ChatChat - Claudia Cragg

Dan Barber, an award-winning chef, speaks here with 's Claudia Cragg as he moves beyond “” to offer a revolutionary new way of eating. After more than a decade spent investigating farming communities around the world in pursuit of singular flavor, Barber finally concluded that–for the sake of our food, our health and the future of the land—America’s cuisine required a radical transformation. He presents his findings in his new book, ''.

Drawing on the wisdom and experience of chefs, farmers and seed breeders around the world, Barber proposes a new definition for ethical and delicious eating.

Barber charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future for our national cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious. He is the Chef of, a restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within the nonprofit farm and education center, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. His opinions on food and agricultural policy have appeared in the New York Times, along with many other publications. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country's Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Judy Foreman on her book 'A Nation in Pain. The workis the product of extensive research.  As Foreman writes in the book, “Over the last five years, I have interviewed nearly 200 scientists and physicians, as well as countless patients, a few lawyers, and a handful of government officials.  I have amassed a roomful of books on pain and hundreds upon hundreds of scientific papers.”  And with over 100 pages of references, Foreman’s research shows up on nearly every page.

But the book is also a product of personal struggle and perseverance. Foreman herself suffered from chronic pain, a fact which places her among 100 million other Americans, by our best estimates.  The difference between Foreman and most others living with chronic pain: she has the standing, the access, and the talent to write a definitive monograph on the subject.

 The book is organized by topic, with chapters dedicated in nearly-equal measure to both the phenomenon of pain and to pain’s treatment.  Foreman also addresses ‘The Opioid Wars,’ an issue which casts a forlorn shadow over chronic pain discussions in this country.  Some chapters, ‘The Genetics of Pain’ among them, lack general appeal.  But this is just as well – the book is intended for a wide audience and its organization allows the reader to set his or her own agenda.

Sometimes know as 'The Punctuation Lady' (for her book   ), Lynne Truss speaks in this interview with 's Claudia Cragg.

She is a British writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked.

Also the author of three novels, the latest of which is , Truss is now working on a sequel. 

She is the writer of numerous radio comedy dramas and spent six years as critic for . This was followed by four (she says, rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper.

She won for her work for Women's Journal.

Lynne Truss also hosted a popular BBC Radio series about punctuation. She is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4 and lives in Brighton, England.

's Claudia Cragg speaks here with  to celebrate the new edition of his work on . Unique, bizarre, and often controversial, Warhol in life and in death bridged the gap between high art and the ordinary, creating works that explored almost every artistic genre. From screenprinting and 'supermarket' art to oil paintings and photography,  rocked the established art world, perhaps more so than any of his contemporaries. During the 1960s inside a studio in New York known as the birth of Pop Art took place at the hands of Andy Warhol, 'the Pied Piper' of New York's underground. His representations of  cans, dollar bills, Brillo boxes, Marilyn Monroe and car crashes, epitomized the American popular culture of his age and constituted one of the most significant revolutions in the art world.

Koestenbaum is also widely known as a cultural critic for his books on Jackie Kennedy and opera:  (FSG, 1995) and : Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon Books, 1993), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books of criticism include (FSG, 2013); (University of California Press, 2012); (Ballantine Books, 2000); and  (Routledge, 1989). He has also published several novels, including (Picador, 2011) and (Soft Skull Press, 2007).

Born in 1958, Wayne Koestenbaum attended Harvard University and received an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from Princeton University. After being named co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, he published his first collection of poetry, (Persea, 1990), which was chosen as one of The Village Voice Literary Supplement’s “Favorite Books of 1990.”

His other books of poetry include  (Turtle Point Press, 2012);  (Turtle Point Press, 2006);  (BOA Editions, 2004);  (Persea, 1999); and  (Persea, 1994).

Koestenbaum received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1994 and taught in Yale’s English department from 1988 to 1996. He has taught painting at the Yale School of Art since 2003 and lives in New York City where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center

Poverty and inequality, says Scott Myers-Lipton, are at record levels. As he shows in his book, ": an Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty", there are today well over forty-seven million Americans live in poverty, while middle class incomes are in decline.

The top 20 percent now controls 89 percent of all wealth. These conditions have renewed demands for a new , an American idea proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Martin Luther King Jr. The new Economic Bill of Rights has a coherent plan and proclaims that all Americans have the right to a job, a living wage, a decent home, adequate medical care, a good education, and adequate protection from economic fears of unemployment, sickness, and old age.

Integrating the latest economic and social data, this new book explores each of these rights. Each chapter includes an analysis of the social problems surrounding each right, a historical overview of the attempts to implement these rights, and assessments of current solutions offered by citizens, community groups, and politicians. These contemporary, real-life solutions to inequality can inspire students and citizens to become involved and open pathways toward a more just society.

In this interview for 's 'It's The Economy', former Congressman @BarneyFrank talks about his most recent book. "How did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay Jew with a thick accent become one of the most effective (and funniest) politicians of our time?"

Growing up in  the 14-year-old Barney Frank made two vital discoveries about himself: he was attracted to government, and to men. He resolved to make a career out of the first attraction and to keep the second a secret. Now, sixty years later, his sexual orientation is widely accepted, while his belief in government is embattled.  is one man's account of the country's transformation--and the tale of a truly momentous career. Many Americans recall Frank's lacerating wit, whether it was directed at the ("What did the president touch, and when did he touch it?") or the pro-life movement (some people believe "life begins at conception and ends at birth"). But the contours of his private and public lives are less well-known. For more than four decades, he was at the center of the struggle for personal freedom and economic fairness. From the battle over AIDS funding in the 1980s to the debates over "big government" during the Clinton years to the 2008 financial crisis, the congressman from Massachusetts played a key role. In 2010, he coauthored the most far-reaching and controversial Wall Street reform '' bill since the era of the Great Depression, and helped bring about the repeal of In this feisty and often moving memoir, Frank candidly discusses the satisfactions, fears, and grudges that come with elected office. He recalls the emotional toll of living in the closet and how his public crusade against homophobia conflicted with his private accommodation of it. He discusses his painful quarrels with allies; his friendships with public figures, from  to ; and how he found love with his husband, Jim Ready, becoming the first sitting member of Congress to enter a same-sex marriage. He also demonstrates how he used his rhetorical skills to expose his opponents' hypocrisies and delusions. Through it all, he expertly analyzes the gifts a successful politician must bring to the job, and how even Congress can be made to work. Frank is the story of an extraordinary political life, an original argument for how to rebuild trust in government, and a guide to how political change really happens--composed by a master of the art.

's Claudia Cragg speaks with Harvard Professor, , on his groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap in America. Putnam is the bestselling author of  why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility.It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in—a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life. Now, this central tenet of the American dream seems no longer true or at the least, much less true than it was. Robert Putnam—about whom The Economist said, “his scholarship is wide-ranging, his intelligence luminous, his tone modest, his prose unpretentious and frequently funny”—offers a personal but also authoritative look at this new American crisis. Putnam begins with his high school class of 1959 in Port Clinton, Ohio. By and large the vast majority of those students—“our kids”—went on to lives better than those of their parents. But their children and grandchildren have had harder lives amid diminishing prospects. Putnam tells the tale of lessening opportunity through poignant life stories of rich and poor kids from cities and suburbs across the country, drawing on a formidable body of research done especially for this book.  is a rare combination of individual testimony and rigorous evidence. Putnam provides a disturbing account of the American dream that should initiate a deep examination of the future of our country.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with veteran journalist Steven Brill who has put together a comprehensive and, according to The New York Times, “...suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American health care circa 2014 — a tour de force inspection of both sausage and factory.

”“Mr. Brill began his muckraking early in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, with a comprehensive indictment of American health care costs that occupied an entire issue of  He continued to comment in the pages of Time on the disastrous debut of the act’s health insurance marketplaces that fall and the widespread repair work that still continues.”

 “All this reporting reappears in the book, sometimes verbatim, reframed by several new sections. At the beginning comes a long back story detailing the years of politicking that created the new legislation. At the end, Mr. Brill offers a series of personal insights provoked in large part by his recent, unexpected detour from reporter to patient, and suggestions for how it might all be fixed.”

tells 's Claudia Cragg the story of '' and how he and his family needed a change. His 20-year marriage was falling apart, his 17-year-old son was about to leave home, and his 14-year-old daughter was lost in cyberspace. Desperate to get out of a rut and reconnect with his family, John dreamed of a trip around the world, a chance to leave behind, if only just for a while, routines and responsibilities. He didn’t have the money for resorts or luxury tours, but he did have an idea that would make traveling the globe more affordable and more meaningful than he’d ever imagined: The family would volunteer their time and energy to others in far-flung locales.   is the inspiring true story of the six months that changed the Marshall family forever. Once they’d made the pivotal decision to go, John and his wife, Traca, quit their jobs, pulled their kids out of school, and embarked on a journey that would take them far off the beaten path, and far out of their comfort zones. Here is the totally engaging, bluntly honest chronicle of the Marshalls’ life-altering adventure from Central America to East Asia. It was no fairy tale. The trip offered little rest, even less relaxation, and virtually no certainty of what was to come. But it did give the Marshalls something far more valuable: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to conquer personal fears, strengthen family bonds, and find their true selves by helping those in need. In the end, as John discovered, he and his family did not change the world. It was the world that changed them.

's Claudia Cragg speaks here wih Lee Trimble. Trimble had always known that his father, , was a WWII hero. Captain Trimble was a fighter bomber stationed in Britain and served with honor, flying 35 missions with the  of the US Eighth Air Force. However, when Captain Trimble was eighty-six years old, he let slip to his son that there were things that happened in the war he never told his children about—incidents that happened while he was stationed in Russia. Lee then began questioning his father for details and was shocked to uncover a secret mission his father had been ordered to keep to himself for over sixty years.

In , the son of Robert Trimble finally shares his father’s legacy. Robert Trimble was finishing his final mission in England and was given an option by his superiors:  go home with the possibility of being called back to the front line or take a position on the Eastern Front in Poland to help ferry damaged planes to be repaired. Captain Trimble, in consultation with his wife, waiting for him back home in Pennsylvania, reluctantly agreed to the latter. However, there was more to this mission than what Robert was told.

Near the end of World War II, thousands of Allied ex-POWs were abandoned to wander the war-torn Eastern Front. In defiance of , which required that each Allied country take in and help shepherd POWs from all Allied nations to safety, the Russians viewed their own POWs as cowards and traitors, and saw captured soldiers from other countries as potential spies. The US repeatedly offered to help recover their own POWs, but were continuously refused by the Soviets. With relations between the tenuous allies strained, a plan was conceived for an undercover rescue mission.

In total secrecy, the  (the precursor to the CIA) chose an obscure American Air Force detachment stationed at a Ukrainian airfield; it would provide the base and the cover for the operation. Captain Robert Trimble began his mission to recover downed American planes in the Polish countryside, but was soon leading his covert mission by cover of night and during downtime. Dodging his Soviet escorts known as bird dogs, undercover agents of  (the Soviet secret police), Captain Trimble followed leads given to him in secret to search for stranded American POWs and get them to safety. Outfitted with state department credentials and a vest lined with money, Captain Trimble traveled through war-torn Poland, only to discover atrocities the likes had never been seen before.