Let's Grab Coffee

We spend a lot of our time on the road, commuting to work, running errands, meeting up with friends and family. In fact, maybe you’ll listen to this episode while you’re on the road. For all the possibilities that roads open up for us, it’s not without a cost. To talk more about how roads impact our lives – and the lives around us – for better and for worse, today I’m joined by Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping The Future of Our Planet.

Have you ever expensed a lunch that wasn’t solely a business meeting or maybe added a little extra time on your timesheet? If so, that’s fraud. Fraud is not just identity theft, ponzi schemes, or embezzling millions of dollars. Fraud is all around us and maybe even happening to us without our knowledge. On today’s show, I sit down with Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope author of Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry.

Kelly Richmond Pope is the Dr. Barry Jay Epstein Endowed Professor of Forensic Accounting at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. Her research on executive misconduct culminated in directing and producing the award-winning documentary, All the Queen's Horses which explores the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. Her TED Talk entitled "How Whistle-blowers Shape History” has been viewed over 1.6 million times, translated into 20 languages, and serves as a resource to help organizations and individuals embrace internal whistleblowing.

In the U.S., we consume about 1 billion gallons of wine annually. Whether you prefer reds, whites, pinks, or bubbles, do you know what’s really in your go-to glass of wine? Wine’s history is filled with tales of deception, and today I sit down with Rebecca Gibb to dive into her latest book, Vintage Crime: A Short History of Wine Fraud. We’ll talk about some of the surprising additions to wine throughout time, including some rather deadly (though tasty!) ingredients, and why and how wine fraud continues to happen. Our chat ends with Rebecca’s wine picks for a variety of occasions.

November is National Adoption Month, which adoptees have reclaimed as National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM). In honor of NAAM, this month on Let's Grab Coffee, I'm featuring conversations with authors of books that center adoptee voices.

Who are you and how do you know? Much of our identity begins with our name and our family origin stories, but what happens when the stories you thought you knew begin to unravel? Questions of identity, family, and truth are at the center of Shannon Gibney’s latest novel - The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption. On today’s show I sit down with Shannon to discuss her book, some of the primary themes around adoption, race, and what we know or think we know, and how she’s creating new stories about herself and adoption.

Shannon Gibney is an award winning author and university professor. Her previous novels include See No Color and Dream Country. She is co-editor with Nicole Chung of When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology.

November is National Adoption Month, which adoptees have reclaimed as National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM). In honor of NAAM, this month on Let's Grab Coffee, I'm featuring conversations with authors of books that center adoptee voices.

According to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, everyone has the right to identity, the right to know one’s history and origins. Everyone, including children adopted transnationally out of a war. But how can these adoptees begin to know their history and origins, if their nations of origin deny their existence? On today’s show, I’m joined by Dr. Elizabeth Barnert, the author of Reunion: Finding the Disappeared Children of El Salvador. In this book, she provides a firsthand account that reveals the impact of forced family separations and reunifications in communities affected by El Salvador’s civil war. We discuss her work with Pro-Búsqueda, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the search of children who were disappeared during the Salvadoran Civil War, and the importance of adoptees’ own agency in the process of reunion.

Elizabeth Barnert is a pediatrician and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research, grounded in human rights and social action, examines children affected by violence, family separation, and incarceration.

November is National Adoption Month, which adoptees have reclaimed as National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM). In honor of NAAM, this month on Let's Grab Coffee, I'm featuring conversations with authors of books that center adoptee voices.

Child welfare services, including adoption and foster care, are often framed around the “best interests of the child,” but who gets to decide what’s best and who’s best for the child? What happens in cases of adoptive parent and foster parent abuse, neglect, and murder? On this episode, I sit down with Roxanna Asgarian, author of We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Through her investigative journalism, she challenges some of the assumptions around child welfare and adoption, centers the birth families whose children were murdered by their adoptive parents in a highly-publicized 2018 murder-suicide, and exposes the harms baked into the child welfare system.

Roxanna Asgarian was the law and courts reporter for the Texas Tribune. Previously, she covered the child welfare and criminal justice systems as an independent reporter in Houston. Roxanna received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and her master’s degree from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

November is National Adoption Month, which adoptees have reclaimed as National Adoptee Awareness Month (NAAM). In honor of NAAM, this month on Let's Grab Coffee, I'm featuring conversations with authors of books that center adoptee voices.

In the last few years, loss and grief have become a shared collective experience, particularly in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic. This period has also put the inequities in the U.S. healthcare system front and center along with the ways that what has been “normal” has often been harmful or unsustainable. In A Living Remedy: A Memoir, Nicole Chung shares her personal experience of loss and grief and connects it to the broader systemic failures that countless Americans have encountered and are one emergency away from encountering.

Nicole Chung is the author the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know, which was named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, and Time. She is currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Time contributor, and a Slate columnist. In 2021, she was named to the Good Morning America AAPI Inspiration List honoring those “making Asian American history right now.”

What does it mean to be trans? Cisgender? And why should we all use our pronouns as part of how we introduce ourselves? Isn’t gender biological? Many of us have questions like these yet we don’t know who to ask or how to have these conversations. On today’s show, I’m joined by Schulyer Bailar. He’s the author of He/She/They: How We Talk about Gender and Why It Matters, a book that is part personal story, part primer on how to talk about gender, and part resource for understanding terminology, history, and science behind our society's views on sex, gender, and identity.

Schuyler Bailar (he/him) is the first transgender athlete to compete in any sport on an NCAA Division 1 men’s team. His story has appeared everywhere from 60 Minutes to The Washington Post. Schuyler’s tireless advocacy has earned him numerous honors including LGBTQ Nation’s Instagram Advocate for 2020, a GLAAD MEDIA Award nomination, the Out Magazine’s 2017 OUT100 list, and the prestigious Harvard Athletics Director’s Award, which is not granted annually – but only when an athlete demonstrates outstanding contribution to Athletics through education. He is only the 7th recipient of the award. In 2021, Schuyler also released his first middle-grade novel, Obie Is Man Enough. And in 2022, Schuyler created LaneChanger.com making gender literacy education accessible to every team, school, and company.

The desire for success and achievement are part of our culture, a culture that tells us ambition is a virtue – to do more, to be the best, to work hard, so we can play even harder. But what does all that ambition ultimately get us? Are we healthier, happier, more fulfilled? With burnout at an all-time high, according to a recent study by the Future Forum, is it time to rethink ambition and our definition of success? That’s the center of today’s conversation with Rainesford Stauffer, author of All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive.

There’s more to food than just what’s on your plate. Food can be a weapon of suppression and a tool of resistance. In fact, food was one contested site of freedom during the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Bobby J. Smith II details this story in Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Today we discuss the 1962-1963 Greenwood, Mississippi Food Blockade and the subsequent Food for Freedom program. This is just one part of the broader food justice movement from the Civil Rights era to present-day that Dr. Smith examines in Food Power Politics.