, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, Skydio, Liebherr, Epiroc, and PlusAI have stated intent to adopt, though nothing is formally signed. Specs include 48-bit color, 116 dB dynamic range, and pre-fused 3D colorized point clouds. The OS1 Max gets 500-meter max detection. Available to order today and shipping this quarter, with no pricing disclosed. CEO Angus Pacala in his TechCrunch interview: “The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both.” TagTinker Lets a Flipper Zero Mess With Electronic Shelf Labels A new Flipper Zero app called TagTinker uses infrared signals to push images and text to electronic shelf labels. Additionally, these are the same kind of price tags grocery chains are starting to use for surveillance pricing. The app and GitHub repo went public this week. Maryland’s HB 895, signed by Governor Wes Moore, takes effect October 1 as the first-in-nation surveillance pricing law. It covers food retailers and third-party food delivery service providers. Furthermore, ESLs use the same IR signaling as TV remotes with weak security. The dev’s disclaimer states it’s strictly for educational research, security curiosity, and displaying digital art on hardware you legally own. Fitbit App Becomes Google Health, Plus Fitbit Air, Plus Google Fit Sunset Google announced May 7 that the Fitbit app becomes Google Health on May 19, rolling through May 26. The launch ships with the new $99.99 Fitbit Air screenless tracker and the long-rumored Google Fit shutdown. Additionally, the four-tab interface (Today, Fitness, Sleep, Health) bundles a Gemini-powered AI Health Coach. Coach is premium-gated at $9.99/month or $99/year. Medical records integration is US-only at launch. The Fitbit Air gets up to one week of battery life and 50-meter water resistance. However, Cochrane flags conflicting privacy framing: Google’s AI summary bullets say “your data stays private,” but the actual document copy says only “committed to not using Fitbit user health and wellness data for Google Ads.” Those are not the same statement. Russinovich on Why Win32 Won and WinRT Didn’t Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich said via Microsoft Dev Docs video that Win32, the 1995 API, is still foundational to Windows 11. WinRT, the modernization replacement, “didn’t play out the way a lot of people expected.” Mostly clickbait framing per Windows Latest, but the substantive angle is real. Microsoft is pivoting back to native WinUI 3 development after years of pushing developers toward WebView2 and Electron. Additionally, Electron-based apps are known for insane RAM usage, and everyone is hurting for RAM right now. Furthermore, the bigger open question is whether Electron survives the test of time, especially with the React engine reportedly being rewritten in Rust. “Tabula Plena”: The Brain Starts Full, Not Blank A Nature Communications study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria found that the mouse hippocampal CA3 recurrent network begins densely connected and refines through pruning. ISTA’s press release frames this as “tabula plena,” meaning full slate, counter to tabula rasa. The paper published April 21. First author Victor Vargas-Barroso and senior author Professor Peter Jonas studied mice at three developmental stages. Furthermore, the “starting overloaded enables faster sensory integration” framing is Jonas’s hypothesis from the press release, not a paper conclusion. Cochrane closes on the bigger question: did we have human growth and experience mapped wrong from the start? The Aqueous Battery You Can Pour Down the Drain A Chinese research team led by Professor Chunyi Zhi at City University of Hong Kong built an aqueous battery using a custom organic polymer electrode plus neutral magnesium and calcium salts (food-grade tofu coagulants) as electrolyte. Published in Nature Communications on February 18. Numbers to know: 120,000-plus charge cycles, full-cell energy density of 48.3 watt-hours per kilogram. That’s well below typical lithium-ion. However, post-cycling analysis showed only magnesium, calcium, chlorine, carbon, and copper, with no heavy metals. The cell complies with US RCRA, ISO 14001, and China’s GB 18599-2020 for direct environmental disposal. Additionally, the “300-plus years” framing is journalists extrapolating from the 120,000 cycles, not a paper claim. ResoNix Klippel Tests Expose Car-Audio Spec Lies Nick Apicella, founder of ResoNix Sound Solutions in Stony Point, New York, spent around $23,000 on independent Klippel LSI and TRF testing of 40 subwoofers. He published 21 results showing widespread misrepresentation of Xmax (excursion) and thermal/power-handling claims. Test data published in three batches between December 2025 and January 2026. Specifics: Wavtech thinPRO12 claimed 20 mm of excursion but delivered 8.85 mm, scoring 15 out of 100 on marketing accuracy. One driver hit 44 percent of advertised excursion. Another tripped thermal protection at half its rated power. Additionally, nine of 21 drivers scored below 50 out of 100. Brands tested include JL Audio, Sundown, Focal, Morel, Audiofrog, Adire, Stereo Integrity, and Dynaudio. Conflict-of-interest flag: ResoNix’s own GUS-15, 12, and 10 prototypes conveniently rank one, two, three. JetBrains Opens 2026 Developer Ecosystem Survey JetBrains opened the 10th annual Developer Ecosystem Survey this week. It takes about 30 minutes, with prizes including a MacBook Pro 16-inch and a $1,000 Amazon gift card. Anonymized raw data is published publicly, and cumulative scale is 100,000-plus developers across recent years. Additionally, the survey is going fully anti-AI: “evil bots, dishonest respondents, and AI agents will be excluded from prize distribution.” Cochrane is curious whether TypeScript holds its 2025 crown after knocking Python off, and whether Rust shows real growth given the wave of LLM-driven Rust rewrites in the past few months. Anthropic’s Claude Code Auto Mode Goes Live Anthropic launched Auto Mode for Claude Code roughly six weeks ago. Claude Code’s previous behavior required user approval for most file modifications and command executions, generating heavy approval-fatigue complaints during longer sessions. Auto Mode is the answer: Claude can run multi-step development tasks without per-action approval. Additionally, the architecture is a two-stage classifier, with stage one a fast yes/no filter and stage two doing chain-of-thought on flagged actions. Cochrane runs his own Claude Code in YOLO mode but with custom rejection rules baked into settings to block commands he doesn’t want, even with skip-permissions on. He recommends configuring settings as the actual policy layer rather than relying on classifier judgment alone. Furthermore, recent posts about Claude deleting websites or wiping production databases reinforce why the settings layer matters more than the auto-mode toggle. Chrome Quietly Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your Computer Google Chrome silently downloads on-device AI model weights (Gemini Nano family) to a `weights.bin` file in the OptGuideOnDeviceModel directory, around four gigabytes in Alexander Hanff’s audit. Furthermore, the model re-downloads if you delete it. Hanff timed his own install at 14 minutes 28 seconds on macOS. Affected platforms include Windows, macOS (including Apple Silicon), and Linux. Hanff frames this as a multi-front legal violation: a direct breach of Europe’s ePrivacy Directive, two articles of GDPR, and an environmental harm of a magnitude that would be notifiable under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. At one billion users, the four-gigabyte distribution represents roughly 240 gigawatt-hours of network and storage energy paired with about 60,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions. However, no EU regulator action or formal complaint has surfaced as of this episode. The model powers on-device features (email writing, scam detection, summarization, smart paste, tab grouping) but not the visible AI Mode button, which routes to the cloud. To disable, Cochrane recommends Chrome Settings, then System, then On-device AI, toggle to off. Two more paths exist via `chrome://flags` or a Windows registry edit. Cochrane closes the show with show housekeeping: GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider, email at geeknews@gmail.com, newsletter signup at geeknewscentral.com, and Pocket Casts as a solid modern podcast app pick. Have a wonderful night. The post Mozilla Meets Mythos #1864 appeared first on Geek News Central.

