Story in the Public Square

Colleges and universities all over the United States are facing a wave of students suffering from depression and anxiety heightened by the last year and a half of the pandemic.  Dr. Jud Brewer says there are things everyone can do to be more mindful, to break bad habits, and to be happier.

Brewer is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University.  He is also a research affiliate at MIT.  Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness.  Brewer is a New York Times best-selling author of “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” (March 2021).  He is an addiction psychiatrist and an internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions.  Based on the success of these programs in the lab, he co-founded MindSciences, Inc. to create app-based digital therapeutic versions of these programs for a wider audience, working with individuals, corporations, and hospital systems to put effective, evidence-based behavior change guidance in the hands of people struggling with unwanted behaviors and “everyday addictions.”

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There is a contradiction inherent in today’s China.  The Chinese Communist Party wields total control over the politics of the land, but the state also celebrates and encourages private wealth.  Desmond Shum offers an insider’s account of wealth, power, corruption, and vengeance in today’s China.

Shum was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong and developed the largest air cargo logistics facility in China, the Beijing Airport Cargo Terminal.  He also led the development of the Bulgari Hotel in Beijing.  Since the early 2000s, Shum was an early pioneer of philanthropy in China, gifting extensively both domestically and internationally.  Desmond holds a bachelor’s degree in Finance and Accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a graduate of the joint-EMBA program of Northwestern University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

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The idea of “caste,” or a hereditary structure to society is foreign to many U.S. audiences. But Padma Venkatraman takes young readers into the caste structure of her native India in a soulful exploration of identity and hope.

Venkatraman is an award-winning author who was born in Chennai, India.  Before becoming a novelist, she earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from The College of William and Mary.  She conducted postdoctoral research in Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and later worked in Germany.  She also served as head of Inwoods Small School, and taught oceanography and directed diversity efforts at the University of Rhode Island.  Venkatraman is the author of five novels including “Climbing the Stairs,”  “Island’s End,” “A Time to Dance,” and “The Bridge Home.”  She has written several other books, including: “Double Stars: The Story of Caroline Herschel (Profiles in Science),” “Women Mathematicians (Profiles in Mathematics),” and the illustrated “Growing Gold” and “Cleverest Thief.”  Her latest novel, “Born Behind Bars,” was published this month.

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When schools finished the academic year earlier this summer, they looked forward to the fall with the first cautious optimism anyone had felt in years.  But Dr. Ashish Jha has offered level-headed wisdom that the pandemic simply is not over.

Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH, is a physician, health policy researcher, and the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.  Before joining Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.  An internationally respected and consulted pandemic expert, Jha strongly believes that communication with the public is an essential part of public health, and never more important than during a public-health emergency like COVID-19.  He appears regularly on national news network shows, is active on social media, and is the authoritative voice on the “COVID: What Comes Next” podcast, available from The Providence Journal and the USA TODAY Network.  In addition to his duties at Brown, maintains a clinical practice at the Providence VA Medical Center.

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It’s been 20 years since the attacks of 9/11.  Next month, we’ll mark the 20th anniversary of the arrival of American troops in Afghanistan who toppled the Taliban regime and hunted down Osama bin Laden.  Now, as American combat troops leave Afghanistan, we sit down with Craig Whitlock who has pieced together the secret history—warts and all—of America’s war in a land long-called “the graveyard of empires.”

Craig Whitlock is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post.  He has covered the global war on terrorism for the Post since 2001 as a foreign correspondent, Pentagon reporter, and national security specialist.  In 2019, his coverage of the war in Afghanistan won the George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting.  He has reported from more than sixty countries and is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Democracy is under attack—in the former Soviet-dominated lands of Eastern Europe, in Turkey, Brazil, India, and yes, even the United States.  Tom Nichols urges us not to just look for leaders to whom we can ascribe blame, but to look at ourselves and discern our own role in the weakening of America’s democratic institutions.

Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies and the Harvard Extension School. He is a specialist on international security affairs, including U.S.-Russia relations, nuclear strategy and NATO issues. A nationally known commentator on U.S. politics and national security, he is a columnist for USA Today and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He served as a staff member in the U.S. Senate and has held fellowships at CSIS and the Harvard Kennedy School. He has taught at Dartmouth, La Salle and Georgetown. He is also a five-time undefeated ‘Jeopardy!’ champion.

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Before 1979, the only way to see the proceedings of Congress was to visit the Capitol.  Brian Lamb believed the American public had a right to see government working and convinced the cable industry to create C-SPAN, the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network.

After serving in the United States Navy, Lamb worked as a White House staffer and as the Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine.  Known for his unobtrusive interview style, direct questions, and balanced approach, Lamb has hosted C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” and “Q&A.”  His awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Humanities Medal.

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Personal conviction and democratic activism often go hand-in-hand.  Mohammed Ali Kadivar is both a scholar of democracy and an advocate whose family has long been vocal proponents of it. 

Kadivar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies and director of the Middle East Popular Politics Lab at Boston College.  The Middle East Popular Politics Lab focuses on collecting and analyzing 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.  His work contributes to political and comparative-historical sociology by exploring the interaction between protest movements and democratization.  Kadivar draws from his experience as a participant-observer of the pro-democracy movement in Iran, and his research agenda explores these issues on a global scale, using case studies, comparative-historical methods, and statistical analyses.  He earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science from University of Tehran in Iran.  His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, among many other publications.  His work has received awards from the Comparative Historical Sociology, Global and Transnational Sociology, Sociology of Development, and Peace, War and Social Conflict sections of the American Sociological Association.

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On more than one occasion, we’ve welcomed guests to this show who engage in “speculative” or “useful” fiction.  Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis are the latest, their new book, titled 2034, looks at what a war between the United States and China might look like in the not-so-distant future.

Admiral James Stavridis is a retired four-star U.S. naval officer.  He is currently an Operating Executive of The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm and Chair of the Board of Counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm.  Previously he served for five years as the Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  He led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility for Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counter-piracy, and cybersecurity.  He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006-2009.  He earned more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations in his 37-year military career.  Admiral Stavridis earned a Ph.D. in international relations and has published nine books and hundreds of articles in leading journals around the world.  He is a monthly columnist for TIME Magazine and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “2034,” “Red Dress In Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning.”  His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and non-fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others.  His writing often appears in Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times where he is a contributing opinion writer.  Ackerman’s stories have also been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Writing.  He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

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With the advent of effective vaccines, it feels—we hope not foolishly—like the pandemic may be coming to an end.  But Martin Halliwell says the crisis in American public health isn’t limited to one particular disease—it’s a theme that recurs again and again over the last century in these United States.

Halliwell is a specialist in American cultural, intellectual and literary history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and in the health humanities.  He is also a professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester’s Centre for American Studies and the current head of the School of Arts. He is the Co-Lead for Humanities and Social Sciences for the University’s Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and a member of the Action on Communities on Health and Equality group.  Halliwell currently sits on the AHRC’s Science in Culture Advisory Group and is a member of the cross-research council Mental Health Experts Group.  He has served as the Co-Chair the Arts and Humanities Alliance since 2016, sitting on the British Academy’s Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Skills Advisory Group and the Strategic Forum for the Humanities.  Halliwell’s recently published book, “American Health Crisis,” analyses contemporary public health crises in America through a historical and cultural lens, bringing individual events together to a narrative of calamity that has brought us to our current crisis in health politics.  He holds a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Nottingham.

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