Martin Wolf is Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator at The Financial Times, London. He has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010–11. The Wikipedia entry on Wolf notes that he is widely regarded as one of the most influential economics journalists in the world. Lawrence H. Summers has called him "the world's preeminent financial journalist. "Paul Krugman wrote of him that "Wolf doesn't even have a PhD. And that matters not at all; what he has is a keen sense of observation, a level head, and an open mind.” Wolf is the author of five books on broad-ranging economic issues. His latest book, published just this year, is entitled, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, which is the subject of today’s interview.

(Recorded 5/2/23.)

Amy Gajda is a professor of law at Tulane Law School, a former journalist, and a nationally recognized expert in the topic of privacy and the media. She was an award-winning legal commentator on Illinois public radio stations, has written for the NY Times and Slate, and has provided commentary for several prominent print and television news media. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals including the American Historical Review, California Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Washington Law Review, among many others. She is the recent author of Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, which is the subject of today’s interview.

(Recorded 5/11/22.)

Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and her TED Talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. She is the author of several books on the intersection between politics and science, including Why Trust Science? published in 2019 and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean published in 2021. Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway have collaborated on three books, including the recently published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, which is the subject of today’s interview. 

(Recorded 5/8/23.)

Sarah Fay is a professor at DePaul and Northwestern Universities, a critic, scholar, and creative writer. Her writing has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, as well as many literary publications such as Bookforum, BOMB, and The Paris Review, where she served as an advisory editor. She is the recipient of many awards and prestigious writing residencies and is the author of the recently published memoir, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses and the founder of Pathological: The Movement, a public awareness campaign devoted to making people aware of the lack of scientific evidence for psychiatric diagnoses and the danger of identifying with an unproven mental illness.

(Recorded 6/23/22.)

Leah Hazard is an American-Scottish midwife and author, whose recent book is entitled, Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. Leah graduated from Harvard University, working in print journalism and television before the births of her two daughters prompted her to change direction. She is now a practicing NHS midwife in Scotland and has worked in a wide variety of clinical areas, from labor wards to outpatient clinics, delivering hundreds of babies and caring for countless families along the way. Her memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK. Leah hosts the popular podcast What the Midwife Said and is a frequent commentator on women’s health across the media.

(Recorded 4/20/23.)

Stephen Grossberg is one of the principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research. At Boston University he has been Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems since 1989, founder of the Center for Adaptive Systems since 1981, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering. In 1987 he founded the International Neural Network Society and its journal, Neural Networks, which became the official journal of the three major neural modeling societies in the world, and was its Editor-in-Chief until 2010. Grossberg has won numerous awards for his work for “seminal contributions to understanding brain cognition and behavior and their emulation by technology.” His recently published book, Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, is about Adaptive Resonance Theory, his model of how our brains pay attention, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world.

(Recorded 4/18/23.)

Loren Williams is a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research passions include the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral bio­chemistry of the ribosome during the origin of life. He is currently director of the NASA-funded Center for the Origin of Life (COOL) at Georgia Tech and a Co-Lead of the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environment Con­sortium. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Since 2008, Williams' research group has been focusing on the ribosome across the tree of life, constructing models of ancestral ribo­somes by combining biophysical chemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.

(Recorded 4/19/22.)

Natalie Hodges is both a writer and a classical violinist. Born and raised in Denver and currently living in Boulder, Colorado, she has performed throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied English and music. Her recently published first book, a memoir entitled Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, explores the intersections of music and time, lived experience as flow states and their interruption, the price and rewards of devotion to art, and coming to peace with the relinquishing, or at least transformation, of a lifelong professional ambition. 

(Recorded 3/28/23.)

Ca​milla Townsend is a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, whose scholarship focuses on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and in the relations between natives and newcomers. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, particularly the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical annals they produced, we catch a glimpse of indigenous conceptualizations of history as they existed at first contact.

In 2010, Townsend was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to in recognition of her work in analyzing the Nahuatl historical annals from the 16th and 17th centuries, written by the Nahuas (or Aztecs) in their own language, using the Latin alphabet taught to them by Spanish friars for the purpose of reading the Bible to more easily convert them to Christianity. Her 2019 book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, won the 2020 Cundill History Prize.

(Recorded 7/26/22.)

Barry Krakow, MD, is a board certified internist, sleep medicine specialist, and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Georgia, having earlier established a sleep clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his 30+ years in the field, he has pioneered innovative techniques for the treatment of chronic nightmares, chronic and complex insomnia, upper airway resistance syndrome, obstructive and central sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome and periodic limb movement disorder. He is the author four books on sleep disorders, including the just published Life-Saving Sleep: New Horizons in Mental Health Treatment.

(Recorded 3/16/23.)