Swing State

The country is in crisis. Riots, protest, police brutality, pandemic. What do we tell our kids to help them understand? And how do we get them educated in our time of Covid-19? When and how do they go back to school? We reached out to leading educator Dr. Jennifer Price. She knows the public school world, the private school world, and how children's lives and educations are being pummeled by pandemic and upheaval. Don't duck the issues, she says. Talk about everything. And be ready for almost anything when it comes to the new face of education in Covid time. Jen Price walks us through the dramatic range of options K-12 schools are juggling as they plan for the coming school year with the pandemic unvanquished. Dr. Price is head of school at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a prominent private school. She was formerly principal of Newton North High School, a large public high school, and Superintendent of North Andover Public Schools.

In a hard week, Bakari Sellers– the youngest-ever member of South Carolina's state legislature, CNN commentator and influential African American attorney–points this nation forward in his new book, My Vanishing Country. Another black man chokes and dies under the knee of a cop in Minnesota, white privilege and a black birdwatcher meet in Central Park and protests erupt across the country. African Americans are dying at a disproportionate rate from COVID-19, online school leaves behind African American children who don't have access to broadband, let alone clean water, the Payroll Protection Plan didn't get to many black-owned businesses because they have no bank in their neighborhood. When does this end? More honesty, more action, says Bakari Sellers, for all our sakes.

Drawing on real life research and technology, P.W. Singer's new technological thriller, Burn In, shows how AI gets real fast and asks who controls our future. Will Siri, Alexa and smart houses and, above all, AI robots overtake the human grasp on our destiny? Will tech moguls pull the strings? For good or ill? The Wall Street Journal calls Singer "the premier futurist in the national security environment." He is Strategist at the New America Foundation and New York Times bestselling author of "Ghost Fleet" and "Wired for War." Damon Lindelof, writer/creator of Lost, Star Trek and Watchmen calls "Burn-In" a "rollercoaster ride of science fiction blended with science fact." P.W. Singer and co-author August Cole raise the question: when AI supercharges robots, who controls the off switch? Is there one?

The scenes at the White House press briefings have been wild for years. Crazy talk about injecting bleach and light are the latest. Ashley Parker covered Mitt Romney in 2012 and Jeb Bush and then President Trump's run for the Presidency in 2016 when she was with The New York Times and she now covers the Trump White House for The Washington Post. From her earliest years as a journalist, and she is still very young, she has held major leaders accountable with the power of her reporting. We wanted to know what it's like to cover the Trump White House right now. In the briefing room. In the Rose Garden. In the hallways. As the Covid death toll mounts, the economy tanks, and the November election looms up on the horizon, how will she approach this unusual Presidency full of misinformation, exaggerations and untruths who casts journalists themselves in opposition to him as we head into election season?

The world is desperate for a vaccine. It's a life or death race with massive geo political implications. A game of exposure, time and risk as more mutations of COVID-19 increases the monumental task for the scientists. The need for speed and scale is enormous. Omar Khan is part of the biotech revolution for nucleic acid vaccines based on an RNA delivery technology he created while at MIT. It is changing the way we make vaccines! He says we need all scientists on deck with both traditional vaccine development that takes 6-8 months and gene therapy solutions that can take 7 days. ....He urges that we fire on all cylinders to get it right. But can we produce it fast enough?

Dipayan Ghosh's new book, Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design calls for a Digital Bill of Rights, anti-trust action on Big Tech and new rules to ensure the tech titans have American democracy in mind. But in this interview, he surprised us! He says YES to Google digitizing NYC with Governor Cuomo, YES to Big Tech running coronavirus Track and Trace if done carefully... and he goes deep with us on privacy, consumer rights, and using tech in a crisis.

Robert Reich, American economist, professor, and author who served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton cares deeply about this country. You can hear it in his voice as he walks us through the shortcomings that are failing the American people, a society deeply cracked under the strain of COVID, the lost American Dream and unrelenting rise of unemployment. His new book is The System: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It. In this riveting interview, Reich lays out why and how this moment calls us to reclaim our personal power and create countervailing winds to take our power back as a society.

Sarah Kendzior, author of The View From Flyover Country in 2016 and her new book Hiding in Plain Sight, studied autocrats in Central Asia then came home to find one, she says, elected in her own country, the USA. She's a bare-knuckled critic of the Trump administration and she has been ringing the bell that this is a "transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government." Says he'll try to cancel the November election is he thinks he's going to lose – and that Mitch McConnell's judges may support him. Says the Trump family is out to establish a dynasty, with Ivanka next in line. The host of Gaslit Nation has done her homework with over 30 pages of footnotes. We dive in with the fierce Sarah Kendzior.

When, how and will college students get back on campus? University of California Professor Christopher Newfield wrote The Great Mistake in 2016 on how we wrecked public universities and failed the middle class. Now COVID-19 has knocked schools flat. He calls for refunding and rebuilding public higher ed at the end of neoliberalism. Talk about prescient. We are also joined by Kent Syverud, Chancellor of private Syracuse University. Both say we need a Marshall Plan - and fast - to help American higher ed rise again. With pandemic, dramatic unemployment and a stone cold economy, how do we revive the American university? Time to get creative!

In 1989, at the age of 29, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, serialized in The New Yorker. Hit with plague, not to mention draught, floods and swinging temperatures, Bill is with us to look at how we seize this moment to restart how we live and mitigate the next tragedy before it is too late.