Story in the Public Square

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms. Mike McIntire documents what happens when those two rights clash and the chilling effect open-carry laws are having on protest and public assembly across the United States.  

 McIntire is an investigative reporter, author, and editor. In 2003 he joined the New York Times, serving in the New York City Hall bureau before transferring to the investigations unit in 2007. Before that, he was the investigative editor at The Hartford Courant, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting and was a Pulitzer finalist for his investigative reporting on medical malpractice. Covering topics such as presidential campaigns, political corruption, New York City Hall, and international terrorism. McIntire has made a name for himself as a fearless investigative reporter, who reports on important issues which affect the lives of his readers. His book, “Champions Way: Football, Florida and the Lost Soul of College Sports,” was published in 2017, focusing on his investigation of college sports corruption, which earned him the role of finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. He went on to share the Pulitzer Prize in both 2017 for reporting on Russia’s hidden interference with the U.S. presidential election and in 2022 for reporting on disclosed financial incentives with police traffic stops. McIntire also earned George Polk, Daniel Pearl and Scripps-Howard awards for obtaining and publishing Donald Trump’s long-concealed tax returns alongside his team in 2020. Outside of investigative reporting, McIntire has also dedicated his time to teaching journalism as a professor at New York University since 2004 and served as a 2019 Ferris Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.  

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When Pope Pious XII died, the Catholic Church sealed his documents until 2020.  David Kertzer was among the first to gain access to those documents when they were unsealed, and his new book reveals what the Pope knew and did while World War II ravaged Europe.

Kertzer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science at Brown University.  His latest book, “The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler,” was published in June 2022, with Italian, German, Spanish, and Chinese editions also in press.   He is an authority on Italian politics, society, and history; political symbolism; and anthropological demography.  Kertzer is a past president of both the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and is co-founder and served for many years as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.  In 2005, Kertzer was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  From 2006 to 2011, he was the Provost of Brown University.   Kertzer’s “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and has been published in eighteen foreign editions.  The book was also adapted into a play by playwright Alfred Uhry was performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2006.  In April 2016, Steven Spielberg announced that he would be making a film based on Kertzer’s book, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner.

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Science is under assault—on social media, on our airwaves, and sometimes even around our dinner tables.  Holden Thorp discusses the role science can and should play in an era of profound challenges, like climate change, pandemic disease, and profound changes in technology’s relationship with humanity.

Holden Thorp has been the Editor-in-Chief of the “Science” family of journals in 2019. He came to “Science” from Washington University, where he served as provost and continues to serve as the Rita Levi-Montalcini Distinguished University Professor, holding appointments in both chemistry and medicine.  A North Carolina native, Thorp earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1986 and a doctorate in chemistry in 1989 at the California Institute of Technology, working with Harry B. Gray on inorganic photochemistry.  He completed postdoctoral work at Yale University with Gary W. Brudvig, working on model compounds and reactions for the manganese cluster in the photosynthetic reaction center.   In his research career, Thorp studied electron-transfer reactions of nucleic acids, developed technology for electronic DNA chips, and cofounded Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which developed VIVJOA (oteseconazole), now approved by the FDA and marketed by Mycovia Pharmaceuticals. Thorp is the coauthor, with Buck Goldstein, of two books on higher education: “Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century” and “Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and its Colleges and Universities.”

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Since the fall of 2022, the women of Iran have confronted the authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran after one young woman died in the state’s custody. Ali Kadivar views the advocacy of those brave women through the broader struggle for democracy around the world.

Kadivar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Boston College.  He also directs the Middle East Popular Politics Lab at Boston College, which focuses on collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on various instances of contentious mobilization such as revolutions, wars, civil wars, anti-regime protests, and pro-regime mobilization globally, in the Middle East, and particularly in Iran.  Kadivar’s work contributes to political and comparative-historical sociology by exploring the interaction between protest movements and democratization and draws on his experience as a participant-observer of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, but his research agenda moves outward from this case to explore these issues on a global scale, using case studies, comparative-historical methods, and statistical analyses.  His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Comparative Politics, Socius, and Mobilization, and has won awards from the Collective Behavior and Social Movement (CBSM), Comparative Historical Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Peace, War and Social Conflict sections of the American Sociological Association (ASA).  His new book is “Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy,” from Princeton University Press.

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In an age of fake news and so called “truthiness,” the world sometimes feels untethered from reality.  Today’s guest uses her reporting and storytelling to ground her audience in science, even while her words reconnect us to our shared humanity and our relationship to the natural world.  She’s Alanna Mitchell, this week on “Story in the Public Square.”

Mitchell is a Canadian journalist, author and playwright who works at intersection of science, art and society.  Her book, “Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis,” was an international best seller that won the U.S.-based Grantham Prize for excellence in environmental journalism in 2010.  She turned it into a one-woman play in 2014 and has been performing it internationally since then.  The theater adaptation was nominated for a Dora award in Toronto for outstanding Indie play.  Mitchell was a playwright-in-residence at The Theatre Centre while she adapted her book, “Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths: A Memoir” into a play.  The book also won the $10,000 Lane Anderson Award for best Canadian science book written for adults in 2015.  She is also the author of “The Spinning Magnet: The Force that Created the Modern World and Could Destroy It,” about the Earth’s magnetic field.  Mitchell’s journalism has appeared in the New York Times’ science section, CBC’s Quirks & Quarks, National Geographic, The Guardian, GQ India, The United Church Observer and Canadian Geographic Magazine.  She has also made radio documentaries for CBC and has given talks on climate change, ocean change, cancer, John Franklin’s expedition, evolution, Charles Darwin, neonic pesticides and the earth’s magnetic field.