The news of Texas covered today includes:Our Lone Star story of the day: Steven Balch, Ph.D. may be America's original D.E.I. on campus fighter!  Today we talk about this term “academic freedom” that so many on campus are throwing about, claiming such is under attack by new laws in Texas and elsewhere.Two, of many, recent stories I had in the stack are the background for the interview: Former Texas Tech professors criticize course content changes, cite academic freedom concerns Left-Wing Faculty Association Threatens To File Complaints with TAMU, Texas Tech Accreditor Dr. Balch is an American conservative scholar and higher education reformer. He was the founding president of the National Association of Scholars from 1987 to 2009. Balch received a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, in 1964. He received his master's degree (1967) and Ph.D. (1972) in political science from the University of California in Berkeley. It was during the Berkeley riots that he became a conservative and he is now a Republican. Dr. Balch was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush at the White House on November 15, 2007. The award cited him “for leadership and advocacy upholding the noblest traditions in higher education,” and went on to say that “his work on behalf of reasoned scholarship in a free society has made him a leading champion of excellence and reform at our nation's universities.”Our Lone Star story of the day is sponsored by Allied Compliance Services providing the best service in DOT, business and personal drug and alcohol testing since 1995.Listen on the radio, or station stream, at 5pm Central. Click for our radio and streaming affiliates.www.PrattonTexas.com

