The 7th Avenue Project

Musical explorer Rick Walker pauses for a moment to retrace some of the ground he's traversed in the last 35 years, from his early days as a punk/ska/new wave drummer to a serious student of world percussion traditions to electronica and looping to jazz.

Even the most commonplace social interactions can get awfully dicey when race is involved. Enter Jenée Desmond-Harris, who writes the Race Manners advice column at theroot.com, helping readers sort through racially charged situations in everyday life. Jenée and I talked about her own background, the complexities of contemporary race relations and the predicaments we find ourselves in.A small sampling of the topics we discussed:

-Identity as a matter of choice

-Being biracial in America

-Talking to kids about race

-Aestheticizing and sexualizing race

-The racist uncle at the dinner table

If you've bought into the simplified notion that genes are top-down bosses, issuing marching orders that your cells, body and brain merely obey, it's time to rethink. Biobehavioral scientist Steve Cole and colleagues are assembling a new picture of genes that don't just talk, but also listen. Though scientists have long known that external inputs affect gene regulation (which genes are switched on or off), the degree to which large numbers of genes are influenced moment-to-moment by our experiences – including our social life, our feelings and perceptions – is an important developing story. Steve and I talked about this new understanding of the mind-body connection, how feelings and perceptions may impact the immune system via changes in gene regulation and the emerging field he calls “social genomics.” After hearing this interview, you may never feel the same about your genome again.

A musical gets a second life as Cabrillo Stage rolls out a new version of “Lunch: A Modern Musical Myth” this week. I spoke to two members of the Emmy/Grammy/Oscar/Golden Globe-nominated creative team: composer Steve Dorff and book writer Rick Hawkins. They told me why they felt the story of 11th-hour redemption was ripe for revival, and how they updated both script and songs. We also listened to some of the original music, recorded in 1994 with an all-star studio cast including Carol Burnett, Michael Rupert, Laurie Beechman and Davis Gaines. Lunch Reimagined premieres Jan 3 at Cabrillo Stage.

I've spoken to Paul Bloom previously about the precocious moral awareness of young infants and the ingenious experiments used to demonstrate it. Now Paul has synthesized those findings in a far-reaching exploration of our ethical capacities and limitations. His new book is "Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil" Topics covered in this interview include:

-Are we born with a sense of right and wrong?

-Gut feelings vs. rational deliberation as a basis for ethical behavior

-The roots of racism

-Mafia morality

-Sitcoms and moral uplift

Up and coming comic Ron Funches is trying to make it in the big time, and so far, so good. He's moved to LA, has a part in a new TV comedy series and is writing for another. We talked about Ron's path from open mics to paying gigs, developing his comic chops, his partiality to women comedians, why he still gets confused for a homeless person and what it's like to be meeting and working with some of his comic role models.

Since winning the Fields Medal (the closest thing in mathematics to the Nobel Prize) in 2010, Cédric Villani has become a roving ambassador for math and science. He's well-suited to the role: a patient explainer and broad-minded thinker, passionate about education and social engagement, with a seemingly limitless range of interests. We talked about Cédric's emergence as a math whiz, what it's like to spend years exploring a single equation, his fascination with statistical mechanics and entropy, whether math is "real" in some more-than-conceptual sense, what mathematicians do that computers can't, his love of comic books and his signature retro look.

That old 60's phrase "consciousness raising" may sound quaint and overblown today, but for a generation of progressive intellectuals it wasn't hyperbole. Feminism, for example, was more than a push for equality and social justice; it was a wholesale re-evaluation of all sorts of unexamined "truths" about the world and the stories we tell. It's easy to underestimate how much the ground shifted back then, which is why I wanted to talk to Helene Moglen. She was there for, and part of, the whole shebang. In this interview, Helene offered a very interesting look at her life, her times and work as a critic. Topics include: Faculty parties before and after the women's movement, what really happened at those consciousness raisings, and feminist readings of "Frankenstein" and "Robinson Crusoe.

David Harris-Gershon grew up regarding Palestinians as the enemy: “They were just the latest in a long line of people wanting us dead, lined up throughout history: Arabs, Germans, Russians, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians.” So you might think a Hamas-orchestrated bombing in Jerusalem that left two of his friends dead, his wife badly injured and him with a nasty case of PTSD would only harden those feelings. Instead, it led to a re-evaluation, a visit to the bomber's family and a more complicated view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. David and I talked about his new memoir and his change of heart.

"Filmmaker Michel Wenzer isn't interested in the lurid fare that typifies popular depictions of prison. He is interested in how some inmates manage to find a way to live and to grow in a place of desolation. For the men profiled in Wenzer's documentary At Night I Fly: Images from New Folsom, salvation comes in the form of self-examination and artistic engagement, helped along by the remnants of California's once-thriving Arts In Corrections program. We talked about Michel's experience filming in New Folsom (younger sibling of the original Folsom Prison) and the life lessons we could all learn from some of the lifers he met. I played some clips from At Night I Fly and also some bits of interviews I've done over the years with prison artists, including the poet Spoon Jackson, who was the inspiration for Michel's film.