Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

Michael Smith’s new book “Lawyers for the Left: In The Courts In the Streets And On The Air”profiles a range of lawyers who, as radicals and socialists, devoted their careers to representing victims of injustice rather than the rich and the privileged. Their clients included Martin Luther King and Angela Davis, the prisoners in the infamous massacre at Attica, people who suffered torture, police abuse, mass arrests, and segregation. Stories like these even start to give lawyers a good name. In this edition of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Michael is joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the cofounder and executive director of the Partnership For Civil Justice in Washington DC and Glen Ford, executive director of Black Agenda Report.

“The offer was too good to resist: Go to rehab for a week, get $1,000 in cash. It was early 2017, and Brianne, a 20-year-old from a woody Atlanta suburb, had come to South Florida to leave her heroin addiction behind,” read the opening lines of Julia Lurie’s feature article in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine entitled “Hooked: How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.” “$1,000 for the first week of her stay and $500 each week thereafter. That money could buy Brianne a whole lot of heroin.” In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI Mother Jones reporter Julia Lurie details the major health hazards rehab recruiters are exposing recovering addicts to under the guise of trying to help.

“The Brink” is a startling new documentary directed and filmed by Alison Klayman (“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” “Take Your Pills”) that follows former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as he takes his effort to spread extreme nationalism from the U.S. to the rest of the world. With unprecedented access, Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall historical document employs a vérité approach that aims to expose Bannon’s tactics, including his relationship with the media. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Alison Klayman and producer Marie Therese Guirgis discuss their experience making “The Brink” and why they feel it is a film every American needs to see.

Born in 1937 in New York City, Peter Campus is a seminal artist in the fields of new media and video art. Peter’s work is a part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Tate Modern. In his recent digital video work, he transforms footage of landscapes and interiors into painterly scenes, using sophisticated digital techniques. Cristin Tierney opened her eponymous art gallery in New York City in 2010, following a long career with Christie’s Auction House. Noam M. Elcott is the chair of art humanities in the art history department at Columbia University and the author of “Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media.” In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Peter Campus, Cristin Tierney and Noam M. Elcott discuss the rise of video art and what role Peter has played in its transformation to one of the major artistic disciplines of our time.

Look around your office. Turn on the TV. Incompetent leadership is everywhere, and there's no denying that most of these leaders are men. In his timely and provocative new book “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It)” Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks two powerful questions: why is it so easy for incompetent men to become leaders and why is it so hard for competent people—especially competent women—to advance? On Friday’s edition of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explores this confounding question at the heart of so much systemic gender inequality throughout America and beyond.

In cities across the country, skyrocketing rents and home values are forcing the young, the non-rich, and the non-white out of cities—or pricing them out before they move in—leaving urban America less diverse, less vibrant, and less fair. In his new book, “Generation Priced Out: Who Gets To Live in the New Urban America,” housing advocate Randy Shaw challenges progressive cities to reverse rising economic and racial inequality and offers specific strategies to do it. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Randy Shaw expands on the themes of housing inequity that he explores in his book.

In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, we celebrate the first day of spring by opening the phones for gardening expert Pete Muroski to take your questions on all things botanical. If you’re the type of person for whom spring is all about flowers blooming and the smell of a healthy topsoil, or you’re simply interested in possibly doing some light gardening in the warmer months, you won’t want to miss it.

John Murphy has a story to tell. An elite adviser, analyst, and operative for the Army, CIA and South Vietnamese intelligence services, John experienced the Vietnam War up close and behind close doors in a way that few people did. Michael Reiter’s documentary “Agents Unknown,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime, is the first in-depth look into John’s role in this untold bit of US military history. It’s a story of intelligence work at the ground level: espionage, agents and bad information working its way through the war machine, leading to the epic failures of command that made the human cost of the Vietnam War much greater. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, John Murphy and Michael Reiter discuss their important documentary “Agents Unknown.”

Hugh Ryan’s “When Brooklyn Was Queer” is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history―a great forgetting. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Hugh Ryan discusses this largely untold history.

According to the CDC, between 1999 and 2017 over 218,000 Americans died due to overdoses from prescription opioids--more than 3 times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. A current Massachusetts court case alleges that Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the multi-billion dollar company that makes Oxycontin, continued to “turbocharge” sales of the drug while downplaying its extreme danger--for more than a decade after pleading guilty in 2007 to misleading regulators, doctors, and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and potential for abuse. And yet in 2017, when the National Institutes of Health held meetings to combat the crisis, they turned to…Purdue executives for advice. This would be darkly comic if so many lives were not at stake—and the practice was not so common. Building on the ideas in his popular TED talk “In Praise of Conflict,” Jonathan H. Marks examines the widespread practice of public-private partnerships in “The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health.” Join us on “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI for a conversation with Jonathan H. Marks about why this troubling practice needs to stop.