JOHN NICHOLS, Nation magazine’s national affairs correspondent, reports from Texas on Beto O’Rourke’s insurgent campaign against Senator Ted Cruz. We place today’s political and societal crises in context - How are things broken? How did they get broken? How do we fix them? With a nod to new blood and new passion on the campaign trail.

MARSHALL GANZ dropped out of Harvard in ’64 to work on Freedom Summer, was a lead organizer for years with United Farm Workers, and led the grass-roots storytelling model for Obama ’08. He’s a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, having returned after 28 years to earn his BA and PhD. I participated recently in one of his public narrative trainings. For the mid-terms and beyond, we need to learn from him. Here’s our conversation, recorded in March 2012.

A friend emailed me JOAN WILLIAMS’ Harvard Business Review article, What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class. Read over 3.7 million times, it’s the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history, and I can see why. WILLIAMS is the author of WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. “If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, the consequences could turn dangerous.”

It’s 10 years since the financial crash, and books, articles and commentators are looking back. So let’s listen to my 2010 conversation with Michael Lewis, We talk about his #1 best-seller THE BIG SHORT, but more than that, I ask him to define terms - like securitization, derivatives, credit default swaps. It's one of my all time favorite interviews.

I read an interview by Dahr Jamail with today’s guest, cultural communication expert Milton Bennett, at Truthout.org. Titled Is There a Cult of Trump? It spells out the methods utilized – consciously or unconsciously - by Trump to turn his followers into a cult – impervious to outside or contrary influence and united in defense of their aims and their leader. It’s a story of tactics and behavior that transform the Trump phenomenon into something more dangerous than a simple political divide.

This weekend when folks in communities around the world take part in a Global Day of Climate Action, you'll hear my October 2017 conversation with PAUL HAWKEN (The Ecology of Commerce; Natural Capitalism; Blessed Unrest) about his research project and best-selling book: DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which ranks the 80 most impactful solutions - plus 20 others for which there isn't enough data yet to rank them.

California Natural Resources Agency predicts severe heat waves, wildfires, ocean rise will cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Trump administration decimates Obama emissions rules for cars and power plants. Rise Up for Climate global day of action Sat 9/8. MICHAEL BRUNE, Executive Director of Sierra Club, shares good news, bad news, and ways to get involved.

In light of the Cohen and Manafort verdicts and the overturning of Obama Clean Air policy of regulating power plant emissions, let’s listen to my 2005 conversation with JARED DIAMOND regarding his book COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED. In his earlier Pulitzer-prize winning bestseller GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. In COLLAPSE, he asks: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

This week we replay an interview recorded March 25 2017 in the early days of Trump with JONATHAN SMUCKER. Currently a grassroots organizer in his hometown of Lancaster PA, Jonathan was involved with Occupy Wall Street and has a lot to say about what worked and what we can learn from what didn't. I turn to him now because the grassroots will go a long way to determining turnout in November, and turnout will decide the mid-term election.

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind, once as high as #4 on the NYTimes best-seller list, currently #4 in LA, tells the story of the scientific research as well as his personal experience of guided sessions with psychedelics. Award-winning LA Weekly columnist, Seven McDonald, does the same in an article for Playboy on the therapeutic use of MDMA (ecstasy) to treat PTSD. I'm joined by McDonald and Cole Marta MD, the principal investigator at the Los Angeles site of FDA-sanctioned phase II and III trials with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.