In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #271 | Guests: Gilda Daniels and Myrna Peréz | Show Summary: Angie’s guests tackle the many obstacles to our most precious freedom: access to the ballot box. Donald Trump has convinced many voters not to trust the Post Office with their ballot, and overseen destruction of mailing systems. Gerrymandering is the norm across the country. And a rising number of poor districts and neighborhoods of color report hours-long voting lines. Angie's guests: Gilda Daniels is the author of Uncounted: The Crisis of Voter Suppression in America; she's a former Deputy Chief in the U.S. Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division, Voting Section. She served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations and is currently a professor of law at the University of Baltimore Law School. Myrna Peréz heads the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. She has testified before Congress and several state legislatures on a variety of voting rights related issues. She is a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School and has also served as an adjunct professor of clinical law at NYU School of Law.

Show #270 | Guests: Prof. William Howell and Prof. Terry Moe | Show Summary: Donald Trump, elected in a populist uprising, has eschewed the normal conventions of politics. But the idea of what’s “normal” needs to be examined in its own light. For example – “normally”, laws are drafted in Congress and sent to the President for signature. What if that were a two-way street? What if the President could propose legislation for Congress to approve? William Howell is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago; he’s the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the university’s Harris School of Public Policy. Terry Moe is at Stanford University, where he’s the Wm Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Together they’ve created an audacious proposal: what if we looked at the reality of “normal” politics – deadlocked, partisan, vulnerable to the worst of populist instincts – and literally rejiggered the Constitution to fix it? Their book is Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy.

Show #269 | Guest: Robert Reich | Show Summary: What if the Left/Right divide were more distraction than destruction? Economist and academic Robert Reich says the real threat is the wealth divide. Runaway economic injustice can spell the end of democracy, while we’re busy hating each other over social divides. We talk about his latest book, and the Netflix documentary Saving Capitalism. Robert Reich has immersed himself in the US economy for decades. He served in the administrations of three presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was on Barack Obama’s transition team of advisors. He’s a prolific book author, beginning in 1982 with Minding America’s Business. His latest was released earlier this year: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. Reich is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He co-founded the American Prospect, where he serves as chairman.

Show #268 | Guests: Dr. Joseph Pierre, Dr. Nancy Rosenblum | Show Summary: Q-anon; the Bill Gates vaccine plot; 911 truthers: this week's In Deep is an escorted dive into the murky world of conspiracies. What mental processes lead to belief in Q-Anon, or chemtrails, or vaccines as a corporate plot? With more conspiracies gaining ground – what’s the effect on democracy? Joseph Pierre is with the UCLA School of Medicine; Harvard’s Nancy Rosenblum is the co-author of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. They’ll walk us through understanding, coping with, and compensating for conspiracy theorists in America.

Show #267 | Guest: Dan Partland, director and producer | Show Summary: The American people divide into three groups. One group is certain there’s something deeply wrong and deeply dangerous with Donald Trump. A second group is concerned but unsure. The third group of our citizens cannot be persuaded that he’s a danger to our lives and country. This hour won’t do much for that last group. But for groups one and two, a new documentary will be of deep interest: Unfit: the Psychology of Donald Trump. Angie talks with the show's director and producer, Dan Partland. Dan is a Multi-Emmy winner of documentary and non-fiction TV, whose work includes series such as A&E’s Intervention, The Sixties on CNN, and American Race with Charles Barkley for TNT. Dan's work also includes landmark films of the independent cinema such as the feature documentary A Perfect Candidate along with Sundance winners Welcome to The Doll House and The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.

Show #266 | Guest: Susan Fowler | Show Summary: Susan Fowler was born determined. From a life of childhood poverty she pushed her way to an Ivy League school.     She swam upstream against misogynist Silicon Valley culture to land jobs in line with her energy and intellect. Then she blew it all wide open with a blog post in 2017, detailing the day-to-day sexism she'd had to confront as an engineer at Uber. That viral post, coupled with #MeToo, transformed both her own life and the halls of misogynist power.     Fowler has capitalized on the phenomenon to advocate for equality, support, and fairness in Silicon Valley. She's worked for labor reforms, including a push to eliminate arbitration agreements.     The New York Times cited Fowler’s "unique brand of courage, clarity of mind, and moral purpose" in hiring her as its technology opinion editor. Susan Fowler sat down with Angie Coiro do discuss her new book, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber.

Show #265 | Guest: Conor Dougherty | Show Summary: Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. Nowhere is this more visible than in the San Francisco Bay Area, where fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties where the homeless make their homes. The adage that California is a glimpse of the nation’s future has become a cautionary tale.     Angie sits down with New York Times economics reporter Conor Dougherty to discuss his new book, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, a penetrating look into the crisis of housing in America.

Show #264 | Guest: Diane Ravitch | Show Summary: Privatized schools were sold to the American public as a cut above— an avenue to the best education, drawing from under-performing public schools that doomed children to lower standards. At the same time, says education authority Diane Ravitch, Common Core was touted as the best route to at least basic educational success for all young students.     Both, Ravitch says, have failed spectacularly. Privatization has turned schools into profit machines less concerned with student success than the bottom line. Public schools have been gutted in their wake. And Common Core has caused tremendous problems for students and teachers.     Diane Ravitch served in education posts under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Her latest book, Slaying Goliath, takes on what she calls the "Disrupters," intent on promoting the privatization of our struggling education system. Unafraid of naming names, she cites the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Waltons (Walmart), Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, on the right and the left, as well as corporations, foundations, etc. sacrificing the public in favor of profit.

