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Learning America – Ep 96 with Luma Mufleh

It was a wrong turn that changed everything. When Luma Mufleh—a Muslim, gay, refugee woman from hyper-conservative Jordan—stumbled upon a pick-up game of soccer in Clarkston, Georgia, something compelled her to join. The players, 11- and 12-year-olds from Liberia, Afghanistan, and Sudan, soon welcomed her as coach of their ragtag but fiercely competitive group. Drawn into their lives, Mufleh learned that few of her players, all local public school students, could read a single word. She asks, “Where was the America that took me in? That protected me? How can I get these kids to that America?”

Learning America traces the story of how Mufleh grew a group of kids into a soccer team and then into a nationally acclaimed network of schools for refugee children. The journey is inspiring and hard-won: Fugees schools accept only those most in need; no student passes a grade without earning it; the failure of any student is the responsibility of all. Soccer as a part of every school day is a powerful catalyst to heal trauma, create belonging, and accelerate learning. Finally, this gifted storyteller delivers provocative, indelible portraits of student after student making leaps in learning that aren’t supposed to be possible for children born into trauma–stories that shine powerful light on the path to educational justice for all of America’s most left-behind.

The Kaiju Preservation Society – Ep 95 with John Scalzi

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When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on.

What Tom doesn’t tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, massive dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world. They’re the universe’s largest and most dangerous panda and they’re in trouble.

It’s not just the Kaiju Preservation Society who’s found their way to the alternate world. Others have, too. And their carelessness could cause millions back on our Earth to die.

John Scalzi is the New York Times best selling author of Old Man’s War, The Collapsing Empire and Redshirts, the latter of which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. His short stories have been adapted for the Netflix animated series Love Death + Robots. He’s known across the internet for his horrific burritos.

The Sleep Fix – Ep 94 with Diane Macedo

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Roughly thirty percent of the population is estimated to be living with insomnia, while many more suffer from other sleep disorders. ABC anchor/correspondent Diane Macedo—a former insomniac herself—understands the struggle. Now, in The Sleep Fix, Macedo presents perspective-shifting research and easy-to-implement solutions to help millions of people finally get the shut-eye they need.

Macedo’s mission is crucial to our health and well-being. Everything from our heart health to our mental acuity to our blood pressure is influenced by how much—or little—we sleep. As an early morning reporter and an overnight news anchor, Macedo learned this the hard way, struggling for years to get the sleep she so desperately needed, and watching her health deteriorate along the way. But Macedo found the more she embraced typical sleep tips, the worse she slept. So she decided to attack the problem from the ground up, interviewing sleep experts from all over the world to get to the bottom of what really keeps us from sleeping—and the various ways to fix it.

Diane Macedo is currently an anchor and correspondent for ABC News, appearing on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, Nightline, World News Now, and America This Morning, as well as breaking news reports. She’s also an anchor for ABC News Live, where she hosts ABC New Live Update, The Breakdown, and covers breaking news and special events.

The Power of Nothing to Lose – Ep 92 with William L. Silber

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Following books by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, noted economics professor William L. Silber explores the Hail Mary effect, from its origins in sports to its applications to history, nature, politics, and business.

A quarterback like Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers gambles with a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game when he has nothing to lose – the risky throw might turn defeat into victory, or end in a meaningless interception. Rodgers may not realize it, but he has much in common with figures such as George Washington, Rosa Parks, Woodrow Wilson, and Adolph Hitler, all of whom changed the modern world with their risk-loving decisions.

In The Power of Nothing to Lose, award-winning economist William Silber explores the phenomenon in politics, war, and business, where situations with a big upside and limited downside trigger gambling behavior like with a Hail Mary. Silber describes in colorful detail how the American Revolution turned on such a gamble. The famous scene of Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas night to attack the enemy may not look like a Hail Mary, but it was. Washington said days before his risky decision, “If this fails I think the game will be pretty well up.” Rosa Parks remained seated in the White section of an Alabama bus, defying local segregation laws, an act that sparked the modern civil rights movement in America.

Even That Wildest Hope – Ep 69 with Seyward Goodhand

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Even That Wildest Hope bursts with vibrant, otherworldly characters—wax girls and gods-among-men, artists on opposite sides of a war, aimless plutocrats and anarchist urchins—who are sometimes wondrous, often grotesque, and always driven by passions and yearnings common to us all. Each story is an untamed territory unto itself: where characters are both victims and predators, the settings are antique and futuristic, and where our intimacies—with friends, lovers, enemies, and even our food—reveal a deeply human desire for beauty and abjection.

Seyward Goodhand’s work has been shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award. Her first collection of stories, Even That Wildest Hope, is now out with Invisible Publishing.

Waking Up To The Dark, Part 2 – Ep 56 with Clark Strand

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Waking Up to the Dark is a book for those of us who awaken in the night and don’t know why we can’t get back to sleep, and a book for those of us who have grown uncomfortable in real darkness—which we so rarely experience these days, since our first impulse is always to turn on the light. Most of all, it is a book for those of us who wonder about our souls: When the lights are always on, when there is always noise around us, do our souls have the nourishment they need in which to grow?

Clark Strand is the author of WAKING UP TO THE DARK: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age and co-author, with his wife Perdita Finn, of THE WAY OF THE ROSE: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. Strand has written for Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon, and numerous other newspaper and online venues. He is the co-founder of Way of the Rose, an international eco-feminist rosary fellowship open to people of any spiritual background. He lives in the Catskill Mountains with his wife and family.

Robert Murray Sculpture – Ep 49 with Jonathan Lippincott

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Spanning six decades, Robert Murray: Sculpture includes photographs of nearly two hundred works, seen in galleries, museums, and private collections, at public outdoor exhibitions, in his studios, and in the workshops of his fabricators. Jonathan D. Lippincott’s introduction and interview with Murray cover the sculptor’s process of working with fabricators and foundries, issues of public art and the siting of sculpture, Murray’s early years, his close friendship with Barnett Newman and relationships with other artists, his lifelong interest in flying, and more, insightfully illuminating both the work and the life of his remarkable sculptor.

Jonathan D. Lippincott is the author of Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. Design manager at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he also works independently as art director and designer on illustrated books about architecture, landscape, and fine art. He has written about art for The Paris Review Daily, On-Verge, and Tether: A Journal of Art, Literature, and Culture, and curated shows including the eightieth-anniversary exhibition for American Abstract Artists. He lives in New York City.

How Hormones Control Just About Everything – Ep 48 with Randi Hutter Epstein

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A guided tour through the strange science of hormones and the age-old quest to control them. Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles. Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology. A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique (Part 2) – Ep 47 with Rowan Moore Gerety

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Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the efforts of ordinary people to provide for themselves where foreign aid, the formal economy, and the government have fallen short. I tell the story of contemporary Mozambique through the stories of people on the margins, from a street kid who flouts Mozambique’s child labor laws to make his living selling muffins, to a riverside community that has lost dozens of people to crocodile attacks. Amy Wilentz captured it well in a blurb saying Mozambique is “a country that has managed the troubling feat of failing its people while showing signs of stunning economic growth.”

Rowan Moore Gerety is a journalist in New York. His writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian, the Atlantic, and Foreign Policy, and is a longtime contributor to NPR. The author of Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique, he studied anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fulbright fellow in Mozambique.