In the U.S., illiberalism is in power. I don't think anybody really argues against that. But I've been surprised by how weak liberalism has felt in response. Donald Trump isn't a popular president; he isn't making people want more of what he is. But if the forces of illiberalism are really going to be turned back in this country, I think more people need to be excited and inspired by liberalism itself. We need a liberalism that stands for more than “not Trump.” So I've been on my own esoteric journey, reading a lot of books on the history of liberalism, trying to understand what excited and inspired people in the past, and how liberals overcame crises like the one we're in. And reading one of those books, “The Lost History of Liberalism” by Helena Rosenblatt, it felt like an epiphany — that this was a piece of the puzzle. So I wanted to have Rosenblatt on the show to talk about it. Rosenblatt is a professor of history, political science and French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and in this conversation, she walks me through the history of liberalism that she uncovered, and the values that once lived at its heart. Mentioned: Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Liberalism by Edmund Fawcett Book Recommendations: Liberalism against Itself by Samuel Moyn Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre Thinking With Machines by Vasant Dhar Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Lauren Reddy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Filipa Pajevic and Marlaine Glicksman. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dr. Taemin Ha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Nutrition, and Exercise Sciences at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). His research focuses on promoting physical activity and health among children and adolescents through a whole-of-school approach, with a particular interest in how technology can be integrated into K–12 school communities to facilitate and encourage physical activity. Dr. Ha is an AIESEP Early Career Scholar, an award he will receive at the AIESEP World Congress in Taipei.---## Episode OverviewIn this episode, host Risto Marttinen sits down with Dr. Taemin Ha to explore his growing program of research on technology integration and school-based physical activity. From the origins of his research agenda to his most recent systematic review, Dr. Ha walks us through the landscape of how — and how well — schools are using technology to get kids moving.Ha, T., Dauenhauer, B., Krause, J., McMullen, J., & Farber, M. (2025). Comprehensive school physical activity program technology practice questionnaire (CSPAP-TPQ). *Educational Technology Research and Development*, *73*(1), 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-024-10399-1Ha, T., Dauenhauer, B., McMullen, J., & Krause, J. (2025). Attributes contributing to the use of technology in school-based physical activity promotion: A diffusion of innovations approach. *Journal of Teaching in Physical Education*, *44*(2), 366–376. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2024-0052Ha, T., Chey, W. S., Fan, X., Oh, J., & Bernstein, E. (2025). Technology use in physical education: Insights from New York State teachers. *Journal of Teaching in Physical Education*. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2024-0343Ha, T., Moon, J., Yu, H., Fan, X., & Paulson, L. (2025). A systematic review of technology-infused physical activity interventions in K-12 school settings: Effectiveness, roles, and implementation strategies. *International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity*, *22*, 113. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-025-01811-x---## About Dr. Taemin HaDr. Ha is an Assistant Professor at Queens College, CUNY. His scholarship centers on promoting physical activity and health among children and adolescents through whole-of-school approaches, with a specific focus on technology integration in K–12 school communities.taemin.ha@qc.cuny.edu

Money is both a concrete thing and an abstract measure. If you only look at money as an abstract measure, as traditional economists have done for centuries, you'll miss out on the real role that money plays in our society.  The decisions of governments, corporations, and everyday people are influenced by money, and understanding this is helpful in understanding what's driving the decision making that's ultimately leading to a worsening climate crisis.  While discussing the new book "Against Money" by Arjun Jayadev and JW Mason, we explore a variety of topics such as John Maynard Keynes' early objections to economists' treatment of money, the fuzzy math behind the measurement of inflation and GDP, and even the fallout between Trump and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Arjun Jayadev is professor of economics and director of the Center for the Study of the Indian Economy at Azim Premji University in India. JW Mason is associate professor of economics at John Jay College, City University of New York.  You can purchase "Against Money" here:  https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo265118979.html Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter/podcast, The Climate Weekly, to help support this show. Your contributions will make the continuation of this show possible.  Our music is "Gotta Get Up" by The Passion Hifi, check out his music at thepassionhifi.com. Rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Justin Garson is a philosopher and historian of science at the City University of New York. He has published several books and articles on biology, the mind, and madness, including Madness: A Philosophical Exploration in 2022. He also contributes to Psychology Today and Aeon. His latest book, The Madness Pill: One Doctor's Quest to Understand Schizophrenia, was published by St. Martin's Press in April 2026. In this interview, Justin joins us to talk about the work of Solomon Snyder, whose discoveries ushered in the era of biological psychiatry. We also talk about the race to develop new psychiatric drugs based on his research and the implications for our understanding of psychosis. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help us continue to survive and grow. https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/ To find the Mad in America podcast on your preferred podcast player, click here: https://pod.link/1212789850 © Mad in America 2026. Produced by James Moore https://www.jmaudio.org

