Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Amanda Montell is a linguist, cultural commentator, and host of the weekly podcast  Sounds Like a Cult . In addition to essays published in  Time,   Cosmopolitan , and other magazines, she has published three books. Her first, W ordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language , released in 2019, established her as a writer who deconstructs biases in our culture, using...

Tom Chivers is a science writer who has won several awards, including the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism, the Association of British Science Writers’ science journalist of the year, and the  Times ’s science books of the year. He has written three books. His first,  The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Ar...

Colin Wayne Leach is a social and personality psychologist at Columbia University, who researches Schadenfreude -- i.e., deriving pleasure from witnessing someone else's misfortune -- and related emotions, such as Genugtuung, which means deriving pleasure from seeing justice done. Recorded 4/12/21.

Ran Barkai is the co-author, with Eyal Halfon, of the recently published book,  They Were Here Before Us: Stories from the First Million Years .  Dr. Barkai is a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, who for 20 years has co-directed the excavations and research at Qesem Cave in northern Israel. His wide-ranging research interests encompass stone tool technology, human-ele...

Vardit Ravitsky is a Professor of Bioethics at the University of Montreal and President of the International Association of Bioethics. Her research focuses on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics/genomics and assisted reproductive technologies and their implications for women’s autonomy and for disability rights. She is President of the International Association of Bioethics; Dir...

Jay Joseph is a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Joseph challenges the empirical evidence behind the mainstream view that mental illness is genetically based, and argues instead that the real causes include oppression, trauma, abuse, and psychologically unhealthy aspects of the social and political environment. He is the author of four books, most recently&nb...

David Olds is a professor at the Pediatrics-Prevention Research Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has devoted his long and distinguished career to the developing and testing of very early interventions in family and child functioning, starting prenatally and continuing through toddler age. After devoting decades to high quality, random assignment, longitudi...

In 2003, Ron Hoffman became the founder of an organization in Falmouth, Massachusetts called Compassionate Care ALS ( CCALS.org ), which has helped well over 1000 families with Lou Gehrig’s disease on both practical and spiritual levels, above all by being deeply present. His memoir,  Sacred Bullet,  published in 2014, reveals in powerful and personal terms, how his own healing is w...

Olivia Campbell is a journalist, essayist, and author focusing on the intersections of medicine, women, history, and nature. Her work has appeared in  The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine , and many other major publications. She is the author of the 2021 NY Times bestseller,  Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine,  which i...

Isabelle Mansuy , a professor in neuroepigenetics in the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich and the Department of Health Science and Technology of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. Specializing in neuroepigenetics and molecular psychiatry, Dr. Mansuy is doing cutting edge research, using mice, to separate nature from nurture in how the effects of trauma, environmental stre...

Psychiatrist, professor, and researcher,  Randolph Nesse , is a cofounder of the field of evolutionary medicine. Twenty-five years ago his book,  Why We Get Sick , which he co-authored with George C. Williams, went on to sell more than 100,000 copies and to be translated into eight languages. He served for many years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he is a professor e...

Karen Valby is a culture writer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, O Magazine, Glamour, Fast Company, and EW. She is also the author of two books. The first,  Welcome to Utopia: Notes from a Small Town , was published in 2010. Her soon-to-be-released book,  The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and th...

Robert W. Derlet, MD is a Professor Emeritus at the medical school of the University of California, Davis, former Chief of Emergency Medicine at the Davis Medical Center, candidate for Congress in 2016, and author of the recent book,  Corporatizing American Health Care. Recorded 6/16/21.

Michele Nishiguchi, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Merced, she runs the Nishiguchi Symbiosis Lab, specializing in the study of the association and interaction between the tiny Bobtail squid and a light emitting bacteria called Vibrio fischeri, which are relevant to the evolution of both beneficial and detrimental bacteria in humans. Before her recent mov...

Bruce Hoffman  and  Jacob Ware are the coauthors of the recently published,  God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America . Dr. Hoffman is a professor at Georgetown University, professor emeritus of terrorism studies at the University of St Andrews, Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, and a Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at...

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and musician, focusing on race, public policy, and applied ethics. At the age of 28, he is already becoming a well-known commentator and critic on issues related to race-based policies. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their  City Journal.  He is also the host of the pod...

Ernest Scheyder is a senior correspondent for Reuters covering the green energy transition and the mining of the minerals required for its implementation. He previously covered the U.S. shale oil revolution, politics, and the environment. He is the author of the recently published book,  The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives . Recorded 3/6/24.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an anthropologist of religion at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the edge of human experience: hearing voices, having visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis, whether on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, with people who hear voices in India, Ghana, and southern California, with evangelical Christians who seek to...

Ken Hammond is a professor of East Asian and global history at NMSU since 1994, who lived in Beijing from 1982 to 1987 prior to completing his PhD at Harvard in 1994. He subsequently joined the history faculty of NMSU, specializing in East Asian history, particularly 16th century China. From 2007 to 2015 he was co-director of the Confucius Institute at NMSU. Long interested in human rights and pro...

Richard ("Dick") Scobie was the Executive Director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee from 1972 to 1998. Under his direction, the UUSC defended human rights and promoted humane solutions to social problems worldwide, from war zones in Central America, Africa and Asia, to America’s broken systems of criminal justice and child welfare. His memoir,  To Advance Justice ,  publis...

Ben Alderson-Day is a professor of psychology at Durham University in the UK, researching the phenomena of voice-hearing and unusual sensory experiences. Specializing in atypical cognition and mental health, his work spans cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and child development. He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Early Career Hallucinations Research group, a network comprising...

Aveek Bhattacharya was the Chief Economist and is now the Interim Director of the Social Market Foundation (SMF), a non-partisan think tank based in the U.K., which aims to promote evidence-based policy and cross-party co-operation in politics. Prior positions include Senior Policy Analyst at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, researching and advocating for policies to reduce alcohol-related harm....

Michael Yassa is a professor at the University of California at Irvine, where he is the director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. His research focuses on how the brain learns and remembers information, and how learning and memory mechanisms are altered in aging and neuropsychiatric disease, especially dementia. Today's interview also explores the crucial role of memory in...

Neil Harvey is a professor and academic department head in the Government Department at New Mexico State University. His main areas of interest encompass politics in Mexico and Latin America, especially social movements in the struggle for democracy and new forms of political representation. He has carried out field research in Chiapas, Mexico, into their independent peasant movements, land confli...

Roger Berkowitz is a professor of Political Studies and Human Rights, as well as the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, both at Bard College. He is the author of  The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition,  an account of how the rise of science led to the divorce of law and justice and the editor of  Reve...