ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

@KGNU's Claudia Cragg () speaks here with Dan Pfeiffer, a cohost of #PodSaveAmerica, now also coming to #HBO in the fall in four hour-long specials. The show's co-creators/presenters are   & . One of Barack Obama’s longest serving advisors, Pfeiffer was White House director of communications under President Obama (2009-2013) and senior advisor to the president (2013-2015). The Decade of Obama (2007-2017) was, Pfeiffer believes, one of massive change that rewrote the rules of politics in ways we are only now beginning to understand (which is, he says, why we all got 2016 wrong). YES WE (STILL) CAN looks at how President Obama navigated the forces that allowed Trump to win the White House to become one of the most consequential presidents in American history, why Trump surprised everyone, and how Democrats can come out on top in the long run. Part political memoir, part blueprint for progressives in the Trump era, YES WE (STILL) CAN is an insider's take on the crazy politics of our time. Pfeiffer, one of Barack Obama's longest serving advisors, tells never-before-told stories from Obama's presidential campaigns to his time in the White House, providing readers with an in-depth, behind the-scenes look at life on the front lines of politics.

, Ed.D. is the first executive director of Harvard's Center for Artistry and Scholarship, which fosters and mobilizes creative, arts-immersed schools. Dr Nathan, speaking here for @KGNU with Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) tackles on #ItsTheEconomy what she believes are the five myths that we tell many of our students in K-12 schools. The book’s title refers to one of these myths, that if you, the students, can just apply more grit, you will succeed in high school and go to college. Of course the trouble with this is that many of our students find themselves at-risk for succeeding no matter how much grit they apply to the situation. No one is underestimating the power of grit, but the structural blockade that many students face, such as the very way that standardized testing does not make sense to them, the grinding poverty of urban environments, the nuance of languages they are not brought up with, the lack of support for academic achievement and the lack of safety in their schools and neighborhoods, stand as unyielding roadblocks to their success.  She is the founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy, Boston’s first public high school for the visual and performing arts, and the co-director of Fenway High School, one of the first pilot schools in the Boston Public Schools. She began her teaching career in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and then came to Boston to work as a bilingual middle school teacher.

KGNU's (@KGNU) Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Cory Albertson () is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research spans media cultures, gender and sexuality studies and social justice movements. His new book, A Perfect Union? Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage (Routledge, 2018), examines network television’s representations of LGBQ relationships and their impact in shifting public attitudes in favor of same-sex marriage. On June 26, 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy declared same-sex marriage "is so ordered" across the United States. The day will no doubt be remembered as a landmark shift in how U.S. society views and validates marriage and romantic relationships. But the shift would not have happened without an arguably more important, but already forgotten, shift four years earlier that saw unprecedented movement in public attitudes alongside record amounts of television representation of LGBQ relationships. Situated at this intersection of legislative, attitudinal and representational change, A Perfect Union? presents analyses of popular programmes such as Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Wife, Glee, Desperate Housewivesand House in order to tackle crucial ethical questions regarding the impact of heterosexual knowledges on the rendering of same-sex relationships as relatable and "respectable" – portraits of heteronormativity that reproduce the masculine/feminine binary, monogamous coupledom and the raising of children. Focusing on the connection between heteronormativity and government legitimacy, Cory Albertson deftly examines television’s privileging of certain forms of relationships over others, shedding light on the reproduction of everyday power relations within LGBQ relationships that hinge on issues of race, sexuality, class and gender. An engaging study of media constructions of same-sex relationships and the shaping of public expectations and attitudes, A Perfect Union? is a must-read for scholars of sociology, media and cultural studies and popular culture with interests in gender, sexuality and the family. Other works include Contexts [2014 and 2016], Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research [forthcoming, 2018], and Youth and Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics [forthcoming, 2018]). He engages with such subjects beyond academia to mainstream outlets as well. His work as a public scholar, essayist, and journalist has appeared in publications such as The Huffington Post, Interview, Out, Pasteand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Albertson is the recipient of the 2014 Jacqueline Boles Excellence in Teaching Fellowship as well as the 2014 Georgia State University Certificate for Excellence in College Teaching.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for KGNU (@KGNU) to the acclaimed poet and journalist  () In her latest work, '', Mikhail - who is herself an Iraqi exile, tells the harrowing stories of (mostly) Yazidi women from across Iraq who have managed to escape the clutches of ISIS. Since 2014, ISIS has been persecuting the Yazidi people, killing or enslaving those who won't convert to Islam. These women have lost their families and loved ones, along with everything they've ever known. Dunya Mikhail weaves together the women's tales of endurance and near-impossible escape with the story of her own exile and her dreams for the future of Iraq. In the midst of ISIS's reign of terror and hatred, an unlikely hero has emerged: the Beekeeper. Once a trader selling his mountain honey across the region, when ISIS came to Sinjar he turned his knowledge of the local terrain to another, more dangerous use. Along with a secret network of transporters, helpers, and former bootleggers, Abdullah Shrem smuggles brutalized Yazidi women to safety through the war-torn landscapes of Iraq, Syria, and Western Turkey. Mikhail was born in Baghdad and earned a BA at the University of Baghdad. She worked as a translator and journalist for the Baghdad Observer before being placed on Saddam Hussein’s enemies list. She immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and earned an MA at Wayne State University. Mikhail, a Christian, is the author of several collections of poetry published in Arabic. Her first book published in English, The War Works Hard(2005), translated by Elizabeth Winslow, won the PEN Translation Award, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of the 25 Best Books of 2005 by the New York Public Library. Elena Chiti translated The War Works Hard into Italian in 2011. Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea(2009), which Mikhail co-translated with Elizabeth Winslow, won the Arab American Book Award. Mikhail's collection of poetry The Iraqi Nights (2014) was translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and published by New Directions.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for @KGNU with ,(@A_Lusardi) the founder and academic director of (www.gflec.org) Research from the Programme for International Student Assessment () shows that a disappointingly high proportion of teenagers struggle to understand money matters, and they are not alone. Many older people too are equally financially ignorant, we are told. Lusardi argues that people often say, wrongly, that financial knowledge can be acquired with experience. But if the evidence from a new survey index is any indication, that way of learning may, in fact, be very slow or not work well at all. Lusardi is the key mover behind to help us all to become better informed financially.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for #ItsTheEconomy with Rickey Gard Diamond () whose new book is 'Screwnomics'.  In , she shares personal stories, cartoons, and easy-to-understand economic definitions in her quest to explain the unspoken assumptions of 300 years of what she calls "EconoMansplaining"—the economic theory that women should always work for less, or better for free. It unpacks economic definitions, turns a men-only history on its head, and highlights female experiences and solutions. encouraging female readers to think about their own economic memoir and confront our system’s hyper-masculine identity. In the past fifty years, Gard Diamond argues, the US has witnessed a major shift in economic theory, and yet few women can identify or talk about its influence in their own lives. Accessible and inspiring, Screwnomics offers female readers hope for a better, more inclusive future—and the tools to make that hope a reality. Gard Diamond helped found  (@VTWomanNews) in 1985 and remain one of her contributing editors today. It is there that I wrote a series of six articles called , which in 2012 won a National Newspaper Award for in-depth investigative reporting.  In 2008, Gard Diamond presented at the sponsored by and . Just months later, U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen was demanding that taxpayers bail out the banks thought “too big to fail.” Those banks are now bigger than ever, as big as the gap between the super-rich and most of us.