As the US Supreme Court deliberates over the future of birthright citizenship, we explore its historic roots in light of immigration, slavery, and indigenous peoples. How do contemporary ideas of birthright citizenship fit with those of the past? How might these ideas influence the Supreme Court's upcoming decision? [ dur: 58mins. ] Anna Law holds the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She is the author of The Immigration Battle in American Courts and Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants. Julie Novkov is the Dean of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy and Professor of Political Science and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany. She is the author of Donald Trump, Constitutional Failure, and the Guardrails of Democracy and co-author of American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship. Gabriel “Jack” Chin is Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Legal Education at UC Davies School of Law. The U.S. Supreme Court has cited his work in two cases: Chaidez v. United States and Padilla v. Kentucky. And Justice Sotomyer has cited his law article in Utah v. Strieff. He is the co-author of Birthright Citizenship, Slave Trade Legislation, and the Origins of Federal Immigration Regulation and  author of A Nation of White Immigrants: State and Federal Racial Preferences for White Noncitizens. This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian, Anna Lapin and Sudd Dongre. Politics and Activism,  Governance / Law, Courts, Immigration, Birthright

Noticing the history and beauty around us can shift how we see ourselves—and our communities. An awe walk through Harlem reveals how the stories embedded in public spaces can spark connection, perspective, and a sense of what's possible.Summary: Cities are full of quiet moments of wonder—if we know how to notice them. In this episode of The Science of Happiness we explore the science of awe while taking an awe walk with students at City University of New York in Harlem. We learn  how everyday urban spaces can deepen our sense of connection, belonging, and curiosity. How To Do This Practice: Choose a familiar place: Pick a street, park, campus, or neighborhood you move through often—somewhere ordinary. Slow your pace: Walk more slowly than usual and give yourself permission to notice, rather than rush. Look for signs of story: Pay attention to buildings, names, textures, and small details that hint at history, culture, or the people who've been there before. Ask yourself: Who stood here before me? What happened here? What journeys passed through this space? Notice your response: Pause when something catches you—a feeling of wonder, curiosity, or even goosebumps—and stay with it for a moment. Reflect on connection: As you finish, consider how this place and the stories within it connect to your own life, sense of belonging, or what feels possible for you. Scroll down for a transcription of this episode. Today's Guest:BOB MCKINNON is an author, teacher, and Director of the Social Mobility Lab at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New YorkLearn more about Bob here: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/profile/bob_mckinnonThis episode is supported by The Gambrell Foundation, who believe a great life grows from strong relationships, a sense of belonging, and moments of awe and wonder. Learn more about their work at gambrellfoundation.orgRelated Science of Happiness episodes:Cities of Awe Series: https://tinyurl.com/2vyhxvnyHow Cities Can Make Space for Awe: https://tinyurl.com/yr7m2zb5What Humans Can Learn From Trees: https://tinyurl.com/48te84psRelated Happiness Break episodes:How To Ground Yourself in Nature: https://tinyurl.com/25ftdxpmPause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/mrutudehFollow us on Instagram: @ScienceOfHappinessPodWe'd love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.Find us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aapHelp us share Happiness Break! Leave a 5-star review and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aapTranscription: https://tinyurl.com/4j5sveye

