Interviews By Topic

Three of the transgender men whose stories are told in "Unbound"

Sociologist Arlene Stein has been following four people who were identified as female at birth but later transitioned to male.  She tells their stories in her book, “Unbound.”   More

Cracked cover

Even this many years later, it’s hard to underestimate what a popular and controversial writer David Foster Wallace still is. There’s even an entire field of "David Foster Wallace Studies" — one of its leaders is Clare Hayes-Brady.More

Code

Machines that program themselves are all around us and they get smarter every day. But are you ready for the master algorithm that can tell a machine how to learn anything?More

Apps

App Intelligence? Santa Fe Institute president David Krakauer says we're on the verge of abdicating our free will to everyday apps.More

Right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes

A men's club where "racist" is an insult but "chauvinist" is a mantra.More

Niki poses with some of her staff. She makes accommodations for employees struggling with prior convictions or legal status.

A few years ago, Niki Okuk started a tire recycling company in Los Angeles. Run along the lines of a worker-owned cooperative, the employees are people who would ordinarily have a hard time finding any job. More

Black hole

Researchers revisit the controversial but potentially life-changing treatment first explored in the 1960s.More

#MeToo

For years, women in science have battled discrimination, old boys’ clubs and gendered stereotypes. Now they’re blowing the whistle on sexual harassment, and some eminent career scientists are being held to account.More

Physicist Don Gurnett has recorded what you might hear from inside a spacecraft, and it isn't just the sound of desolate silence.More

Adolph Hitler

If hate moved next door, would you recognize it? Edgar Feuchtwanger was a young Jewish boy living in Munich when Adolf Hitler moved into the building across the street. Edgar recalls the horror of watching Hitler's rise to power.More

Estee Lauder

What do Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder and Ted Williams have in common? They were driven by individual compulsions.More

Brother Ali

You can find powerful critiques of capitalism and inequality on political platforms — and also on music stages. Take Brother Ali: he’s a Midwestern, Muslim rapper and one of the most popular socially-conscious hip hop artists out there.More

Kshama Sawant, councilwoman in Seattle

Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant is the first socialist to win an election there in almost a century. Her platform included fighting for — and winning — a $15 minimum wage, and a tax on the wealthy.More

Demonstrators march for "Medicare for All" and other socialist-leaning policy goals.

University of Wisconsin sociologist Erik Olin Wright was one of the world's leading Marxist theorists. He died in early 2019. In 2018, he stopped by our studio to talk socialism with Steve Paulson.More

a single bee in a prairie

A poem by Emily Dickinson, read by Anne Strainchamps.More

honey as a cure

A poem by Karina Borowicz, read by Peter Sobol.More

honeybee

A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, read by Stephanie Elkins.More

Norwegian memorial

In 2011, nearly 70 teenagers were shot and killed in Norway. The gunman was a white supremacist named Anders Breivik. Journalist Asne Seierstad spent years trying to figure out how someone could do something so evil. More

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