In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show Summary: With an election year upon us, we are reminded that we have been through this before. The United States in the mid-1840s, for example, was a country in the middle of a major transformation, pushing its boundaries to extend from coast to coast to claim what many in that era asserted was America's Manifest Destiny.
     A new book by NPR's Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep tells us this story through the tale of a political power couple who personified the ambition of that era. His book, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity and Helped Cause the Civil War, finds some similarities with today's political situation in the United States.
     Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show Summary: When the fundamentals of science are being denied at the highest levels of power, and “alternative facts” has entered the lexicon, a new discussion on the importance of truth is required. Professor Richard Dawkins is joined in conversation by Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists.
     Richard Dawkins is the author of a number of best-selling books, including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He was the inaugural holder of the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society, the Kistler Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing About Science, the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award, and the International Cosmos Prize of Japan. His latest book is Outgrowing God.
     Robert Sapolsky is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and author of A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons.

Show Summary: Thought leader Tamim Ansary returns for a discussion of his sweeping new nonfiction work, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict and Connection.
     Tamim Ansary sprang into prominence with Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Now he turns that scrutiny to the histories of smaller groups of people into today's globally connected, fully-interwoven human populace, and discovers something prescient: even before disparate human cultures ever met, their innovations always influenced one another… and now that influence is only speeding up. The world's major cultural movements— Confuscianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Nomadism—have, he says, reached a new interrelationship inevitable in the march of human history. We are in a new time of revolutionary reinvention, as differing cultures overlap and transform rapidly due to global connectedness. What does this new proximity portend?
     Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show Summary: Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein examine the transformative power of education through the eyes of a dozen incarcerated men and women trying to earn college degrees, in their groundbreaking film College Behind Bars: Documenting The Bard Prison Initiative's Impact On Prisoners. Novick and Botstein, long-time associates of legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, invested years into filming inside the New York State prison system. College Behind Bars airs on PBS November 25 and 26, 2019.

Show Summary: Charles Postel's new book, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, compares and analyses today's wealth and power disparities in light of their origins in the Gilded Age of a century ago. Charles Postel, Professor of History at San Francisco State Univerity, is also the author of The Populist Vision.

Show Summary: For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations–lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman–until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable. Moving between Grace and Cyrus, Dunham brings us inside the chrysalis of gender transition, asking us to bear witness to an uncertain and exhilarating process that troubles our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we are constituted. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.

Show Summary: The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide is an eye-opening account of how a city creates its black, white, rich, and poor spaces, and suggests these problems are not intractable. Lawrence Lanahan has worked in radio and print journalism for over a decade, including five years producing for WYPR, Baltimore's NPR station. At WYPR, he won a duPont Award for "The Lines Between Us," a year-long multimedia series about inequality.

Show Summary: The Earthbound Parent: How (and Why) to Raise Your Little Angels Without Religion is a meditation on how to encourage children to discover the world and their place in it for themselves. Richard A. Conn, Jr. is an international lawyer and private investment fund manager. He has advised governments on legal restructuring, has delivered a keynote to the United Nations, and is involved in various not-for-profit activities, including one that has taught chess to 1.2 million U.S. public school students.

Show Summary: Mental health advocate Kelechi Ubozoh discusses her new book We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health--Stories and Research Challenging the Biomedical Model.

Show Summary: Riane Eisler is the acclaimed author of The Chalice and The Blade, an investigation into the cultural roots of social systems and gender roles. Her new book, Nurturing our Humanity, lays out a new understanding of human possibilities, showing how we can structure our environments to support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity.