Story in the Public Square

This episode was made possible with the gracious collaboration of Newport Film and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities’ “Culture is Key” Project.

In the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sam Pollard and Benjamin Hedin tell that story in a powerful documentary that shines a light on race, power, and the politics of personal destruction.

Sam Pollard’s career as a feature film and television video editor and documentary producer and director spans almost thirty years. He recently served as Executive Producer on the documentary “Brother Outsider,” the Official Selection for the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. His first assignment as a documentary producer came in 1989 for Henry Hampton’s Blackside production “Eyes On The Prize II: America at the Racial Crosswords.” One of his episodes in this series received an Emmy. He returned to Blackside as Co-Executive Producer/Producer of Hampton’s last documentary series, “I’ll Make Me A World: Stories of African-American Artists and Community.”

Benjamin Hedin has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, The Oxford American, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, The Georgia Review, and other publications. He is the editor of “Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader” and author of the nonfiction chronicle, “In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now.” Triquarterly Books will publish his first novel, “Under the Spell” in the spring of 2021. He also produced and wrote of the Grammy-nominated documentary “Two Trains Runnin’.”

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Everyone has a ghost story—a personal family experience, something that happened to a friend, an uncle, or even ourselves.  Amy Bruni tells us that sometimes these stories are comforting and sometimes they are not, but there is a lot we can learn from them.

Bruni is a paranormal investigator and co-star of the Travel Channel’s hit show, “Kindred Spirits,” and previously appeared on “Ghost Hunters.”  She is the author of “Life with the Afterlife: 13 Truths I learned about Ghosts,” which has received critical acclaim, including from The New York Times.  In her book, Bruni shares insights from her years of experience with the spirits of the dead, those who encounter them, and the thirteen truths that guide her approach to the supernatural.  From both her experiences with those who are haunted, and the spirits not yet departed, Bruni emphasizes connects us as people, in life and beyond.  She is also the founder of Strange Escapes, a paranormal excursion company that guides guests around some of America’s most notoriously haunted destinations.

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Political divisions are as old as the republic, itself.  But Tom Ricks says that if we’re serious about preserving the union, there is much we can learn from the founders study of the ancient republics in Rome and Greece.

Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project.  He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense.  Ricks covered the US military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years.  A member of two Pulitzer Prize–winning teams, he covered US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  He is the author of several books, including, “The Generals,” “The Gamble” and the number-one New York Times bestseller “Fiasco,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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We live in an age increasingly defined by the intrusion of technology in our lives. Kashmir Hill is a technology journalist whose work explores the looming tech-dystopia—and how we can avoid it.

Kashmir Hill is a New York-based technology reporter who writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy.  She joined The New York Times in 2019 after working as an investigative reporter at Gizmodo Media Group and as a writer and editor at Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law.  Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post.  In 2018, she gave the TED talk, “What your smart devices know—and share—about you,” in which she described what happened when she transformed her apartment into a smart home and monitored the data being sent out of it.  She hold degrees from Duke University and New York University, where she studied journalism.

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The music scene in the 1970s and 1980s is now the stuff of legend—from disco to the rise of hip hop, punk, and new wave, innovation and artistry dominated pop music.  Chris Frantz was in the middle of it all as a founding member of Talking Heads.

Frantz is one of the Talking Heads band’s founding members.  As the drummer, he provided the backbeat for all of the group’s recordings and performances.  Frantz formed the Talking Heads with David Byrne, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison in New York City and built a sizeable following, signing a deal with Sire Records.  The group issued early new wave classics including, “Talking Heads: 77,” “More Songs About Buildings and Food,” “Fear of Music,” “Remain in Light.”  The Talking Heads also produced hit albums, “Speaking in Tongues,” “Stop Making Sense,” “Little Creatures,” and “True Stories,” among others.  Frantz also launched a side project, the Tom Tom Club with Weymouth.  The duo issued a major hit with the track “Genius of Love” off their self-titled 1981 debut album.  Frantz and Weymouth have co-produced with other artists, including Ziggy Marley, los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Happy Mondays, and Angelfish.  Frantz’ drumming can also be heard on releases by Byrne, Brian Eno, and Robert Palmer.  The Talking Heads were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.  Frantz is the author of the recently published, “Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina.”

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A lot of people believe our politics are broken.  Dr. Norman Ornstein says the fault lies squarely with one political party—and will likely shape the course of the Biden administration.

Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies politics, elections, and the U.S. Congress.  He is a cohost of AEI’s “Election Watch” series, a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic, a BBC News election analyst, and the chairman of the Campaign Legal Center.  He previously served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission.  A longtime observer and analyst of American politics and the U.S. Congress, he has been involved in political reform for decades, particularly campaign finance reform and the reform of Senate committees. He has also played a part in creating the Congressional Office of Compliance and the House Office of Congressional Ethics.  Ornstein was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.  He is the author of “One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported,” with E. J. Dionne and Thomas E. Mann, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism;” “The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track,” with Thomas E. Mann and “The Permanent Campaign and Its Future.”

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The end of the 19th Century in America, is often associated with the rise of profound social movements like the temperance movement; the women’s suffrage movement, and—more darkly—even the eugenics movement.  Ernest Freeberg tells the story of the birth of the animal rights movement.

Freeberg is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee and is the award-winning author of “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement,” which examines ASPCA founder Henry Bergh’s campaign to grant rights to animals in industrial America.  He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, has served on the editorial board of the “History of Education Quarterly,” and has produced several public radio documentaries.  His research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, the Winterthur Museum, Newberry Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Spencer Foundation, Emory University’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and others.  Freeberg has served as Chief Reader and test development committee member for the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History exam.  He is the author of “The Education of Laura Bridgman,” which won the Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, “Democracy’s Prisoner,” a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in biography, and winner of both the David Langum Award for Legal History and the Eli Oboler Award from the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Roundtable, and “Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America,” was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014 by the American Library Association.

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Every family has its secrets. Robert Kolker tells the story of an all-American family in the middle of the 20th century forced to grapple with that era’s stigma and tragic consequences of serious mental illness.

Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of “Lost Girls,” named one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books and one of Publisher's Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013.  His most-recent book, “Hidden Valley Road,” a number-one New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection, was published in 2020.  His 2006 investigation into sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community helped bring an abuser to justice and was nominated for a National Magazine Award.  His exploration of an eighteen-year murder-exoneration case and the police tactics that can lead to false confessions received the Harry Frank Guggenheim 2011 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Other articles of note include the police shooting of Sean Bell, a close look at New York’s homelessness epidemic, and New York’s cover stories on airport safety and security, and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s Miracle on the Hudson.  Kolker’s journalism has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Marshall Project.

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Our nationality has long been a part of how we identify ourselves.  But Alexis Wichowski surveys the rise of “net states,” big tech companies that are, increasingly, taking on roles traditionally played by nation-states.

Wichowski is a public servant, teacher, and writer.  She serves as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Innovation and Acting Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Broadband for the City of New York.  She also serves as an adjunct associate professor in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, teaching in the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization.  She previously served New York City as an Associate Commissioner at the newly established Department of Veterans’ Services and a Disaster Relief Field Responder before and during 9/11.  She has also served as Program Officer for the U.S. Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy and Diplomatic Innovation Division and as Director of Media Analysis & Strategy at the Permanent Mission of the United States to the United Nations during the Obama administration. She regularly conducts research and writes about the impact of media, technology and government.  Several of her recent publications include. “Net States Rule the World,” in WIRED, “What Government Can and Should Learn from Hacker Culture,” in The Atlantic and “The U.S. can’t regulate Big Tech companies when they act like nations,” in The Washington Post, among others.  Her book, “The Information Trade: How Big Tech Conquers Countries, Challenges Our Rights, and Transforms Our World,” was published in 2020.  Wichowski holds a PhD in Information Science from the University at Albany’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a BA in Chinese from Connecticut College.

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Change may be an essential part of human existence, but Jen Schwartz explores the dislocations in human society caused by the speed with which the world is changing around us.

Schwartz is a senior features editor at Scientific American who produces stories on the intersection of technology and the human condition. She specializes in writing about how society is adapting—or not—to a rapidly changing world, with a focus on climate change and digital disinformation.  During the coronavirus pandemic she has written about the anguish of uncertainty, from the trauma of healthcare workers to the legacy of scientific racism to the chaos of media manipulation.  She co-led the magazine’s 2019 special issue, “Truth, Lies & Uncertainty,” about making sense of reality in unreal times, and contributed an essay about how everyone is an agent in the new information warfare.  Her feature, “Underwater,” about a New Jersey community that is radically adapting to sea-level rise, won the 2019 National Association of Science Writers “Science and Society” award.  Schwartz previously worked as an editor or reporter at Popular Science, GQ, New York, Outside, Self, and The Boston Globe.  She is a veteran researcher skilled in fact-checking and investigative reporting and holds a degree in journalism with a minor in environmental science from Boston University.

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