ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks for KGNU (@KGNU) with Dev Aujla () who has come up with a new, personalized way he says, to find the perfect job, while at the same time staying grounded during the process. Aujla says that we are all so much more than a resume or job application, but how can you communicate that to your potential employer? You need to learn to ask the right questions, stop using job sites like LinkedIn el al. and actually start doing the work that counts.   Based on information gained from over 400,000 individuals who have used these exercises, this book reveals career expert Dev Aujla's tried-and-tested method for job seekers at every stage of their career. Filled with anecdotes and advice from professionals ranging from a wilderness guide to an architect, it includes quick-step exercises that help you avoid the common pitfalls of navigating a modern career.  Whether you've just decided to start the hunt or you're gearing up for a big interview, 50 Ways to Get a Job will keep you poised, on-track, and motivated right up to landing your dream career. Dev Aujla is the CEO of , a recruiting firm that has provided talent and strategy to some of the world’s most innovative companies including BMW, GOOD Magazine, Change.org, and Planned Parenthood. Dev is also a member of the team at , an early stage venture fund based in NYC. Dev began his career founding , a nonprofit design studio that builds products and programs that change the world. DreamNow has reached more than 500,000 people and raised millions of dollars for projects that do good. Dev speaks regularly and has blogged for outlets that range from INC Magazine to Fast Company. His writing and work have been featured in dozens of media outlets, including the New York Times, NPR, the Globe and Mail, CBC, MSNBC, and CBS News. Dev holds an English literature degree from the University of Western Ontario and currently lives and works in New York and Toronto.  In his spare time, Dev runs the , a small independent reading space in New York. He is the coauthor of . His most recent book is called  and was published with Penguin TarcherPerigee in 2018.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks with  (@ebmeacham) about her new book. On 10 April 1967, a year before his run for president, Senator Robert F. Kennedy knelt in a crumbling shack in Mississippi trying to coax a response from a listless child. The toddler sat picking at dried rice and beans spilled over the dirt floor as Kennedy, former US attorney general and brother to a president, touched the boy's distended stomach and stroked his face and hair. After several minutes with little response, the senator walked out the back door, wiping away tears. In  Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed. The book includes thirty-seven powerful photographs, a dozen published here for the first time. Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta as part of a Senate subcommittee investigation of poverty programs lasted only a few hours, but Kennedy, the people he encountered, Mississippi, and the nation felt the impact of that journey for much longer. His visit and its aftermath crystallized many of the domestic issues that later moved Kennedy toward his candidacy for the presidency. Upon his return to Washington, Kennedy immediately began seeking ways to help the children he met on his visit; however, his efforts were frustrated by institutional obstacles and blocked by powerful men who were indifferent and, at times, hostile to the plight of poor black children. Sadly, we know what happened to Kennedy, but this book also introduces us to three of the children he met on his visit, including the baby on the floor, and finishes their stories. Kennedy talked about what he had seen in Mississippi for the remaining fourteen months of his life. His vision for America was shaped by the plight of the hungry children he encountered there.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for @KGNU with Elizabeth Catte (@ElizabethCatte), public historian.  Her work, , is a short, compelling read, steeped in history, and serves as a wonderfully intelligent antidote to the untruths of our political moment. It could also be transformative. Appalachia is more than just a region in the eastern United States. For some Americans, it’s an important element in the story about why we have the president that we do. A case and point: , the 2016 bestselling memoir set in Appalachia and allegedly soon to become a movie directed by Ron Howard, was proclaimed by the New York Times as one of “6 Books to Help Understand Trump’s Win.” But for Elizabeth Catte, a public historian and activist from Appalachia, it’s a place that many people just get wrong. The popular image of Appalachia as a home to a backwards, white population that’s trapped in a culture of poverty is a falsehood that people believe to avoid taking responsibility for social problems, she says. “I think it’s a basic kind of psychological desire that there is a place where everything that’s toxic and not progressive can be compartmentalized.” Catte grew up in East Tennessee, and writes about an Appalachia that we outsiders don’t hear much about in the news. It’s a place rich in diversity, with communities whose members include LGBTQ and people of color, and where the working class is not just made up of white male coal miners. Catte knows the region has problems, but says they are only made worse by false views of Appalachia that have a long history rooted in racism. And when Hillbilly Elegy, a book that Catte argues only perpetuates these dangerous stereotypes, became a national bestseller, she decided to write her own book to correct the record. public historian and activist from Appalachia, it’s a place that many people just get wrong. The popular image of Appalachia as a home to a backwards, white population that’s trapped in a culture of poverty is a falsehood that people believe to avoid taking responsibility for social problems, she says. “I think it’s a basic kind of psychological desire that there is a place where everything that’s toxic and not progressive can be compartmentalized.”

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for KGNU Denver/Boulder with Sarah Smith, one of the founders of  The organization is designed to foster a "revolution" to rebuild our communities through carpentry, design, and education. Based in Seattle, Sawhorse is a non-profit startup engage in "guerilla" building projects with student-led design and propagating a new way of thinking about education, building, and work. Smith tells @KGNU how with a group of friends she went about founding the initiative, what resistance they encountered on the way and, 8 years on, their hopes for the future.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia for @KGNU) speaks here with  about her new book, “,” in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.” For more than a decade, Jacoby says, there have been growing symptoms of this affliction, from fundamentalist assaults on the teaching of evolution to the Bush administration’s willful disavowal of expert opinion on  and strategies for prosecuting the war in Iraq. Conservatives have turned the term “intellectual,” like the term “ liberal,” into a dirty word in politics (even though neo-conservative intellectuals played a formative role in making the case for war against Iraq); policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making everyone an authority on everything.  Susan Jacoby is the author of eleven previous books, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion. Her articles have appeared frequently in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in forums…

