Terrence Mcnally Podcast

In WHY RELIGION? A Personal Story, ELAINE PAGELS weaves what she's learned about religion with her own experience responding to dual tragedies that took place 25 years ago – the death of her young son, followed a year later by the death of her husband. She asks, Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? How do traditions still shape the way people - whether religious or not - experience everything from sexuality to politics? Finally, can religion help us get through the most difficult challenges we face?

Too often when we read about immigrant children, they are being torn from their parents' arms or blamed for lawlessness. Sisters Constance Touey & Jeannette Lucey met in 1984 when they were both assigned to a parish K-8 school in inner city Philadelphia. DO IT BETTER: How the Kids of St. Francis de Sales Exceeded Everyone's Expectations tells remarkable stories of their 30+ years as principal and 8th grade teacher as they worked to educate and transform the lives of wave after wave of poor immigrant children. I'm proud to have written it with them.

How are we doing by our kids? School and college budgets shrink. Teacher strikes are on the rise. College debt is crippling. Children are separated from their parents. I check in with DAVID KIRP, Professor at UC Berkeley. His books include THE SANDBOX INVESTMENT and KIDS FIRST. We talk about innovative programs that work and could make a big difference. If only we cared.

CORY DOCTOROW, has a lot to say about human nature, society, and technology. He writes speculative fiction - YA best-seller LITTLE BROTHER, and most recently the novel, WALKAWAY and graphic novel IN REAL LIFE. As a technology expert and activist, he’s co-editor of Boing Boing.net, a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. Learn more at craphound.com. I suspect we’ll just scratch the surface. Photo: jonathanworlth.com

As the government shutdown continues and 800,000 federal workers suffer along with asylum seekers caught by the President’s anti-immigrant actions, listen to my interview from last February with ALI NOORANI, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and author of THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. You can learn more at ali-noorani.com and immigrationforum.org where you can link to Ali’s podcast, Only In America.

BILLY WIMSATT, is the founder and executive director of Movement Voter Project, which offers a clear break from the tired and true strategy of electoral politics - big donors, big consultants, and big TV ad buys. MVP helps progressive donors move some of their money to support the best local community-based organizations in key states - organizations alive on the ground 365 days a year, whether there’s an election or not. In 2018, they moved more than $13M to 350+ groups in 42 states - in almost every competitive US House, Senate, Governors race and ballot measure. You can learn more at movement.vote.

In his newest book, We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the 21st Century, ERWIN CHEMERINSKY, Dean of Berkeley Law, makes the case that the right has since the 1970s developed and enacted a clear vision of constitutional interpretation. He calls on progressives to fight back with an alternative vision based on fulfilling the Constitution’s promise of liberty and justice for all.

Investigative reporter GREG PALAST (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) has been exposing GOP dirty tricks and voter suppression since 2000. Listen for the latest in the mid-terms in Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere - and how to fight back.

As Trump cronies are caught up in Mueller’s dragnet, let’s look at how justice works for regular folks. 2006 documentary AFTER INNOCENCE tells the stories of wrongly convicted prisoners exonerated and freed by DNA evidence. My guests include: JESSICA SANDERS, Director, Producer, Writer; MARC SIMON, Producer, Writer, and a former attorney with the Innocence Project; HERMAN ATKINS, exonerated and released in 2001 after 13 years in prison; DENNIS MAHER, exonerated and released in 2003 after 19 years in prison; and J W CARNEY who prosecuted Maher.

While elections matter, a vital society demands much more. In How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't, LESLIE CRUTCHFIELD examines some movements that have succeeded — from tobacco control and gun rights expansion, to marriage equality and acid rain reduction — as well as recent campaigns that haven’t - like Occupy Wall Street, controlling C02 emissions, and gun violence prevention. Her research identifies six practices linked to success. We’ll explore them so you can put them to work.

Midterms are over, Sessions has been fired, Trump has two months till the new House arrives. I’m on vacation and can’t respond to any of that. This week you’ll hear my April 2010 conversation with Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries. We’re joined by Luiz Perez, one of the senior staff at Homeboy. My guests and their work run absolutely counter to the kinds of prejudice and ugliness indulged in by the President.

DAVID CORN wrote the Mother Jones cover story - The Most Important Election of Our Lives, declared that "The Russia scandal is the most important scandal in the history of the United States", and co-authored with Michael Isikoff, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. Who better to talk to at this moment...less than two weeks till the midterms.

JOHN NICHOLS, Nation magazine’s national affairs correspondent, reports from Texas on Beto O’Rourke’s insurgent campaign against Senator Ted Cruz. We place today’s political and societal crises in context - How are things broken? How did they get broken? How do we fix them? With a nod to new blood and new passion on the campaign trail.

MARSHALL GANZ dropped out of Harvard in ’64 to work on Freedom Summer, was a lead organizer for years with United Farm Workers, and led the grass-roots storytelling model for Obama ’08. He’s a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, having returned after 28 years to earn his BA and PhD. I participated recently in one of his public narrative trainings. For the mid-terms and beyond, we need to learn from him. Here’s our conversation, recorded in March 2012.

A friend emailed me JOAN WILLIAMS’ Harvard Business Review article, What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class. Read over 3.7 million times, it’s the most read article in HBR’s 90-plus year history, and I can see why. WILLIAMS is the author of WHITE WORKING CLASS: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. “If we don’t take steps to bridge the class culture gap, when Trump proves unable to bring steel back to Youngstown, the consequences could turn dangerous.”

It’s 10 years since the financial crash, and books, articles and commentators are looking back. So let’s listen to my 2010 conversation with Michael Lewis, We talk about his #1 best-seller THE BIG SHORT, but more than that, I ask him to define terms - like securitization, derivatives, credit default swaps. It's one of my all time favorite interviews.

I read an interview by Dahr Jamail with today’s guest, cultural communication expert Milton Bennett, at Truthout.org. Titled Is There a Cult of Trump? It spells out the methods utilized – consciously or unconsciously - by Trump to turn his followers into a cult – impervious to outside or contrary influence and united in defense of their aims and their leader. It’s a story of tactics and behavior that transform the Trump phenomenon into something more dangerous than a simple political divide.

This weekend when folks in communities around the world take part in a Global Day of Climate Action, you'll hear my October 2017 conversation with PAUL HAWKEN (The Ecology of Commerce; Natural Capitalism; Blessed Unrest) about his research project and best-selling book: DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, which ranks the 80 most impactful solutions - plus 20 others for which there isn't enough data yet to rank them.

California Natural Resources Agency predicts severe heat waves, wildfires, ocean rise will cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Trump administration decimates Obama emissions rules for cars and power plants. Rise Up for Climate global day of action Sat 9/8. MICHAEL BRUNE, Executive Director of Sierra Club, shares good news, bad news, and ways to get involved.

In light of the Cohen and Manafort verdicts and the overturning of Obama Clean Air policy of regulating power plant emissions, let’s listen to my 2005 conversation with JARED DIAMOND regarding his book COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED. In his earlier Pulitzer-prize winning bestseller GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. In COLLAPSE, he asks: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?