In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Peter Beinart speaks with Bard College Professor Ziad Abu-Rish about the roots of Israel's aggression against Lebanon. They discuss why Israel has been attacking Lebanon since 1948, why Hezbollah continues to fight Israel, and why the Lebanese military can't disarm Hezbollah. They draw upon this article that Ziad recently published in The Public Source, “Sovereignty Without Defense: The Army, the State, and Hezbollah's Weapons." Peter Beinart is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is also a Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, an Editor-at-Large at Jewish Currents, and an MSNOW Political Commentator. His newest book (published 2025) is Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. He publishes regularly on https://peterbeinart.substack.com/. Ziad Abu-Rish is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies and Director, MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. He is a scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. His research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. His teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in human rights; comparative state formation; various themes in Middle East studies; and research methodologies. Abu-Rish is the author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (Stanford University Press, 2026). He co-created (with artist Tania El Khoury) The Search for Power, a touring lecture performance and sound installation exploring the history of electricity in Beirut. Abu-Rish is also coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012) and Critical Voices: A Collection of Interviews from and on the Middle East (2015). Abu-Rish has also authored several articles appearing in Middle East Report and Review of Middle East Studies and chapters in edited volumes on the political economy of the Middle East, the Arab uprisings, and teaching Middle East history. Abu-Rish also serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. Original music by Jalal Yaquoub.

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works. Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Amy Amy Adamczykis Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Trained as a sociologist of religion, her research focuses on how different contexts (such as nations, counties, friendship groups), and personal religious beliefs shape people's deviant, moral, and health-related attitudes and behaviors. We'll be talking today primarily about the findings from her book Handing Down the Faith.

A simple experiment turning a parking space into a parklet reveals how small changes to public spaces can spark connection, belonging, and awe. Summary: What if even the smallest changes to our cities could transform how we feel and connect? In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we visit the site of San Francisco's first parklet, and explore how reclaiming everyday spaces can invite people to pause, gather, and experience a sense of belonging.Scroll down for a transcription of this episode.Today's Guests:BLAINE MERKER is an urban designer and public space advocate. He leads Gehl's Enterprise & Corporations team.Learn more about Blaine here: https://www.gehlpeople.com/people/blaine-merker/SETHA LOW is an anthropologist and Professor at City University of New York. She's also the author of the book Why Public Space Matters, as well as many other books examining the social life of cities.Learn more about Setha here: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/setha-lowThis episode is supported by The Gambrell Foundation, who believe a great life grows from strong relationships, a sense of belonging, and moments of awe and wonder. Learn more about their work at gambrellfoundation.orgRelated Science of Happiness episodes:What Humans Can Learn From Trees: https://tinyurl.com/48te84psHow to Do Good for the Environment (And Yourself): https://tinyurl.com/5b26zwkxAre You Remembering the Good Times: https://tinyurl.com/483bkk2hRelated Happiness Break episodes:How To Ground Yourself in Nature: https://tinyurl.com/25ftdxpmPause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3Experience Nature Wherever You Are, with Dacher: https://tinyurl.com/mrutudehFollow us on Instagram: @ScienceOfHappinessPodWe'd love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.Find us on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aapHelp us share Happiness Break! Leave a 5-star review and share this link: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aapTranscription: https://tinyurl.com/yr7m2zb5

Earthworms are supposed to be a sign of healthy soil. But they're actually an invasive species that can even damage forests. So have we been sold a lie about worms and soil? Not exactly. The relationship between the two depends on the context. And the way we garden — or farm — can make all the difference. IDEAS producer Annie Bender unearths the complicated truth about the not-so lowly earthworm.Guests in this episode:Joshua Steckley is a political ecologist, postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University and the author of The Nightcrawlers: A Story of Worms, Cows, and Cash in the Underground Bait Industry.Peter Groffman is a professor at the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center and Brooklyn College, with research interests in ecosystem, soil, landscape and microbial ecology, with a focus on carbon and nitrogen dynamics.Mike McTavish is a conservation scientist at a rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge, Ontario.Janet Browne is a historian of science and Darwin biographer, author of a two-volume set called Darwin: A Biography.

Unlike some reporters, Fortune's Nick Lichtenberg isn't afraid of AI—in fact, he's whole-heartedly embracing it. WSJ's Isabella Simonetti shares how Lichtenberg is a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed. Plus, Minkyu Shin, an assistant professor of marketing at the City University of Hong Kong, explains why using AI to write a customer complaint might yield better results. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices