With all the #Chinabashing going on, it's perhaps important to remember why the #PRC, its people and culture rather than its national entity, matters to the rest of the world. It is easy to lose sight of now but that is why perhaps in June 2020 it's a good time to reprise a previously broadcast interview with Simon Winchester @simonwwriter. @claudiacragg speaks here with Winchester about Joseph Needham and 'The Needham Question'. The subject caused the most tremendous brouhaha in The New York Ti...
Jun 25, 2020•24 min
Walter Schaub speaks here with @claudiacragg for @KGNU @KGNUNews about ethics in government and the filing of a complaint with regard to the management of #COVID19 and a member of the administration. Schaub is a senior advisor to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington who previously served as director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE). He is a frequent cable news contributor and has also worked at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Vete...
Jun 11, 2020•27 min
Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg (all comments greatly welcomed) speaks here with , @iamaraindogtoo filmmaker and documentarian. He is the author of several books addressing American history, including: , and and more. His new film is called
May 28, 2020•29 min
@claudiacragg speaks with @davedaley3, author: "Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count" & "Unrigged: How Americans Battled Back To Save Democracy," ex-EIC @salon Following Ratf**ked, his “extraordinary timely and undeniably important” (New York Times Book Review) exposé of how a small cadre of Republican operatives rigged American elections, David Daley emerged as one of the nation’s leading authorities on gerrymandering. In Unrigged, he charts a vibrant political movement that is rising in ...
May 21, 2020•42 min
@claudiacragg speaks with The Washington Post's David Ignatius @ignatiuspost about his new novel, The Paladin. He is a prize winning novelist who has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for nearly four decades. The story is this: when a daring, high-tech CIA operation goes wrong and is disavowed, the protagonist Michael Dunne sets out for revenge. A CIA operations officer Dunne is tasked with infiltrating an Italian news organization that smells like a front for an enemy intelligence servi...
May 14, 2020•28 min
A growing number of businesses and individuals worldwide have stopped using banknotes in fear that physical currency, handled by tens of thousands of people over its lifetime, could be a vector for Public officials and health experts have said the risk of transferring the virus person-to-person through but they don't rule it out. While it is of course eminently sensible to avoid every possible source of Covid 19 contamination, the consequences of a cashless society inevitably hit hard the credit...
Apr 30, 2020•21 min
According to a new report from the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, African Americans are being “disproportionately affected by COVID-19.” The data showed that 33% of those hospitalized are black, a rate that outstripsrelative population size. KGNU's Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg speaks here with Daniel E. Dawes, a nationally recognized leader in healthcare law and policy, who has been an instrumental figure in shaping the Affordable Care Act, aka 'Obamacare' and who also founded and chaired ...
Apr 16, 2020•33 min
At least 10 percent of American workers have lost their jobs in the past three weeks amid the coronavirus pandemic and a record 6.6 million new claims for unemployment benefits were filed last week. Weekly new claims topped 6 million for the second straight time last week as tough measures to control the novel coronavirus outbreak abruptly ground the country to halt. The Labor Department said today that first-time claims for unemployment benefits in the week ending April 4 totaled 6.6 million, d...
Apr 09, 2020•51 min
Isabel Allende @isabelallende has been through a great deal in her life and that is why perhaps listening to her story now might be helpful to some? Believe it or not, the esteemed poet once called "the worst journalist he had ever met..." This was because she had the effrontery to try and write his memoirs. Nevertheless, today Allende is the of her own which together have sold fifty-one million copies. Her debut novel in 1982, , told the tale of four generations of a Chilean family and at ths t...
Apr 02, 2020•24 min
Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Jennifer Steinhauer @jestei @nytimes about her lively study, “ The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress.” In January 2019, the largest number of women ever elected to Congress was sworn in—87 in the house and 23 in the Senate - this was a dress rehearsal for the 2020 primary and general election. Democratic women won largely on painting the GOP as incompetent especially around health care. This history-making Class of ’19 included many remarka...
Mar 19, 2020•34 min
Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with @ValWalkerAuthor about her friendly, candid, and comforting guide for isolating times when we have no one to count on, As we potentially enter a time for mass isolation, the guide may just help some to cope a little more and also encourage those who ARE coping to help those who are not. Despite the inclusive promise of social media, loneliness is in any case, even in far more 'normal' times, a growing epidemic in the United States and throughout the w...
Mar 12, 2020•32 min
Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) speaks here with Dr. Richard J. Davidson (@healthyminds) about the book he co-wrote, ' In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can r...
Mar 05, 2020•17 min
Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with @Anne_S_Kim about those millions of young people Kim considers 'Abandoned'. Anne Kim is a writer based in northern Virginia and the author of . She was special projects editor at the in 2013 and senior writer from 2015 to 2018. Americans under the age of 25 grab headlines when they launch flashy startups or become activists for social change. However, as Washington Monthly Anne Kim shows, both in this discussion and her book, the success of such leade...
Feb 27, 2020•36 min
Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) speaks here with Frederic Martel (@martelf) for the new paperback publication of his latest book, In The Closet of The Vatican. Pope Francis declared that "behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life." These are the disturbing words that the Pope himself has used to unlock the “closet.” In the new paperback edition of this New York Times bestseller,(Bloomsbury Continuum; 9781472966186; paperback now out), author and renowned French ...
Feb 20, 2020•33 min
Soulful jazz singer Billie Holliday is remembered these days for her unique sound, troubled personal history, and a catalogue that includes such resonant songs as and Claudia Cragg, @claudiacragg, speaks here with about the surprising ways in which Holiday and her music were also strongly shaped by religion. is not a new biography of the jazz legend, nor does the book come up with many new findings about the life of the much-studied singer or the thoroughly documented jazz milieu she inhabited. ...
Feb 13, 2020•39 min
(At the end of this interview, Cleo Z. reads s poem, ''. To learn more or contact Cleo Z., please DM @claudiacragg) Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with #MichaelKorda about his new book, #. It is a legendary editor's unflinching love song about his radiant wife, #MargaretMogford, and her battle with cancer. Born in London, Michael Korda is the son of English actress Gertrude Musgrove, and the Hungarian artist and film production designer . He is the nephew of film magnate and brother , b...
Feb 06, 2020•29 min
What if the real world isn’t 'REAL' but just some kind of computer program? Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) speaks here with @Rizstanford As Virk () puts it, “The fundamental question raised by the is: Are we all actually characters living inside some kind of giant, massively multi-player online video game, a simulated reality that is so well rendered that we cannot distinguish it from ‘physical reality’?” These ideas may well have first been most discussed because of the films, but many people ha...
Jan 30, 2020•29 min
Claudia Cragg speaks with Dr. Jennifer Neitzel of the Their mission is to facilitate authentic engagement and relationships that empower communities to guide the work of systems change throughout the halls of learning nationwide. Barriers to educational equity include disproportionate poverty. This type of poverty remains one of the most significant moral dilemmas that US society faces today. Labor, housing, and education laws, particularly during Jim Crow, primarily set-up a racial caste system...
Jan 23, 2020•24 min
Today is the 127 anniversary of what many Hawaiians consider to be an "illegal occupation" of their lands. On Jan. 17, 1893, Queen Lili`uokalani of the independent kingdom of Hawai`i was overthrown as she was arrested at gunpoint by U.S. Marines. Native Hawaiians say they are now fighting to stop the construction Thirty Meter Telescope on sacred Mauna Kea. As Patrick Wolfe theorized, "settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. The violence of colonialism — and the fight for Indigenous sov...
Jan 18, 2020•31 min
As of production time, the 2020 Presidential Race has only 'Old White Men' contenders. We could debate why endlessly, but perhaps something deeper is at play? Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with , (@maxklau) who as a Harvard doctoral student was researching the topic of 'youth leadership'. Klau stumbled upon a provocative educational exercise, he says, that changed the course of his life. Klau is an author, leadership scholar, educated and Chief Program Officer @NewPoliticsAcad. To in...
Jan 16, 2020•27 min
Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) speaks here with Devin Fergus (@devin_fergus), the Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies, at the University of Missouri, about his new book, '"Land of the Fee: The Decline of the Middle Class and the Making of the New World Financial Order". "Consumer financial fees have helped to choke off dreams of the middle class and middle class aspirants alike," argues Fergus (History and Black Studies/Univ. of Missouri; Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making o...
Jan 08, 2020•34 min
For this episode, Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) speaks with Anne Nelson (@anelsona), about her new book. Shadow Network:Media, Money, and The Secret Hub of the Radical Right. An award-winning author and media analyst, Nelson chronicles the astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting it...
Dec 24, 2019•30 min
Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with , about his newest book, #WhoSaysYoureDead Medical & Ethical Dilemmas for the Curious & Concerned from @AlgonquinBooks Appel presents an invigorating way to think about vital health and ethical issues that many will confront as individuals, or we as a society must reckon with together. Drawing upon the author’s two decades teaching medical ethics, as well as his work as a practicing psychiatrist, this profound and addictive little book offer...
Dec 16, 2019•24 min
Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with , about his shattering account of the crack cocaine years, Please send any comments or questions or ideas for future shows to @ClaudiaCragg. This book from the award-winning American historian, tells the story of the young men who bet their lives on the rewards of selling 'rock' cocaine, the people who gave themselves over to the crack pipe, and the often-merciless authorities who incarcerated legions of African Americans caught in the crack cocaine...
Dec 12, 2019•26 min
Pete Singer, The Life You Can Save, and many are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the publication (originally published 3rd December 2009) and the global initiative which it launched. He is also the author of the iconic book on . This book is available FREE as a download (at ) to all listeners as he mentions in the piece. He says "this is to 'reach the most readers/listeners and help the most people who live in poverty." Singer believes that the end of global poverty is in our reach. gives co...
Nov 29, 2019•25 min
Claudia Cragg (@claudiacragg) takes up a discussion with (@LydiaPyne), historian, about whether or not an authentic painting needs to be painted by Andy Warhol? And should we be outraged that some of those famous scenes in Blue Planet were filmed in a lab? Who are the scientists putting ever-more improbable flavors in our ? Welcome to the world of “genuine fakes”--the curious objects that fall in between things that are real and things that are not. Unsurprisingly, the world is full of genuine f...
Nov 20, 2019•23 min
(@claudiacragg) speaks here for with Richard Cahan (@Picturetweeter) about the book he has put together with Mark Jacob and Michael Williams, :The Human Toll of War. Richard Cahan is the author of 12 books including an acclaimed history of the federal court in He served as the picture editor of the and is currently an independent scholar at the . The world was in ruin at the end of #WorldWarII: from the #Blitz in London to the atomic bomb blasts in #Hiroshima and #Nagasaki. A small group of Army...
Nov 06, 2019•24 min
Kindly consider taking part in a short survey on this podcast (). Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with psychologist (@drdoreendm) about her new book, ''. With current statistics suggesting that the average American over the age of 14 engages with screens upwards of 10 hours a day, the topic of our growing dependence upon technology applies to nearly everyone. While the effects differ at each point of development, real changes to the brain, re...
Oct 17, 2019•28 min
Claudia Cragg (@ClaudiaCragg) speaks here with Robert Kuttner (@rkuttnerwrites) whose latest book is. Some of those interviewed in this long-running series are in such high demand that time in discussion is sorely limited. Recently, one such has been Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of and professor at Brandeis University's Heller School. In 'The Stakes....', Kuttner argues that the 2020 presidential election will determine the very survival of American democracy. To restore popular fait...
Oct 10, 2019•13 min
Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with geriatrician and author, Dr. Louise Aronson () on her new book, , an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made ...
Oct 07, 2019•34 min
