Please Explain (The Leonard Lopate Show)

Spring is finally here, and we're kicking off the growing season with a Please Explain that’s all about urban agriculture and city gardens! Find out the best ways to maximize your green space - whether it’s a window box, rooftop plot or a community garden. We’ll also look at the city’s growing rooftop-farm movement, discuss public garden spaces and find out why rooftop gardens are an ecological necessity in our urban landscape.

Joining us is Annie Novak, co-founder and head farmer of the nation’s first commercial green roof row farm, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn. She’s also the manager of the Edible Academy at New York Botanical Garden, founder and director of Growing Chefs and author of The Rooftop Growing Guide. We’ll also be joined by Gerard Lordahl, Director of Open Space Greening Program at GrowNYC, a non-profit which operates local environmental programs, including the city Greenmarkets. 

Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

The English language is spoken by millions of people around the world, and despite that fact, it remains relatively fluid. Because it’s so adaptable, who knows what the future will hold in store for English? On today's Please Explain, we’ll attempt to find out with Simon Horobin, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. He's the author of How English Became English: A Short History of a Global Language. We’ll also learn how modern English developed and became standardized, in addition to how it has evolved through the centuries and in different global communities.

Do you have questions about the history and future of English? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

Has technology destroyed our ability to have meaningful face-to-face conversations? What happens when we look up from our phones and try to communicate? On today's Please Explain, media scholar and MIT professor Sherry Turkle reveals how our relationship with technology has harmed our ability to empathize. She's also the author of the bestselling book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age. 

Do you have questions about technology and modern conversation? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

Charter schools have been growing in popularity over the past few years in communities across the country, most notably in New York and Washington, D.C. Advocates say they're the solution to failing inner city schools, while critics argue they're corporatizing public education. We have a lot of questions about charter schools, and on today's Please Explain we'll talk find out how they began, how they're funded, as well as some of successes and failures of the system. 

Dr. Michael Fabricant, a professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work and executive officer of the Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare, and Dr. Michelle Fine, a Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, Women's Studies, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY, will join us to talk about charter schools. They’re the authors of Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What's at Stake?   

President Obama said last month that our Supreme Court, "is supposed to be above politics, not an extension of politics. And it should stay that way.”  But has the Court ever been non-partisan in practice? Is it even possible for nine justices to stay out of politics? In light of the contention over Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination, we're looking at the politics of the Supreme Court on today's Please Explain. 

Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer at The New Yorker, senior legal analyst at CNN and author of the forthcoming book American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, joins us to shed some light on the inner-workings of the Supreme Court. Nina Totenberg, NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent, also joins the conversation. 

What is folk music? Spanning genres, geographical locations, and eras in time, it’s the music of the people. Although American folk music has been around for a long time, you could say it had its biggest explosion in the 1960s in Greenwich Village. In fact, New York has experienced a bit of a folk revival in recent years.

On today's Please Explain, we're exploring folk music with Eli Smith, the co-founder of the Brooklyn Folk Festival, the banjo player for The Downhill Strugglers and the former co-host of The Down Home Radio Show. Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, a multi-instrumentalist performing at this year's Brooklyn Folk Festival, joins Eli in the conversation. They'll also perform live in our studio! 

Event: The Brooklyn Folk Festival will be held at St. Anne’s Church (157 Montague Street between Clinton and Henry) from April 8th-10th. It will feature 35 bands, workshops and events including an old time string band, freedom songs of the Civil Rights Movement, shape note, country blues and international folk music from Syria and Colombia. 

There's a whole world of magical creatures out there, and on today's Please Explain we're unraveling the truth behind cryptozoology, which may or may not be a pseudoscience. Loren Coleman, one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, an honorary member of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club and director of the International Cryptology Museum, joins us to discuss creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Joe Gisondi, a professor of journalism at Eastern Illinois University and the author of Monster Trek: The Obsessive Search for Bigfoot, also weighs in on the discussion. 

Do you have questions about Bigfoot, unicorns, centaurs or other magical creatures? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

The presidential primaries are in full swing, and that leaves us with a lot of questions about the intricate rules, politics and process of choosing our next president. What’s the difference between a primary and a caucus? Delegates and superdelegates? Why do political parties even have conventions? For these answers and more, we turn to Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, host of the “Trumpcast” podcast on Slate.com and author of The Bush Tragedy. 

Do you have questions about our presidential primary process? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

Event: Slate's Culture Gabfest LIVE will be held on April 6th at 7:30 p.m. at the SVA Theater at 333 West 23rd Street. For tickets and event information, visit the event page. 

What's the difference between a primary and a caucus? One of them do not have a secret ballot https://t.co/CqYEvuM9Lo

The delegate structure was meant to prevent someone like #BernieSanders from getting the nom & losing general election, says @jacobwe

Delegates are bound for the first ballot, and we haven't had a convention that goes beyond first ballot since 1960s https://t.co/EbeBsy8G9v

Political parties are private and "they can do whatever they want" to choose the nominees, says @jacobwe https://t.co/fBeyXr978g

If a candidate drops out, delegates become uncommitted. That's why candidates "suspend" their campaign https://t.co/zFKLDCnYly

If you thought that dinosaurs were extinct, think again. According to a new exhibit at The American Museum of Natural History, birds are a form of living dinosaur! The myriad evolutionary connections between birds and dinosaurs are apparently found in bird bone structure, flight mechanisms, feathers and nesting patterns. We now know more than ever about these common traits thanks to new technologies like CT scanners, synchrotrons and advanced computer modeling that paleontologists have used to examine fossils, bones, and other ancient remnants.

On this week’s Please Explain, we’ll dive into these connections with Dr. Mark Norell, the chair of the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology. 

Event: Dr. Norell's exhibit “Dinosaurs Among Us,” at the American Museum of Natural History opens March 21st and will run until January 2nd, 2017. The exhibit will open exclusively to AMNH members March 18th through March 20th. For tickets and more information, click here. 

Want to hear more from Dr. Mark Norell? Check out our interview with him in 1994.

Think dinosaurs are extinct? Think again. https://t.co/48fb3Vtk8I pic.twitter.com/Mvxf2wuJmm

"It's even hard today to say what a bird is," says Dr. Mark Norell, the chair of the @AMNH Division of Paleontology. https://t.co/BpOcrlHalh

Flamingos were alive during the same time as T-Rex. Guess which one survived the asteroid? https://t.co/m767oQ4SQP

#TIL Crocodiles can communicate while still inside the egg. https://t.co/6g8uyeNYhP

"The more you find in the fossil record, the crazier it gets" says @AMNH's Dr. Mark Norell https://t.co/UhIJyLAvls pic.twitter.com/uZ0SwZ53NE

Mark Zuckerberg, the 31-year-old co-founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook, recently announced that he and his wife plan to donate 99% of their wealth - approximately $45 billion - to charity. On today's Please Explain, Michael Hobbes, a freelance writer who also works for a human rights NGO, talks about how philanthropy is changing, from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg's altruism. 

Do you have questions about philanthropy? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!