ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

, please? All feedback greatly appreciated. Thank you.  's talks with Philip Moeller @PhilMoeller about his new book, "Get What's Yours for Medicare", an essential companion to explain the nation’s other major benefit for older Americans. Learn how to maximize your health coverage and save money. In the season for annual re-enrolment for health insurance, many Americans would benefit from what he has to say.  #SocialSecurity provides the bulk of most retirees’ income and Medicare guarantees them affordable health insurance. But few people know what Medicare covers and what it doesn’t, what it costs, and when to sign up. Nor do they understand which parts of Medicare are provided by the government and how these work with private insurance plans—Medicare Advantage, drug insurance, and Medicare supplement insurance.  Do you understand Medicare’s parts A, B, C, D? Which Part D drug plan is right and how do you decide? Which is better, Medigap or Medicare Advantage? What do you do if Medicare denies payment for a procedure that your doctor says you need? How do you navigate the appeals process for denied claims? If you’re still working or have a retiree health plan, how do those benefits work with Medicare? Do you know about the annual enrollment period for Medicare, or about lifetime penalties for late enrollment, or any number of other key Medicare rules? Health costs are the biggest unknown expense for older Americans, who are turning sixty-five at the rate of 10,000 a day. Understanding and navigating Medicare is the best way to save health care dollars and use them wisely. In Get What’s Yours for Medicare, retirement expert Philip Moeller explains how to understand all these important choices and make the right decisions for your health and wealth now—and for the future.

, please? All feedback greatly appreciated. Thank you.  Following on from Claudia Cragg's previous interview with Douglas Abrams on (with HH The Dalai Lama, and the Very Reverend Desmond Tutu) this interview discusses that book's companion. A In The Book of Joy, two great spiritual masters, Nobel laureates, and dear friends met for a landmark discussion on how we can live with joy even in the face of adversity. His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu shared their personal stories of struggle and renewal as well as the joy practices they use themselves every day. Now this elegantly designed, 365-day journal prompts us with inspiring quotes to help transform the joy practices into an enduring way of life. The Book of Joy Journal is the perfect companion for The Book of Joy’s many passionate readers as well as the perfect gift for anyone looking to live a more joyful life.

, please? All feedback greatly appreciated. Thank you.  In a renewed conversation (listen, also, to  Oct. 13, 2016) 's speaks here with , the former finance minister of Greece. This new book's title, , borrows a term used pejoratively by Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, and provides an extraordinary account of low cunning at the heart of Greece’s 2015 . The more defiant the leftwing Syriza government became, the more it was met with intimidation from some or duplicitous reassurance from others. But there are lessons on dealing with power, and the so-called 'Deep Establishment', that apply not only to the EU but also to the Powers That Be in the US.  Varoufakis is the co-founder of the movement, , which is campaigning for the revival of democracy in Europe. He is also the author of After teaching for many years in the United States, Britain, and Australia, he is currently a professor of economics at the University of Athens.

Here 's speaks with Jessica Bruder  about her book, . In this, tells the stories of these nomadic laborers navigating a changing economic landscape for America’s retirees. A new labor force is growing across the country: “workampers,” older Americans who have turned to short-term transient work when Social Security and their retirement cushions have fallen short.  In its review, Kirkus stated that "What photographer Jacob Riis did for the tenement poor in How the Other Half Lives (1890) and what novelist Upton Sinclair did for stockyard workers in The Jungle (1906), journalist Bruder now does for a segment of today’s older Americans forced to eke out a living as migrant workers." Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and the dark corners of the economy. She has written for Harper’s, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Bruder teaches narrative writing at the Columbia School of Journalism.

() speaks with 's Claudia Cragg about "" an interdisciplinary study that draws on narrative theory and cultural studies methodologies to trace African Americans' changing attitudes and relationships to lynching over the twentieth century. Hill argues that. rather than being static and one dimensional,both broad American and African American attitudes towards lynching and the lynched victim evolved in response to changing social and political contexts.