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The American revolution had many fathers.  But Stacy Schiff paints a picture of Samuel Adams—the cash-strapped publisher and political leader from Boston—as, perhaps, the essential founder whose spirit and maneuvering shaped so many of the seminal events of the revolutionary era.

Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” “Cleopatra: A Life,” which was one of the New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010 and won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography and was translated into 30 languages.  Schiff is also the author of “Véra” (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; “Saint-Exupéry,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America,” which was the winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique.  She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among other honors, she was named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, a Boston Public Library Literary Light in 2016, and in 2017 received the Lifetime Achievement Award in History and Biography from the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. Her latest book, “The Revolutionary,” was published in 2022.

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History and memory are two different things, one is built on facts and documents and the other is built on tradition, myth and politics. Ty Seidule dissects the history of the American Civil War and the legacy of the myths it spawned about the cause of the war.

Seidule retired from the U.S. Army as a brigadier general after 36 years of service. Seidule was then appointed Vice Chair of the National Commission on Base Renaming by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in 2021. He has served as Professor Emeritus of History at West Point for two decades, is a visiting professor at Hamilton College and a New American fellow. Seidule is passionate about stopping the spread of misinformation about American history, especially the Civil War. His Southern upbringing contributed to his great reverence for Robert E. Lee and a misguided understanding of the Civil War. Through years of reflection and study of history, his opinion on the issue has changed significantly and he now uses his platform to deconstruct the narrative that Lee was a hero and challenges the idea that Confederate soldiers were underdogs fighting for a noble cause. Seidule asserts that the Civil War was unequivocally about the South’s resistance to the abolishment of slavery and ignoring this history continues to cause harm. He has published numerous articles, books and videos on the topic, including his latest book, “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause,” which was published this year.

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In 2022, the United States dealt with the Omicron surge, saw a major land war in Europe and witnessed a Supreme Court decision that reversed 50 years of precedent. Dr. Evelyn Farkas breaks down these stories and discusses the 2022 Story of the Year.

Over her three-decade career, Farkas has made a name for herself in foreign policy with a specialty in American-Russian relations. Early in her career, she worked as a human rights officer for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and was an election observer in Bosnia and Afghanistan. In 2003 she published her book “Fractured States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia and Bosnia in the 1990s” detailing her experiences. Following her time abroad, she worked as a professor of international relations at the Marine Corps University. From 2008 to 2009, she served on the bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction as the executive director. Farkas has worked in both Congress and the United States Department of Defense. During the Obama administration, she was the foremost expert on Russia in the Department of Defense. She has appeared as a national security contributor and commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and more. Her writings have been featured in various publications and websites, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Daily Beast, Politico and Foreign Policy. She serves as a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and has penned research papers and op-eds featured in most leading publications. Farkas also serves as the executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.

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Some mysteries are never solved, but Casey Parks says some, like the one she writes about, can shed light on profound questions of gender and identity and fundamental questions about how we treat each other as human beings.

Parks is a reporter on the social issues team of the Washington Post. Throughout her career as a journalist, she has focused on stories about the LGBTQ+ community and other marginalized groups. In 2015, her story “The Pact” won first place for “Personalities” from Reporting Society of Professional Journalists, second place for Diversity Reporting for the C.B. Blethen Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. The piece detailed the journey of Kofe and Taumoe’anga, two Polynesian immigrants living in Portland, deciding between playing collegiate football and serving as missionaries for the Mormon church. “About a Boy,” Parks’ three-part series detailing the life of a transgender boy living in Washington state, was awarded third place for Explanatory Reporting in the Best of the West, second place in the National Headliner Awards for a News Series and first place by the Society for Professional Journalists for Comprehensive Coverage in 2018. Parks served as a Spencer Fellow for education reporting at Columbia University. Her pieces on education in the South have appeared in New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and USA Today, among others. Her book “Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery” Parks’ reflection on her life as a gay woman from a Southern family, was published this year.

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Nearly 20 people are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States every 60 seconds, more than ten million people every year. Ruth Glenn bravely shares her story of trauma, survival, and advocacy.

Glenn has dedicated her life to supporting survivors of domestic violence. She is the president and CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), an organization dedicated to holding abusers accountable while protecting survivors and advocates. Before her work with the NCADV began, she worked in the Colorado Department of Human Services for 28 years and served as the director of the Domestic Violence Program in her last nine years there. Glenn is a survivor of domestic violence and has often shared her story to help enlighten others about the prevalence and development of domestic violence. She has advocated for many causes, including reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. The act “creates and supports comprehensive, cost-effective responses to domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking.” Glenn has also advocated for legislation involving firearms and domestic violence. This is clearly an important cause, given the 557 deaths due to gun-related domestic violence that have already occurred this year, according to the NCADV website’s count at the time of writing. Glenn has been a part of several domestic violence programs, provided her expertise on domestic violence survivor issues and testified before the Colorado State Legislature and the United States Congress. In October, she published her memoir “Everything I Never Dreamed: My Life Surviving and Standing Up to Domestic Violence.”

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