In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show Summary: Haben Girma, daughter of refugees and the first Deafblind woman to graduate from Harvard Law, has been honored for her activist work by President Obama, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Raised by two Eritrean refugee parents who survived a 30-year war, Haben learned to value courage and community early. In her lifetime so far, she has traveled the globe, mastered non-visual techniques for navigating both salsa and the electric saw, climbed an iceberg and faced a bull, and attained the prestigious degree that helps her advocate for increased access and equity for disabled persons. She does this all, joyfully, using innovations that allow her to move readily through abled spaces as a deaf and blind woman.
      Angie sits down with Haben to discuss her brilliant new book Haben: The Deafblind Women Who Conquered Harvard Law.

Show Summary: Angie sits down with researcher and journalist Mark Schapiro to explore his new book, Seeds of Resistance, an expose of the high-stakes battle underway for control of the world’s seeds.

Show Summary: Cyberwar—or cyber-anything, has always carried a whiff of science fiction about it. But it's not fiction, it's certainly not entertainment, and, terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke warns us— multiple cyberwars are underway already. The battlefronts range from simple identity theft to the disruption of nuclear programs and medical care. The Pentagon even has a word for this new front line: the fifth domain. That's where ongoing skirmishes for our security as individuals and as citizens are being fought.
      Richard A. Clarke has long experience in American security matters. He's served as a key advisor on intelligence and counterterrorism to three US presidents. In 1998 President Bill Clinton appointed him as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism for the U.S. National Security Council. His latest book, The Fifth Domain: Defending our Country, Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats, calls on that long experience to tackle one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in modern security.

Show Summary: Angie sits down for a fascinating hour with Ron Purser, Professor of Management at San Francisco State University, to discuss his new book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became The New Capitalist Spirituality.
     The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. Business savvy consultants pushing mindfulness training promise that it will improve work efficiency, reduce absenteeism, and enhance the “soft skills” that are crucial to career success. Some even assert that mindfulness training can act as a “disruptive technology,” reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. So far, however, no empirical studies have been published that support these claims.

Show Summary: Elderhood: old age. Many of us can expect to live more years as “elders” than in either childhood or adulthood, a span of up to 40 years, yet that era of our lives has long been treated as more a symptom and burden—elderhood outright ignored or demonized.
     In her extraordinary new book Elderhood, already praised by readers like Mary Pipher and Abraham Verghese, Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson offers an honest and full-hearted re-examination of the later decades, with all of their joys and frustrations. Drawn in part from her medical practice and expertise, in part from personal experience, history and popular culture, Elderhood, exalts the worth of life’s third stage, inviting readers into a new relationship with the so-called “twilight” years of life.

Show Summary: The “NRA’s Worst Nightmare” is an army of moms led by former stay-at-home mother of five Shannon Watts from Indiana, who ignited a grassroots advocacy movement against gun violence which now touches every single one of the 50 states.
     Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began as Watt’s project after the tragic news of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting broke. With her youngest in elementary, Watts felt compelled to act, but quickly realized that the epidemic of gun violence which wrought tragedy on so many families was primarily being legislated by large groups of men. Looking for the voice of other women protecting their families, she found nothing—so she started something profound.
     Can 80 million moms make a difference? From blocking legislative hallways with strollers and electing gun-sense candidates, to getting “open-carry” out of Starbucks and running for office themselves, the large-scale impact of Moms Demand Action suggests that they can.
      In her new book Fight Like a Mother, Watts shares exactly how to have that kind of impact for our future, even if you have no previous experience advocating for a cause. Watts’ story of taking back public policy from the gun lobby is one that began with sudden initiation and continues to yield powerful change. We are all just one good reason away from fighting for what we believe in.
     Watts had five.

Show Summary: Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In his groundbreaking new book, The War For Kindness, Jamil Zaki shares cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that can be strengthened through effort.

Show Summary: Laura Hawkins is the executive director of the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley. Camilla H. Fox is the founder and executive director of Project Coyote, a national organization that promotes compassionate conservation and coexistence between people and wildlife.

Show Summary: Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her new book is How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Show Summary: It has been twenty years since Tony Horwitz's bestselling Confederates in the Attic brought America's modern North-South divide into the light, inviting readers on a trek through Civil War country.
     Now Horwitz retraces the footsteps of a New York Times correspondent who went South as a "spy" for the paper, a full decade before the War. Horwitz traces the route of sleuthing correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted; like Olmsted, collecting as he goes the voices and impressions that informed spectrums of race, money, politics, and power in the pre-war era. Olmsted was driven by what he learned to create spaces welcoming to all, culminating in his landscape design for Central Park.
     Horwitz, in his turn, has written Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. He probes Olmsted's travels and dispatches looking for lessons for today's brutally divided America. Two journeys, more than a century apart, illuminate our current divide.