Story in the Public Square

The novelist has a way of exploring issues—putting flesh on bones—to tell stories about people that can educate, inform, sometimes inspire, and often anger. Vanessa Lillie uses that art form to shine a light on challenges facing native communities and native women, in particular. Lillie is the author of the 2023 USA Today bestselling suspense novel, “Blood Sisters,” which launches a new series with Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two Spirit at the heart of the stories. “Blood Sisters” was a Target Book Club pick and GMA Book Club Buzz Pick as well as named one of the best mystery novels in 2023 by the Washington Post and Amazon. Her previous bestselling thrillers are “Little Voices” and “For the Best.” She also co-authored the number one bestselling and ITW award-nominated Audible Original, “Young Rich Widows,” and its sequel, “Desperate Deadly Widows." Lillie was also a columnist for the Providence Journal and hosts an Instagram Live show with crime fiction authors. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma living on Narragansett land in Rhode Island. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The poet’s ability to capture meaning with words has long been one of humanity’s great gifts. Brian Turner has that muse and uses poetry to explore enduring questions of love and loss. Turner is the author of five collections of poetry “Here, Bullet;” “Phantom Noice;” “The Wild Delight of Wild Things;” “The Dead Peasant’s Handbook” and “The Goodbye World Poem.” He has also authored a memoir, “My Life as a Foreign Country,” and is the editor of “The Kiss” and co-editor of “The Strangest of Theatres” anthologies. Also a musician and songwriter, Turner has written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including “11 11 (Me Smiling)” and “The Retro Legion's American Undertow.” His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals. He was also featured in the documentary film “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,” which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thomas Jefferson famously said he’d prefer newspapers without government over government without newspapers. In large parts of the United States today, government exists without independent news sources—undermining accountability and diminishing civic participation. Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy tell us that despite these troubling trends, there’s much to celebrate in the work of community news outlets around the country. Clegg spent over three decades at The Boston Globe and retired in 2018 after four years of running the opinion pages. In between stints at the Globe, she was deputy director of communications at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is a member of the steering committee for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship at the International Women’s Media Foundation and the co-founder and co-chair of Brookline.News, a nonprofit startup news organization. Kennedy is a Northeastern University professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator. He was a panelist on the GBH News television program “Beat the Press” and a weekly columnist for the network. He was also a columnist for The Guardian and produces Media Nation, an online publication that serves as a media watchdog. Kennedy is a recipient of the Yankee Quill Award from the New England Academy of Journalists and the James W. Carey Journalism Award from the Media Ecology Association. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We take for granted that the “immigrant experience” is part of the American story. But in an epic new history Daniel Schulman tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who built some of America’s biggest financial institutions and transformed America. A best-selling author, Schulman is known for his first book, “Sons of Wichita,” a biography of the Koch brothers, which was a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. His second book, “The Money Kings,” was recently released and details several German-Jewish immigrants who influenced the rise of modern finance in the United States, including Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers and J. & W. Seligman & Co. Beyond his books, Schulman is a journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the Boston Globe Magazine, Politico, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post and Mother Jones, where he is the magazine's deputy Washington, D.C. bureau chief. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Working together across party lines is anathema to much of political Washington, but Margaret Spellings says doing so is the only way to create solutions that last. A nationally recognized leader in public policy, Spellings serves as President and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Previously, Spellings was President and CEO of Texas 2036, president of University of North Carolina System and president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas after she served as U.S. Secretary of Education. As secretary, she led the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan initiative to provide greater accountability for the education of 50 million U.S. public school students. She also launched the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a plan to address challenges of access, affordability, quality and accountability in our nation’s colleges and universities. Before serving as secretary, Spellings was a White House domestic policy advisor, overseeing the agenda on education, transportation, health, justice, housing and labor. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hollywood’s annual night-of-nights is upon us with the Academy Awards around the corner. Pete Hammond helps us take stock of the film industry and the films singled out for their powerful storytelling this year. Hammond, widely considered the pre-eminent awards analyst for film and television, is Deadline’s Awards Columnist covering the Oscar and Emmy seasons. He is also Deadline's Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide where he was a contributing editor. In addition to writing, Hammond also hosts the KCET Cinema Series and the weekly KCET television series "Must See Movies." Previously, he held producing positions at “Entertainment Tonight,” “Extra,” “Access Hollywood,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “The Martin Short Show” and AMC Networks. He has received five Emmy nominations for writing and is only the second journalist to have received the Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award twice, in 1996 and 2013. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's easy to listen to the news and conclude that we have never been more gripped by the so-called “Culture Wars.” But Kliph Nesteroff argues just the opposite: today’s conflict isn’t a fluke, it’s part of a long history of conflict, controversy and recrimination. Canadian comic Kliph Nesteroff is, according to the New York Times, the “premier popular historian of comedy.” He has authored two books since starting out as a stand-up comic, including “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy” and “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.” His work has been praised by comedy legends from Gilbert Gottfried to Mel Brooks to Norm Macdonald. His forthcoming third book is titled “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To some, the civil rights era seems like ancient history, but to others, it’s within living memory. Françoise N. Hamlin helps put the history of the era into a broader context about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor in history and Africana studies at Brown University. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Hamlin was a fellow at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. She also spent several years as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hamlin is the author of “Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II,” winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. She also authored “These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War” and republished the previously self-published 1975 autobiography of Mississippi civil rights activist, Vera Pigee, “The Struggle of Struggles.” Her co-edited anthology, “From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle,” will be published in spring 2024. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Free speech is under assault in educational settings, school committees, university boards and political rallies across the United States. Suzanne Nossell warns the danger isn’t just about our access to books and ideas, but to the fundamental human rights and political freedoms we all hold dear. Nossell currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, and the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.” She is a leading voice on free expression issues globally, having overseen groundbreaking work in Hong Kong, China, Myanmar, Eurasia and the United States. Her prior career spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She served under Presidents Obama and Clinton as well as for Amnesty International USA, Bertelsmann, and the Wall Street Journal. Nossell is also a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, and dozens of other outlets, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy, and other journals. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s easy to look at American politics, now, and find individuals for whom loyalty to party or an individual leader is the only thing that matters. But Richard Aldous tells us of another time when service to the nation was the highest service in public life. Aldous is the Eugene Meyer Professor of British history and Culture at Bard College and specializes in twentieth-century history. He earned his Ph.D., from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow in the Royal Historical Society. He has authored and edited 11 books, including “Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian,” “Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship,” “Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War,” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli” and biographies of Malcolm Sargent and Tony Ryan. Aldous also taught for 15 years at University College Dublin, where he was chair of the History Department. He continues to write regularly for publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and The American Interest, where he is a contributing editor. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most who write about politics focus on the horse-race of elections or the specifics of policies. But Joanna Weiss says we should view American politics—especially current American politics—through a pop-culture lens. Weiss is the executive director of the AI Literacy Lab at Northeastern University, a project to connect journalists and technologists. She is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine and is a former columnist, television critic, and political reporter at the Boston Globe; and the founding editor of Experience magazine, published by Northeastern University. She started her career covering Louisiana politics for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, Pacific Standard, and Boston Magazine, and was anthologized in the book “Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” She has appeared on local, national and international television and radio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There was a time in the United States—not that long ago, actually—when local newspapers played an undisputed positive role in holding people in authority to account. Daniel Golden is a journalist practicing his craft in that great tradition. Golden is a Boston-based senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He has been instrumental in three Pulitzer Prizes, two as an editor and one as a reporter. He co-edited a ProPublica series on Latin American asylum-seekers caught between the U.S. government and the MS-13 gang, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Before joining ProPublica, he worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News. There he edited a series about tax inversions—companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes—that earned Bloomberg’s only Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Golden won a Pulitzer as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. He expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” An updated edition was published in October 2019 with new reporting on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal. He is co-author of “Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities,” with Renee Dudley. Golden spent 17 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including a stint on its Spotlight team, and served as senior editor for investigations at Conde Nast Portfolio. He has won three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Gerald Loeb Award, among others. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writing and creative expression have long been among the defining characteristics of humanity as a species. But Naomi Baron chronicles the rise of artificial intelligence and its myriad abilities to write, to compose, to create—and what it means for our humanity. Baron’s research interests include language and technology, reading, first language acquisition, the relationship between speech and writing and the history and structure of English. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she has published ten books. “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008. “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” appeared in 2015. “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio” was published in March 2021. She examines artificial intelligence and writing in her newest book, “Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing,” published in 2023. Baron taught at Brown University, Emory University, and Southwestern University and American University. She has appeared extensively in the media, including interviews on “Good Morning America,” ABC News’ “20/20,” CNN, NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” and “All Things Considered,” the BBC, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among others. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Persistent Organic Pollutants: you don’t need a Ph.D. in chemistry to recognize realize they are dangerous. But Dr. Rainer Lohmann has been studying POPs for some time and their danger to the environment and human beings. Lohmann’s research combines marine organic geochemistry and environmental chemistry to study recalcitrant organic compounds, including persistent organic pollutants on the molecular level. He has led Superfund Research Center at the University of Rhode Island since 2018, one among roughly 20 nationwide. The Center is a collaboration with scientists from Harvard University and the Silent Spring Institute. It focuses on the Sources, Transport, Exposure and Effects of PFASs—poly- and perfluorinated alkyl substances. Lohmann has engaged decision-makers by working with scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada to advance the use of novel sampling devices to better characterize fluxes of organic pollutants in water and air. Lohmann is currently one of several scientists from around the world coordinating the AQUA-GAPS program, a joint effort with the Czech Republic’s RECETOX initiative at Masaryk University, which conducts research and education around managing the environmental and health risks associated with the chemicals around us. The AQUA-GAPS program promotes the use of passive samplers for legacy and emerging organic contaminants in the waters of the world is now underway. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The year began with chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives and ended much the same. Along the way, we saw technology demonstrate its potential to reshape human productivity and creativity; we have seen wars and violence; and we have worried aloud about the health of American Democracy. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us take stock of all of that and name our 2023 “Story of the Year.” Farkas is one of the nation’s premier voices on American foreign policy and geopolitics, and one of the nation’s most-trusted experts on U.S.-Russia relations. Some of her former positions include: the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the U.S. Department of Defense’s top Russia expert under President Barack Obama and advisor to three U.S. Secretaries of Defense during her tenure at the Pentagon. She serves as a Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States and worked in Congress as well as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). She was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Marine Corps University and is the author of “Fractured States and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe, and more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the violence in the Middle East to the dysfunction in Congress, the world feels increasingly untethered. Tom Nichols spent his early career analyzing threats to American security and now is unapologetic in his warnings about the threats to American democracy. Nichols is an author and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His expertise encompasses a broad range of topics, including nuclear weapons, international security, Russia, and the overarching challenges to democracy globally and in the United States. Nichols has a background as a legislative aide in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He taught at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years and now holds the position of professor emeritus. Among his published works are “The Death of Expertise” and “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The elements of a scary story might be exotic, super-natural, or even mundane. Tananarive Due weaves all of those things together in an ethereal world of her creation to explore the violence of the Jim Crow South. Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is an executive producer for the documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” and has written for “The Twilight Zone” and “Horror Noire” projects. She is co-writing a Black horror graphic novel, “The Keeper,” alongside her husband, Steven Barnes. Due’s work in the Black speculative fiction genre has won various awards including an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. Her books include “Ghost Summer: Stories,” “My Soul to Keep,” and “The Good House.” She co-authored “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir” with her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Due. Her new historical fiction book, “The Reformatory,” is based on the life of her relative, Robert Stephens. Set in Jim Crow Florida, it follows twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr. who is sent to a reformatory, where he must learn how to navigate the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Globalization is often portrayed as the bogeyman in American politics. Thomas Barnett credits it with making the world better, more peaceful, and even more equitable. In the future, he argues, it will continue to drive even more profound shifts in the way the world operates—with real challenges for American leadership and security. ​​Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in United States national security affairs across his entire career. He also operates a consulting practice, Barnett Consulting LLC. A “New York Times" bestselling author and nationally known public speaker who addresses government officials as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert on globalization. Barnett is the author of three bestselling books, including, “America's New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse,” which was released this year. Barnett was a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI. There, he taught and served – in a senior advisory role – military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command. He co-authored the U.S. Navy’s historic white paper “From The Sea;” and pioneering and managing CNAC’s contractual relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everyone faces challenges in life, but when those challenges are born of trauma, the challenge to persevere becomes more daunting. Dr. Jonathan DePierro discusses the science of resilience and how we can all thrive in the wake of adversity. DePierro is the Associate Director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth which provides comprehensive programming to support the resilience and mental health of Mount Sinai faculty, staff, and trainees. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of trauma-related mental health conditions, and the development and delivery of flexible resilience-building interventions. DePierro also teaches Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His new book “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges” includes three experts in trauma and resilience to answer what helps people adapt to life’s most challenging situations. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The transition from childhood to adulthood ushers in a wide variety of difficult questions like who actually loves us, and why. Nyani Nkrumah explores those coming-of-age themes, as well as issues of race, identity, trauma, and who is responsible for the person we actually are. Nkrumah was born in Boston and grew up in Ghana, West Africa and later Zimbabwe. Nkrumah holds a doctorate from Cornell University and attributes her love of writing to her mother, a former English and literature teacher who entertained her kids by reciting poetry and Shakespeare soliloquies on the way to school. Her book, “Wade in the Water,” tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, an 11-year-old black girl trying to overcome familial abuse. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.