Now I've Heard Everything

He's not a psychic nor a fortune teller. The Amazing Kreskin is a mentalist,  perhaps the best known mentalist in the world.

But is he for real ?

After years of hearing people conjecture about his skills, Kreskin in 1996 wrote a book called How To Be a Fake Kreskin.

Listen to this interview and then you decide: fake, or real?

At most news organizations, the White House beat is a coveted plum assignment.

But it's a difficult, stressful, and highly competitive job. Most correspondence last only a few years at best.

One exception was UPI correspondent Helen Thomas. She covered the White House for over 50 years, and covered 10 presidents from Kennedy to Obama.

I met her in 1999 when, at the age of 79, she wrote a memoir called Front Row At The White House

Where did modern humankind come from?

Scientists,, scholars, and experts have been trying to find the answer for generations. 

One of the most prominent among them was Kenyan-born Richard Leakey. 

His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, we're also renowned paleoanthropologists whose work centered on finding the origins of modern humans.

In 1977, Richard Leakey co-authored at groundbreaking book called Origins. But by 1992, he had Unearthed new material the prompted him to write a sequel, called Origins Reconsidered. 

How and where do race, gender, class, art,  and capitalism come together?

That question was at the heart of some 30 books written by author bell hooks.

That was actually the pen name that Gloria Jean Watkins adopted for herself.

But being a black female activist and feminist  also often made her a target.

In her 1999 book Remembered Rapture hooks recalled some of her challenges as a writer and activist and that's when I have the chance to meet her for the first of our several conversations.

Dexter Scott King was only 7 years old in 1968 when his father Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

But his memories of his late father remain sharp and crisp.

And those deeply personal recollections sometimes contrast with the public views of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 2003 at the age of 42, Dexter Scott King wrote a book called Growing Up King, and that's when I had a chance to meet him and talk with him.

When you think of America's great present-day chefs and restaurateurs, there are only a handful of names that immediately come to mind.

And one of them is Wolfgang Puck.

While he may be best known for his acclaimed Spago restaurant, Puck has also written a number of cookbooks, he's a TV and he's the official caterer for the Academy Awards. 

I met him a little over thirty years ago, in the fall of 1991, when he was on tour for his cookbook adventures in the Kitchen.

And get ready. You're going to be very ungry in just a few minutes.

He earned a medical degree from Harvard, but instead of pursuing a career in medicine, Michael Crichton became a writer.

And as a reader, I'm really glad he did.

I had read some of Michael Crichton's books, and enjoyed the movie "The Andromeda Strain," that was based on one of them, but I had never interviewed him, until November 1990 when "Jurassic Park" was published.

"Jurassic Park:" the movie was released in 1993, starring Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum.  

So here now, from 1990, Michael Crichton.

Surrogate parenting has become commonplace in America and other countries. It has helped countless numbers of couples become parents.

But it took until the late 1980s for an American Court to rule on the legal validity of surrogate motherhood.

It came in the case of an infant girl dubbed Baby M. 

A woman named Mary Beth Whitehead gave birth to baby M, after her eggs were fertilized by a man named Bill Stern. He and his wife Elizabeth for unable to have a child of their own.

The trouble arose when Whitehead, after giving birth, decided she wanted to keep the baby.

A protracted court battle ensued, and ultimately the Sterns won custody of the baby.

You know we sometimes get so caught up in the minutiae of everyday life. Trying to protect our own little turf on this little planet that we lose sight of the big picture. I mean the really big picture.

In the 1970s and '80s astronomer. Carl Sagan led the way in showing us the big picture with his book and TV show. Cosmos and then in 1994 his follow-up book called pale Blue.

The interview you're about to hear was actually the second interview I had with Carl Sagan in the early '90s and I found it hard to be in the same room with him and  and not be swept up in his enthusiastic and voracious quest for more knowledge.

And as I was preparing the interview for use on this podcast, I thought how absolutely thrilled Carl Sagan would be today to learn about the James Webb telescope.

Songs recorded by Judy Collins have become some of America's most enduring favorites.

With a debut album in 1961 at a debut concert about a year later and then a number one single shortly after Judy Collins became a fixture in American music, particularly the folk music genre.

But with a musical upbringing that included everything from classical to country to folk to pop. Judy Collins resisted labels 

She in fact learned to trust her heart. That's why she called her 1987 autobiography. Trust Your Heart and that's when I had the chance to meet her.