Social Justice & Activism - The Creative Process - Activists, Environmental, Indigenous Groups, Artists and Writers Talk Diversity, Equity and inclusion

“I think one of the things that we have to acknowledge and repeat over and over again is that the general narrative that there has been no resistance or protest to the current regime is absolutely untrue. People in India have been protesting and protesting consistently across the country. What we've seen is a lack of media attention. But what you've also seen is a kind of violent, disproportionate...

“You can see how important storytelling is to fascism and to MAGA and to ICE. And that type of narrative is seductive to a whole lot of people, not just white people but to a lot of other people as well, and it's yoked to many other narratives around what is the United States, what is American power, what is going to benefit American power, what's going to erode American power. So there's a tremen...

“I think that Jews have become extremely solipsistic in a way that is embarrassing. It's very much contrary to the way I was brought up, which was not to talk about yourself, which was to talk about other people and to serve other people. That was part of the heritage that I received from the Holocaust and from my family's background as refugees was, “You're not a refugee. You've got it pretty goo...

“I think first of all that in order to have disillusion, you need to have illusion and I really want to sort of take a stand in the name of being a delusional person, you know? I do think illusions are necessary to our sense of creativity, and we need to fall in love with extreme projects, and we need to have ideas that are sometimes unsustainable. We need to dream big in order to be creative and...

Chiara Barzini has spent her life navigating the literal and cultural fault lines between Italy and California. Today we will discuss her book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams , and her life as an artist living between two countries. In her acclaimed 2017 novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake , she wrote about arriving in the San Fernando Valley just weeks after a catastrophic n...

Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of human sorrow. Georgi Gospodinov is widely considered one of the most daring voices in contemporary European literature. His acclaimed novel, The Physics of Sorrow , won the prestigious Jan Michalski Prize in 2016 , blending ancient myth and quantum physics to chronicle the delicate realities of post-socialist Easter...

“We are in the middle of a labyrinth which suggests to us many fake corridors. What's the superpower of literature? Literature is like an antidote against propaganda. Propaganda explains the world easily in a two-dimensional way.  Literature gives you a more complex explanation. Literature tells personal stories.” Today, we have a conversation about time, memory, and the bittersweet geography of h...

“Lincoln Center is multiple stages. I think probably over three dozen stages across 16 acres. It is a vast canvas in and of itself. And then we have this beautiful plaza that leads to this beautiful campus, and that’s the visual I think that most people have when they think of Lincoln Center is this beautiful fountain in the center and these three gorgeous buildings. It’s New York’s biggest plaza,...

"I really do believe that the arts are critical to how we move forward together, and live performance in particular, I think, is a way of us practicing how to move across our ideological boundaries and find one another and imagine these new worlds together and create together." Shanta Thake is the Chief Artistic Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts —the nation's largest performing art...

Today, we examine how we will adapt to a changing climate and learn to listen to the Earth.(0:00) Abrahm Lustgarten (Reporter, ProPublica) (3:00) Jon Gertner (Author, The Ice at the End of the World) (5:32) Bill Hare (CEO, Climate Analytics) (6:35) Rob Nixon (Prof. Environmental Humanities, Princeton) (8:12) Louis de Jaeger (Co-founder, Food Forest Institute) (10:06) Kathleen Rogers (Pres., EarthD...

Today, we hear from writers  Yann Martel, Carl Safina  and  David George Haskell  on the practice of listening to the living world.  Tom Chi  discusses the dangerous volatility of a one-degree shift.  Clayton Aldern  explores how climate change alters brain health and behavior, while  Ami Vitale,Osprey Orielle Lake  and  Martín Von Hildebrand...

Why does our economy treat environmental destruction as an inevitable side effect rather than a massive design flaw? How can shifting our focus from polarizing "talkers" to practical "builders" literally save the planet? We are repeatedly told that the climate crisis is too vast and volatile to solve, but what if the true obstacle is simply bad design? Tom Chi  is a physicist, designer, inven...