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia for @KGNU) speaks here with historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (@rdunbaro)on her new book, 'Loaded', which Kirkus Reviews calls "a provocative cultural analysis arguing that the Second Amendment and white supremacy are inextricably bound." "Though some argue that the Second Amendment is necessary to protect the “right to bear arms” for hunters and other law-abiding citizens, Dunbar-Ortiz ( 2014) maintains that the “well-regulated militia” has been the crucial element all along. This has given rise to many malicious groups, including slave hunters, the Ku Klux Klan, and white nationalists intent on race war (what one source dubs “rahowa…short for racial holy war”) as well as “seasoned Indian killers of the Revolutionary Army and white settler-rangers/militias using extreme violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goal of total domination.” "It may sound extreme, but the author’s historical research provides strong support for her argument that gun love is as American as apple pie—and that those guns have often been in the hands of a powerful white majority to subjugate minority natives, slaves, or others who might stand in the way of the broadest definition of Manifest Destiny. “The United States is not unique among nations in forging origin myths,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “but only one of the few in which its citizens seem to believe it to be exceptional by grace of the Creator, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify genocide, appropriation of the continent, and then domination of the rest of the world.” The author’s analysis encompasses the growth of the arms industry, the embrace of the Western outlaw mythos, and the controversy over the Second Amendment itself, which was paid “little attention” until the second half of the 20th century, when civil rights, war protest, and rising crime rates increased the call for gun control. This compact manifesto won’t convince everyone, but it presents a formidable argument." To sum up, calls it "A radical revision of American history, specifically as it relates to its persistent gun culture."

The debate over why the Vietnam War went so wrong still rages as we reach its 50th anniversary. But as Max Boot argues in THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, one figure looms especially large as a symbol the war’s many missed opportunities: .   Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here for @KGNU with Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and renowned military historian,Max Boot () and the author of  and the New York Times bestseller . (WW. Norton; Jan 2018) is a biography of profound historical consequence, rescuing Lansdale from historical disgrace. Perhaps Vietnam could have been different, had we only listened… In this legendary profile of Edward Lansdale—the man claimed to be the fictional model for Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and a co-conspirator in the Kennedy assassination (Oliver Stone) -  best-selling author Max Boot manifests Lansdale’s “heart and mind” diplomacy in the Philippines and Vietnam. Never before-seen documents, love letters, and dozens of interviews recast this cautionary American story, tracking the daring rise and utter fall of the roguish “T.E. Lawrence of Asia” from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evacuation in 1975.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNU @KGNUClaudia) speaks here with Harvard Professor Martin Puchner (@martin_puchner) on his latest book, The Written World. This is the story of how literature has shaped world history in sixteen acts, from Alexander The Great and the Iliad to Do Quixote and Harry Potter. As Puchner has been extensively interviewed, and as Puchner is himself a 'modernist' by persuasion, this interview starts very late in the 4,000 year old catalogue that the book represents.  The author leads the reader on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the powerful role stories and literature have played in creating the world we have today. Beyond The Axial Age, Puchner tells of Cervantes, who invented the modern novel, battles pirates both real (when he is taken prisoner) and literary (when a fake sequel to Don Quixote is published). We learn of Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering work as a media entrepreneur, watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. He speaks with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott in the Caribbean, as well as Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, as well as the wordsmiths of the oral epic Sunjata in West Africa. Throughout The Written World, Puchner’s narrative also chronicles the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself—that have shaped religion, politics, commerce, people, and history.

Here, Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia, for @KGNU) speaks with Lisa M Stulberg (@LisaStulberg),associate professor, sociology of education, at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. about her latest book, . In recent years, there has been substantial progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights in the United States. We are now, though, in a time of incredible political uncertainty for queer people. LGBTQ Social Movements provides an accessible introduction to mainstream LGBTQ movements in the US, illustrating the many forms that LGBTQ activism has taken since the mid-twentieth century.  Covering a range of topics, including the uprising and gay liberation, AIDS politics, queer activism, marriage equality fights, youth action, and bisexual and transgender justice, Lisa M. Stulberg explores how marginalized people and communities have used a wide range of political and cultural tools to demand and create change. The five key themes that guide the book are and as complex strategies for equality, the limits and possibilities of legal change, the role of art and popular culture in social change, the interconnectedness of social movements, and the role of privilege in movement organizing.  This book is an important tool for understanding current LGBTQ politics and will be essential reading for students and scholars of sexuality, LGBTQ studies, and social movements, as well as anyone new to thinking about these issues.

Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia, for @KGNU) speaks with  (@bjrisman) to find out if today's young adults are gender rebels or returning to tradition? In , Risman reveals the diverse strategies youth use to negotiate the ongoing gender revolution. Using her theory of gender as a social structure, Risman analyzes life history interviews with a diverse set of Millennials to probe how they understand gender and how they might change it. Some are true believers that men and women are essentially different and should be so. Others are innovators, defying stereotypes and rejecting sexist ideologies and organizational practices. Perhaps new to this generation are gender rebels who reject sex categories, often refusing to present their bodies within them and sometimes claiming genderqueer identities. And finally, many youths today are simply confused by all the changes swirling around them.  As a new generation contends with unsettled gender norms and expectations, Risman reminds us that gender is much more than an identity; it also shapes expectations in everyday life, and structures the organization of workplaces, politics, and, ideology. To pursue change only in individual lives, Risman argues, risks the opportunity to eradicate both gender inequality and gender as a primary category that organizes social life.