Episodes

While we often catastrophize about the perils of AI, if we walk on the sunny side of the street, could it be that the tools available with the new technology may help us to save our broken politics and governance? Our guest, Beth Simone Noveck, not only thinks that these tools can be beneficial, if used with that intent, but she’s put a number of these practices in action and seen it work. She is a professor and director of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, and she ...

Energy transition is accelerating and solar power itself is having a moment after a turbulent adaption over recent decades. And while Big Oil still gets subsidies, the efficiencies that have occurred in bringing solar online are allowing this renewable, and others like wind, to prove their viability in the energy marketplace. Clearly, federal policy with its incentives to make these renewables part of the energy mix has been erratic and America really does not have a national energy policy. Much...

Steve Hirsch, a thirty- year veteran of the CIA who held senior positions spanning counterterrorism, intelligence analysis, public affairs and organizational transformation, now retired, is working to help people like you and me understand how the agency operates, particularly given the many changes that have taken place since 9-11. Our discussion is serious and protracted and involves critical issues about the quality of the product produced by the agency, current threats to its objectivity, th...

While we are in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suddenly changed the way that deaths are attributed to measles. At one point, Pennsylvania health officials had a death toll at 4 measles-associated deaths, while the CDC counted none. Those numbers have changed and gone up but America, and its top health official, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have a serious case of health denialism owing to his many years in the fringe community of a...

Since the pandemic made work at home a thing, it has become routine for many office workers in our country. Finally, studies are revealing that while many truly appreciate the flexibility, there are downsides when it comes to productivity, social isolation and team building. While attempts to get employees to return-to-office (RTO) are often met with howls of disapproval, the reasons given are to improve results, greater productivity, the desire to use empty office space and support more commerc...

Description: I recently moderated a discussion titled ‘Democracy on the Edge: Election 2026 Key Issues Forum’ sponsored by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Waterbury campus of the University of Connecticut. This podcast is a reprise of that event featuring: Brody Mullins, former Wall Street Journal reporter addressing issues of campaign finance Dave Daley, FairVote.org, and author of a number of books on gerrymandering and Ira Shapiro, author of three books on the U.S. Senate and ...

The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, under the direction of Steven Kull, has been out surveying people in 11 competitive states and 28 competitive U.S. House districts in advance of the midterm elections. Perhaps, surprisingly, on key issues like fixing Social Security’s impending fiscal crisis, which would require recipients to accept up to 20 percent less each month, the affordability of housing and health care and the onrush of AI, there is widespread agreement on tho...

Labor unions taught many activist groups how to organize to improve working conditions and how to push back against strong corporations. For the last fifty years or so, union strength has eroded and corporate America has had a stranglehold on the politics of this nation. We’ve seen the results–jobs shipped overseas, inferior quality coming back in return and further environmental degradation. If corporate interests, particularly in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision in 2010, bankroll ...

About one-fifth of the adult population in America experiences mental illness in any given year, yet less than half of them receive treatment. Often, our approach is to prevent disaster rather than foster positive outcomes for the patient. And media coverage exaggerates the danger involved in dealing with most people who experience serious mental illness, like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, among others. While we closed down many large facilities housing people with mental illness our commu...

I know what you’re thinking, you don’t want one more podcast on AI. However, it’s developing at a breakneck speed, with the full encouragement of the federal government, to move fast and break things. Is it the human race that actually is in peril? Astrophysicists, like Stephen Hawking, have warned us that AI and its onrushing development ‘could spell the end of the human race.’ Now let’s be clear, there are responsible players in the AI space who see the dystopian possibilities and are trying t...

It might seem on paper that the world’s democracies, as part of their first act, have done a great job of building mechanisms and approaches to make the whole system work–voting and elections, safeguards for them, and ways to expand the franchise. Yet, particularly in the United States, where money plays such a key role and lobbyists make a living representing special interests, have we done all we could to engage the public in an ongoing effort to plug them in to have a say between elections on...

In a recent decision, The United States Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties. While some see this as a win for Republicans, our guest, Brody Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author of “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took over Big Government,” thinks in contrast to the ascendant position of Super PACS since the Citizens’ United decision back in 2010, where the money and transparency are truly dark, this ...

Fixing our fragmented mental health care system is a key priority in dealing with the crisis we have today regarding Americans’ mental well-being. The services are not uniformly available, often late in getting to the people who need them and all of this has a profoundly negative impact on both the patients and the providers. Dealing with the physical side of the medical community is difficult enough. Imagine being in emotional distress and the crisis building up to a point where an emergency ex...