“In the book I spend a bunch of time basically teaching skills and teaching frameworks of thinking. Not to indoctrinate, it's not a framework like an ideology where you need to believe exactly these things. This is a lot more about how does one use their minds effectively to solve problems that have been solved before. Of course, I work on things that have to do with investment and climate and the...

Salwa and Selma Mikou are the founders of Paris-based Mikou Architecture . Born in Fez, Morocco and educated in Paris, they have spent the last two decades reimagining the relationship between the built environment and the cultural landscape. After honing their craft under two of the world’s most iconic architects, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano, they founded their own studio. For them, architecture...

Step into the deep time of the forest floor, where a single fallen leaf contains the history of the world, and invisible fungal networks hum with ancient conversations. Biologist and acclaimed author David George Haskell reveals a staggering truth: we are completely dependent on the botanical world, and our belief in strict human individuality is a biological illusion. Haskell has spent much of hi...

Two weeks away from filming her most ambitious film to date, Cherien Dabis and her crew were forced to evacuate Palestine as the devastating events of October 2023 began. Instead of abandoning the project, they adapted, filming across Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece, creating a cinematic love letter to the resilience, joy, and humanity of the Palestinian people. My guest today is Cherien Dabis . She’s...

“These oppressive structures are built to strip us of our humanity. One of the ways they do that is by filling us with anger and hatred. If we allow ourselves to stay there, we're doing the job of the oppressor for them by slowly killing ourselves. I wanted to make a movie that would remind people that we can't allow them to win by giving up our humanity . We have to hold onto our humanity and try...

"The thing that puzzled him was why people don't agree to be fully expressed while they're alive. Why does it only happen in their last moment? Why wouldn't you live being fully expressed?" My guest today is  AL Kennedy . She is one of Britain’s most acclaimed and versatile literary voices, a writer who can inhabit the internal life of a soldier in a POW camp, as she did in her Costa Book Awa...

What happens when the state infiltrates your most intimate relationships? How do we protect the innocence and imagination of children in an increasingly authoritarian world? “"If you have love, eventually you're going to win. It's not that people aren't going to die. It's not terrible things aren't going to happen. But if you stay with that and you stay centered in that, you'll get through and you...

“Grief happens because you don't stop loving the person who died. The person doesn't exist in your reality anymore. The everyday is not colored and shaped by this other human being, but you don't stop loving the person. So grief is a particular kind of unrequited love. And probably without that dynamic relationship with this person, I would be someone else. And he would've been someone else. I mea...

Can curiosity and empathy be taught? How can we expand our sense of solidarity through stories? In this episode, we explore the internal dialogues of artists, actors and writers to ask what it means to step into someone else's shoes. (0:00) Novelist  Jim Shepard discusses Literature as a Tool for Emotional Education and Exploring History (2:05) Tony Award-winning Actor Neil Patrick Harris on...

In this special edition, we hear from our guests from across the arts and sciences. From composers and poets to forest ecologists and climate envoys, they tell the story of our planet. Moving beyond the data of destruction, we explore the intelligence of nature, the ethics of what we eat, and the empathy required to save our future. MAX RICHTER , Composer, Sleep, The Blue Notebooks CARL SAFINA , A...

On Music, Trust and Connection with the Animal World “Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I think can work for an animal because they can sense the sadness, and they try to reassure me and comfort me. I chose love songs because I'm convinced they are very intuitive and they can sense what I am trying to say to them, and profess my love in a way. I think there's always a way to co...

How is music a pathway to understanding animals? Musician Plumes ‍ takes his guitar to the world's most unlikely concert halls—farms, sanctuaries, and wild habitats. A passionate advocate for veganism and animal welfare, we discuss what animals hear, how trust forms, and what music can reveal when it enters a world not made for humans alone. “Mostly I’ll play in a minor key, something sad, which I...

On the urgent need to reclaim our political voices, the forces that silence dissent, and how art and poetry are crucial tools for survival Our guest today is an activist scholar who believes the classroom is inseparable from the public square. David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and a founding faculty member of Stanford’s Program...