Can you imagine living in thirteen houses and five countries by the time you were nine years old? Even that seems excessive for members of the military. You might think it’s unusual, but you don’t question it too much as a child growing up like that because that’s all you’ve ever known. But, when the authorities show up at your house and you find out your family has been living a lie and your name isn’t even your own, you know something isn’t right. Tyler Wetherall writes about the experience of living life on the run and her drug-smuggling Dad’s attempts to stay one step ahead of the law in No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run. 

It’s common knowledge that the best teams are more than just the people that make up those teams but working together in a collaborative way can be very challenging and so often success is eludes those teams. Studies and stats show passionate, hard working people consistently outperform teams, but there are a small number of Dream Teams that buck those trends and manage to pull off amazing things together, well beyond what any single person can do. How can you be a better team player? Is there a secret sauce? Shane Snow, author of Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart, talks about it on this episode of Conversations.

From obsessively taking selfies to tweaking what you look like with filters and apps, it seems that technology has played a role in muddying the waters of what’s acceptable, beautiful and desirable. Not to mention, society’s never-ending struggle with defining what’s too fat, too thin, perfect and problematic is a topic that everyone has an opinion about. Even before anything was available for folks to read, Kristan Higgins’ novel Good Luck With That was causing quite a stir online as she challenged readers to think about their views of weight and body image. 

In 1968, Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” It seems with the endless ways of getting attention these days, particularly in the Internet age with the oversaturation of all things media … everyone is constantly sharing a joke or a funny video or a funny meme. It’s like we’re all obsessed with finding the humor life. Is being funny in one way or another at the heart of how many people are striving to achieve that 15 minutes of fame? Author and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings says everything is getting funnier in his book Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture.

In this country’s first two centuries, only three cases brought before the US Supreme Court required an interpretation on the Second Amendment. But over the three decades since, few debates have proven so persistent and so polarizing. On one end of the issue are those who believe that the Second Amendment champions unfettered access to and use of whatever firearms one chooses. On the other are those who believe our founding document ties gun ownership to participation in a militia, and thereby argue it lawful for government to limit firearms in any way it sees fit. But, Jonathan Hennessey argues that both sides are misunderstanding the intentions of the Founding Fathers in his documentary, You Don’t Understand the Second Amendment.

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As a child, Eric Borsuk wanted to be an FBI agent. But, he wound up becoming a criminal instead. Disillusioned with his freshman year of college, along with two of his childhood friends they were determined to escape from their mundane Middle-American existences.  The three hatched a plan to steal millions of dollars’ worth of art work and rare manuscripts from a university museum.  Sounds like something out of a Hollywood heist movie.  Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, as you'll read in Eric's book, American Animals: A True Crime Memoir.

The world was in ruin at the end of World War II: from the Blitz in London to the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A small group of Army soldiers witnessed it all. They also photographed Germany’s last push, the Battle of the Bulge, and they rode into Germany and saw unimagined destruction. They documented the Burma Road, which opened Mainland China to supplies, and saw war atrocities as far away as the Philippines. These soldier photographers are acclaimed for their war photographs, but their work has never been compiled in a book. Richard Cahan and his co-author (Mark Jacob) want to show what total war is really like in their book, Aftershock: The Human Toll of War Haunting World War II Images by America’s Soldier Photographers.

In the late 1970s, Paul Kitagaki, Jr., author of Behind Barbed Wire: Searching for Japanese Americans Incarcerated During World War II, learned that the great documentary photographer Dorothea Lange had photographed his grandparents, father and aunt in 1942 as they awaited a bus in Oakland, to begin their journey into a Japanese detention camp. Several years later, while looking through over 900 of Lange’s photographs at the National Archives he found the original images of his family, and of many others.  He grew up in California and knew very little about the incarceration of Japanese people until his teens. Then he started asking his parents about their experiences, but they wouldn't talk. So, he decided to track down the subjects of many of the famous photos.

It wasn’t all that long ago that what we now think of as the Gig Economy didn’t even exist. And, yet the granddaddy of disruption is not only a household brand, Uber has become synonymous with all forms of ridesharing. So, ordering an Uber or a Lyft or even a completely different service that isn’t even a rideshare service is an Uber just as brands like Kleenex are what people say instead of facial tissue. For better or worse, Uber is the face of the Gig Economy and remains the largest rideshare company in the United States recruiting and signing up tens of thousands of drivers every month but leaving them to largely fend for themselves. Harry Campbell, author of The Rideshare Guide: Everything You Need to Know about Driving for Uber, Lyft, and Other Ridesharing Companies continues to be one of the voices in the wilderness trying to help people along the path to becoming a successful rideshare driver.

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There’s no doubt that Climate Change is well, changing the climate and we can see that in our own backyard in the Coachella Valley with both winter and summer temperatures less predictable the past few years. Not to mention the effects of the drought that was declared in 2012 in California are still being felt with the huge increase in wildfires across the Golden State just this year in part due to the enormous number of dead trees and other vegetation. But, what can we do, right now, in the landscapes of our own backyards and communities? We discuss all of this with Ginny Stibojt, author of Climate-Wise Landscaping: Practical Actions for a Sustainable Future.