Underground movements and subcultures are not a recent phenomenon. Throughout modern history these bohemian movements, often marginalized in their time, have brought us our greatest creative minds by virtue of their unwillingness to accept the norms of the day. Great art, poetry music and thought have derived from these freethinkers. In recent American history, we can go from the beatnik era of the 1950’s to the hippies of the 1960’s and to the punks of the 1980’s to find the Kerouac’s, Dylan’s,...

You will find that out early in the discussion that awaits you just ahead. Our guest provides a thumbnail of modern Iranian history and in the process makes us realize that Western meddling in the mid-20th century, provides a throughline to where we are today. And where we are today in this American misadventure reminds us why Western short-term thinking is overmatched by the long game the Iranian leadership, admittedly a ‘thugocracy’, employs when it considers its actions. And while we see thei...

There has been an association between cats and women throughout history. It’s not always been a positive one as so many histories have been dominated by the male perspective. Even in our era, as cats have taken their place alongside dogs, as popular home companions, they were derisively referenced in the 2024 campaign, as their guardians were referred to as ‘childless cats ladies.’ It has been a long and difficult history for the cats that we now embrace in our society. This phenomenon is only a...

What comes to mind if I say San Francisco–the hippies and Grateful Dead of the 1960’s, the locus of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, the Internet revolution of the 1990’s, the urban decay of the pandemic era or the AI revolution that is clearly upon us? Well, I think the best answer is all of the above. The city is a complicated mix of culture, technology, business and a growing class divide. There may be no better chronicler of the city than Jonathan Weber who has been covering this beat for di...

We are far from the days when Phyllis Schlafly led the Eagle Forum pushing back on the feminist leaders of the Left in the 1970’s. However, she gave voice to issues like the pro-life movement, opposition to gay rights, and others that animated the first wave of pushback. Today, with many conservative Christian women speaking out loudly and proclaiming their concern about traditional values slipping away in America, the success of their movement in self-evident by looking at who has the levers of...

We know we are going to die, as difficult as that concept is to get our arms around, but we may imagine that our life’s work, our stuff, must be preserved because it will live on forever, particularly as we can now capture it in digital form. Some might say that we are living in an era of permanent memory: everything is stored, searchable, and retrievable, especially now as AI systems ingest vast archives of human speech, images and text. But our guest on this podcast, noted Professor of History...

The term ‘grey divorce’ referring to the increasing trend of couples over the age of 50 ending long-term marriages, often for reasons driven by personal growth, financial independence, and growing apart, after spending much time together during the pandemic, is one of several topics we discuss on today’s podcast. Divorce, by the numbers, is actually below the often-cited threshold of fifty percent dissolution of marriages in this country, but then again far fewer people, as a percentage of the p...

In a moment of crisis for American democracy and liberalism, antisemitism has become a point of ideological obsession. Now we’re questioning where free speech ends and hateful discrimination begins. Is it possible that law can check antisemitic impulses which have generally been below the surface, yet never extinguished, while avoiding the tendency to censor political speech? History should remind us of the trapdoor we’re opening unless we find the balance. In his brilliant book, ‘Exceptional Ha...

So many businesses are in flux struggling to keep pace with exponentially revolutionary technologies, like generative AI, and the people they employ are in the same spin cycle with them. How do they work through this cataclysmic period? According to Steve Reiner, author of “Business Changes Fast, People Change Slow: A Leadership Guide to Accelerating Organizational Change and Building a Competitive Advantage,” it all starts from the top. The leader of the company and upper- level executives have...

Laurence Kotlikoff, PhD. is considered one of the 25 leading economists in the world according to the respected magazine, ‘The Economist.’ And he’s been the clearest and most consistent voice as to the fiscal gap that America has accrued by way of its public debt, roughly $40 trillion, and its ‘off the books’ obligations to Americans by way of social insurance programs, particularly in an aging society with a below replacement birth rate. He will try to engage your thinking around what he deems ...

There may well be strong arguments for statutes of limitations, basically a deadline to file civil or criminal suits, in various areas of the law because evidence can be lost, memories fade, and witnesses may no longer be available. In the case of child sexual abuse, however, memories of what happened may be awakened many years, decades even, later when there is a triggering event or the adult self finally wants to come to terms with the trauma that has affected them throughout their lives. Yet,...