The Quarantine Tapes

On episode 178 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by Jacqueline Novogratz. Jacqueline is the founder and CEO of the non-profit Acumen. Jacqueline and Paul celebrate their birthday, both born on the Ides of March, before turning to how Jacqueline approaches her work with Acumen, both during the pandemic and beyond.

Jacqueline talks about how Acumen engages with investment and how the pandemic drove them to understand their role in community-building on a deeper level. They talk about the need for moral imagination and the essential role of reading in building understanding, touching on Mary Oliver, Gabriel García Márquez, and more.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of Acumen. In 2001, Jacqueline founded Acumen with the idea of investing philanthropic patient capital in entrepreneurs seeking to solve the toughest issues of poverty. As a pioneer of impact investing, Acumen and its investments have brought critical services like healthcare, education and clean energy to hundreds of millions of low-income people. 

After supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs, Jacqueline and her team recognized character as the crucial ingredient for success; in 2020, they launched Acumen Academy to instruct others in global social change. Under Jacqueline’s leadership, Acumen also has launched several for-profit impact funds designed to invest at the intersection of poverty and climate change, and has spun off 60 Decibels, founded on the principle that serving all stakeholders is as important as enriching shareholders.

Jacqueline is the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Sweater and Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World. She has been named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy, one of the 25 Smartest People of the Decade by the Daily Beast, and one of the world’s 100 Greatest Living Business Minds by Forbes, which also honored her with the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Social Entrepreneurship. 

Credits:

Paul Holdengraber - Co-Creator, Host, OLA Director
Anthony Audi - Co-Creator, Researcher, OLA Director
Alejandro Cohen - Co-Creator, Producer, Composer
Christian Pitt - Production Coordinator 
Erin Cooney - Copy, Production
Dublab Team

On episode 176 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by author Nathalie Etoke. Recorded during the time of the historic trials surrounding the death of George Floyd, Nathalie expands on the way that the pandemic has brought into focus many things that were dormant. In this moment of reckoning, Nathalie expertly addresses the truth about what shapes racism, and asks us all to consider what are the consequences of imperialism on our notions of collective human culture. 

Paul and Nathalie continue to dig into the challenging questions that explore how to be human in a dehumanized world, and how we experience the fullness of life, in the face of death and disaster. Nathalie also shares a passage from her new book called Shades of Black, soon to be published in April 2021, by Seagull Books, and the pair discuss further ways we create the connection to living with history, and the need to find a way to get along, to live together and share it.

Nathalie Etoke is Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her articles have appeared in Research in African Literatures, French Politics and Culture, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Présence Francophone, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. 

She is the author of L’Écriture du corps féminin dans la littérature de l’Afrique francophone au sud du Sahara and of Melancholia Africana the Indispensable Overcoming of The Black Condition which won the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In 2011, she directed Afro Diasporic French Identities, a documentary on race, identity and citizenship in contemporary France.​​Her upcoming book Shades of Black will be published in April 2021.​

Additional links:

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/French/Faculty-Bios/Nathalie-Etoke

https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/03/17/review-of-nathalie-etokes-melancholia-africana/

Credits:

Paul Holdengraber - Co-Creator, Host, OLA Director
Anthony Audi - Co-Creator, Researcher, OLA Director
Alejandro Cohen - Co-Creator, Producer, Composer
Christian Pitt - Production Coordinator 
Erin Cooney - Copy, Production
Dublab Team

This episode of The Quarantine Tapes is a very special episode bringing together clips from the past one year of the podcast. With these clips, join us in returning to some of the most thoughtful, interesting, and moving moments from this chronicle of our past year in quarantine. We hear from Werner Herzog, Naveen Kishore, and Rosanne Cash on their hopes and fears in the early days of this crisis, and from Patton Oswalt, Joy Harjo, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., and many more over the course of the past year.

These luminous voices speak to the despair of the beginning of the pandemic and look forward with hope to what we might be able to change when we come out of this moment. These clips address the many topics that have been on our minds this past year, from the books that kept us company to the moment the world turned off last March to the reckoning of last summer’s protests. The reflections from our past guests range from moving to funny to heartfelt in this unique look back at one year of The Quarantine Tapes.

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Part 1 Symphony of voices features the following Quarantine Tapes Guests: Pico Iyer, Elif Shafak, Daniel Mendelsohn, Simon Critchley, Julian Sands, Henry Rollins, Lynette Wallworth, Naomi Shihab Nye, Werner Herzog, Maira Kalman, Joy Harjo, Romila Thapar, Lynell George, Sister Judy Vaughn, Naveen Kishore, Rosanne Cash, Baz Dreisinger, Kwame Dawes, Patton Oswalt, Jackie Goldberg, Viet Thanh Ngyuen, Isabella Rossellini, Mona Eltahawy, Howard Bryant,