Show #263 | Guest: Kelly MacGonigal | Show Summary: What if the key to feeling vividly alive and energetic in your body is closer than you think? No matter what your past experience with exercise has been—from finding it a chore to falling in love with a favorite activity—it is possible to find happiness and meaning through movement. Acclaimed Stanford research psychologist Kelly McGonigal, who once offered readers a transformative new approach to stress, now looks beyond the gym and around the world to find the secrets of joy in movement. To Tanzania, where one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the world live; to a Julliard dance class for Parkinson’s sufferers; to London, where volunteers combine fitness with community service. Her new book The Joy of Movement draws on neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology to illustrate the link between well-being and movement.

Show #262 | Guest: David Talbot | Show Summary: A deeply personal interview with David Talbot, bestselling author of The Devil's Chessboard, Season of the Witch, and numerous others. After Talbot suffered a debilitating stroke, the journalist and historian turned inward, and came away with shifting priorities and a touching, honest, and suprisingly uplifting examination of mortality.Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke

Show #261 | Guest: Steve Inskeep | Show Summary: With an election year upon us, we are reminded that we have been through this before. The United States in the mid-1840s, for example, was a country in the middle of a major transformation, pushing its boundaries to extend from coast to coast to claim what many in that era asserted was America's Manifest Destiny.     A new book by NPR's Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep tells us this story through the tale of a political power couple who personified the ambition of that era. His book, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity and Helped Cause the Civil War, finds some similarities with today's political situation in the United States.     Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show #259 | Guest: Tamim Ansary | Show Summary: Thought leader Tamim Ansary returns for a discussion of his sweeping new nonfiction work, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000 Year History of Human Culture, Conflict and Connection.     Tamim Ansary sprang into prominence with Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Now he turns that scrutiny to the histories of smaller groups of people into today's globally connected, fully-interwoven human populace, and discovers something prescient: even before disparate human cultures ever met, their innovations always influenced one another… and now that influence is only speeding up. The world's major cultural movements— Confuscianism, Islam, Judeo-Christianity and Nomadism—have, he says, reached a new interrelationship inevitable in the march of human history. We are in a new time of revolutionary reinvention, as differing cultures overlap and transform rapidly due to global connectedness. What does this new proximity portend?     Tamim Ansary and Angie Coiro discuss the price and the prospect of this singularly connected moment in human history.

Show #258 | Guests: Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein | Show Summary: Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein examine the transformative power of education through the eyes of a dozen incarcerated men and women trying to earn college degrees, in their groundbreaking film College Behind Bars: Documenting The Bard Prison Initiative's Impact On Prisoners. Novick and Botstein, long-time associates of legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, invested years into filming inside the New York State prison system. College Behind Bars airs on PBS November 25 and 26, 2019.

Show #257 | Guest: Charles Postel | Show Summary: Charles Postel's new book, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896, compares and analyses today's wealth and power disparities in light of their origins in the Gilded Age of a century ago. Charles Postel, Professor of History at San Francisco State Univerity, is also the author of The Populist Vision.

Show #256 | Guest: Cyrus Grace Dunham | Show Summary: For as long as they can remember, Cyrus Grace Dunham felt like a visitor in their own body. Their life was a series of imitations–lovable little girl, daughter, sister, young gay woman–until their profound sense of alienation became intolerable. Moving between Grace and Cyrus, Dunham brings us inside the chrysalis of gender transition, asking us to bear witness to an uncertain and exhilarating process that troubles our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we are constituted. Written with disarming emotional intensity in a voice uniquely theirs, A Year Without a Name is a potent, thrillingly unresolved queer coming of age story.

Show #255 | Guest: Lawrence Lanahan | Show Summary: The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore's Racial Divide is an eye-opening account of how a city creates its black, white, rich, and poor spaces, and suggests these problems are not intractable. Lawrence Lanahan has worked in radio and print journalism for over a decade, including five years producing for WYPR, Baltimore's NPR station. At WYPR, he won a duPont Award for "The Lines Between Us," a year-long multimedia series about inequality.

Show #254 | Guest: Richard A. Conn, Jr. | Show Summary: The Earthbound Parent: How (and Why) to Raise Your Little Angels Without Religion is a meditation on how to encourage children to discover the world and their place in it for themselves. Richard A. Conn, Jr. is an international lawyer and private investment fund manager. He has advised governments on legal restructuring, has delivered a keynote to the United Nations, and is involved in various not-for-profit activities, including one that has taught chess to 1.2 million U.S. public school students.

Show #253 | Guest: Kelechi Ubozoh | Show Summary: Mental health advocate Kelechi Ubozoh discusses her new book We've Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health--Stories and Research Challenging the Biomedical Model.

Show #252 | Guest:Riane Eisler | Show Summary: Riane Eisler is the acclaimed author of The Chalice and The Blade, an investigation into the cultural roots of social systems and gender roles. Her new book, Nurturing our Humanity, lays out a new understanding of human possibilities, showing how we can structure our environments to support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity.

Show #251 | Guest: Haben Girma | Show Summary: Haben Girma, daughter of refugees and the first Deafblind woman to graduate from Harvard Law, has been honored for her activist work by President Obama, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Raised by two Eritrean refugee parents who survived a 30-year war, Haben learned to value courage and community early. In her lifetime so far, she has traveled the globe, mastered non-visual techniques for navigating both salsa and the electric saw, climbed an iceberg and faced a bull, and attained the prestigious degree that helps her advocate for increased access and equity for disabled persons. She does this all, joyfully, using innovations that allow her to move readily through abled spaces as a deaf and blind woman.      Angie sits down with Haben to discuss her brilliant new book Haben: The Deafblind Women Who Conquered Harvard Law.