's Claudia Cragg speaks with Peter Hessler about in the 24th July edition of "How Trump is Transforming Rural America". The main focus of this piece is Grand Junction, Colorado.  Peter Hessler joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2000. From 2000 until 2007, he was the magazine’s correspondent in China. His Letter from China articles included features on the basketball player Yao Ming, a Shenzhen factory worker, and a rural family in the grip of a medical crisis. His first book, “River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze,” won the Kiriyama Prize and was short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His second book, “Oracle Bones,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. He won an American Society of Magazine Editors award for his piece “China’s Instant Cities,” about the entrepreneurial frenzy behind China’s dramatic economic growth, published in National Geographic. He completed his trilogy of China books with “Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip.” In 2011, Hessler was named a MacArthur Fellow. After leaving China, Hessler moved to southwestern Colorado, where his stories included a feature about the local uranium industry and a profile of a small-town druggist. His collection of essays, “Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West,” was published by Harper in 2013.  In the fall of 2011, Hessler moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he has covered the ongoing revolution.

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling and James Beard Award-winning author of many books, including, Choice Cuts, The Basque History of the World, Salt, Cod, The Food of a Younger Land, and The Last Fish Tale.  With EDIBLE STORIES: A Novel in Sixteen Parts Kurlansky brought readers all new stories about the food we share, love and fight over. (This is a reprise of an interview originally aired on KGNU in 2010.  In these stories, Mark Kurlansky reveals the bond that can hold people together, tear them apart, or make them become a vegan: food.  Through muffins or hot dogs, an indigenous Alaskan fish eyeball soup or Jewish cholent, a bean curd Thanksgiving turkey or potentially toxic crème brulee, a rotating cast of characters learns how to trust, how to honor the past, how to realize you’re not in love with someone any more, how to forgive. Kurlansky brings his keen eye and unerring sense of humanity to these stories.  And throughout his love and knowledge of food shows just how important a role what we eat plays in our lives. Mark Kurlansky is the winner of a Bon Appétit American Food and Entertaining Award for “Food Writer of the Year,” the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award for Food Book of the Year, and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  Kurlansky lives in New York City.

Professor Chris Rapley, Ph.D., CBE and Director of the British Antarctic Survey, has been one of the most respected scientists in the UK. This was first broadcast on KGNU Denver/Boulder in 2006.  Rapley has spent years looking at what the deep ice of Antarctica tells us of past epochs. Through his work, he can explain what influence man has made to our climate and what the data shows for future trends. According to Professor Rapley, "As well as changing the chemistry of the atmosphere, oceans and land, we've paved over significant amounts of the planet, we have shifted species from one part of the planet to another; we've changed and destroyed habitats and are destroying biodiversity." "All of these things are intricately connected, so there is no way other than by being a sort of flat-earth ostrich that you could imagine that humans could do these things without there being consequences." "And this is worrying since we live on a finite planet which provides us with our food, our fresh air, our fresh water, our energy, and our shelter.”

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Professor Nancy Maclean about her latest book, 'Cemocracy in Chains'.  Nancy MacLean attempts to show how ideas were forged in a last-gasp attempt, she believes, to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. By recasting the era's legal and social-movement successes, developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the majority's ability to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

 Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into ‘makers’ and ‘takers'. And, she alleges, when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.  

Based on ten years of research, this work tells what many will consider to be a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok, and is a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

In this interview with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, world-renowned astrophysicist and author Mario Livio investigates perhaps the most human of all our characteristics—curiosity—as he explores our innate desire to know why. Experiments demonstrate that people are more distracted when they overhear a phone conversation—where they can know only one side of the dialogue—than when they overhear two people talking and know both sides. Why does half a conversation make us more curious than a whole conversation? In the ever-fascinating Why? Mario Livio spoke in depth to scientists in several fields to explore the nature of curiosity. He examined the lives of two of history’s most curious geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. He also talked to people with boundless curiosity: a superstar rock guitarist, Queen's Brian May, who is also an astrophysicist; an astronaut with degrees in computer science, biology, literature, and medicine. What drives these people to be curious about so many subjects?  Curiosity is at the heart of mystery and suspense novels. It is essential to other forms of art, from painting to sculpture to music. It is the principal driver of basic scientific research. Even so, there is still no definitive scientific consensus about why we humans are so curious, or about the mechanisms in our brain that are responsible for curiosity. Mario Livio—an astrophysicist who has written about mathematics, biology, and now psychology and neuroscience—explores this irresistible subject in a lucid, entertaining way that will captivate anyone who is curious about curiosity.