Claudia Cragg () speaks here for with ) who founded the Higher Education Program at the Indiana Women’s Prison in 2012 and directed the program until 2017.   She is also Director Emeritus of started as part of her Public Policy class at the prison.  Kelsey’s interest in prisons and related topics of race and violence began as a teenager with three experiences: marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery, AL, working with an all-male inmate crew assigned to the Maryland Statehouse where she was working, and living with a tribe of active headhunters in the Philippines.  After graduating from Yale in 1971 as a member of the university’s first class of women, Kelsey became a correctional officer at the Connecticut State Prison for Women in Niantic.  She later went to graduate school at Harvard where she wrote her dissertation on the devastating effect that working in prisons has on officers.  Her book, Prison Officers and Their World (Harvard U. Press, 1988), remains one of the few in-depth studies of men and women who work in prison. In the years since, she has continued to research and write about prisons, including being an advocate for the return of prison nurseries in the 1990s, and investigating problems of white supremacy among prison employees in the 2000s.  Kelsey is now a full-time grandmother living in Oakland, CA

Good jobs, says Andrew Yang (), are disappearing. Speaking here with @KGNU 'It's The Economy' host, Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) he founder of Venture for America (@Venture4America) says that new technologies like robots and AI are great for business, but will quickly displace millions of American workers. In the next twelve years, a third of all American workers are at risk of permanently losing their jobs, a crisis far worse than the Great Depression. If we want a bright future, we have to do something we’ve never done before—and we have to do it now. In , released April 3rd, Andrew imagines a different future—one in which people yet prosper and seek fulfillment through the automation wave. At the center of this vision is Universal Basic Income, a form of social security that provides every American adult with a monthly $1,000 check, no strings attached; it’s an idea rapidly gaining popularity among forward-thinking politicians and economists. Andrew makes the case for UBI as an essential step toward a new, more durable kind of economy, one that puts humans first.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with author Simon Winchester (@simonwwriter) about his latest book, In this, he writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs Boson. Precision, Winchester says, is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives – a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps – all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world? Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision’s pioneers. this book takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America. Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.  In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror. After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months. Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman. Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Winchester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Before The Perfectionists, Winchester's most recent book was The Alice Behind Wonderland, released March 2011.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for KGNU Denver/Boulder (@KGNU)'It's The Economy' with James Bannerman (). Bannerman is a 'Creative Change Agent' who "combines Creativity with Psychology to help businesses innovate". His most recent books are "r" and "". Kindly note: In the US, the first of these two books is published as ' Bannerman says that the books aren't going to turn you into a genius, but he says you already knew that. What it will do, he maintains, is increase the number of genius moments in your life. You know, those amazing times when you cleverly solve a problem that others have been struggling with, or come up with a brilliant idea that makes the ordinary extraordinary. We could all do with a touch more inner genius: The ability to see what others miss. The ability to shape an ingeniously persuasive argument. The ability to create, adapt, adjust, rethink, tweak, and polish. This is the stuff upon which amazing careers and great businesses are built. And while we can’t all be the next Einstein, Shakespeare, or Steve Jobs, we can all develop and hone our genius thinking skills. His combined work just might enable you, the reader, to: Solve problems and dissolve obstacles Spot opportunities that others miss Win arguments with persuasive lines Turn the distinctly average into something truly special Those who think creatively are given a massive advantage, he argues, —in the workplace and at home—and everyone can do it, with a bit of help. As an innovation consultant Bannerman has worked with many leading organisations including Aston Martin, British Airways, Orange, Starbucks, Rolls-Royce and HSBC, as well as at the National Space Centre on a mission to Mars. He also lectures on business creativity and innovation on the MBA programmes at Warwick Business School, Grenoble Ecole de Management, and Oxford Brookes University, where he is currently doing a PhD on the impact of lateral thinking upon organizational advantage. Before working in business he was a platinum-selling songwriter, a freelance cartoonist (eg. Punch), a trained clinical psychotherapist, and he has an MA Hons in English Literature from Edinburgh University