Writer Alice Walker has been thinking about how anger co-exists with peace. She spoke with Shannon Henry Kleiber about her new book of poems, “Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart,” and how she works on healing herself when she’s been hurt by others.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
The religion scholar Elaine Pagels introduced the world to the ancient Gnostic Gospels. 25 years later, she's finally ready to talk about how her own grief — after the deaths of her young son and husband — shaped her religious imagination.More
Amy Stewart is a serious gardener with a side gig – writing about all the plants that could kill you.More
Kathryn Harkup is a chemist with an expertise in poison. She’s made a close study of a famous poisoner that employed everything from arsenic to cyanide to knock off close to 300 (fictional) victims: Agatha Christie, the mystery writer.More
Baltimore-based podcasters Aaron Henkin and Wendel Patrick are interviewing people and telling their stories, block by block.
More
Anne Strainchamps joins a group of women, Laurie, Jane, Carol and Liz, to watch the premiere of Season 7 of "Call the Midwife" and talk about birth. More
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
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
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
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
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
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
Cleve Jones was a young activist and Harvey Milk’s protege, the man who would later create the AIDS Memorial Quilt. What he remembers about that time is how the gay community channeled anger and grief into a night he’ll never forget.More
Could a computer write the next West Side Story or Hamilton? That’s what composers Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor tried to figure out—the result is a musical called “Beyond the Fence."More
Jason Rohrer is one of the top game designers in the world. So when the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act came out, he found a loophole. Turns out, its' not all internet gambling games that are against the law. It's only the ones that are subject to chance. He claims that his new online gambling game is all skill. More
Want to be successful at gambling? How about sports? Investments? Michael Mauboussi is the Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse and author of a book where he outlines “The Success Equation."More
Psychologists John and Julie Gottman are famous for being able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will break up, stay together unhappily, or stay together happily.More
A lot of people feel guilty about something - diet, money, relationships or something else. Our host Anne Strainchamps and writer Devorah Baum definitely do. So we asked them to sit down to talk about how we wound up about in a giant cultural guilt trip.More