Free Forum with Terrence McNally

We lost perhaps our nation’s most influential Buddhist with the death of ROBERT THURMAN June 16th at the age of 84. A former monk, ordained and partly trained by the Dalai Lama, left the monastery, earned a Harvard doctorate, taught at Amherst & Columbia, and wrote, edited and translated more than 20 books on Buddhism, both scholarly and for the general public. He was a founder of the American...

I learned a lot in this conversation with CORY DOCTOROW and in his new book, THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI. Rather than fear AI, Doctorow uses it daily, but he is also skeptical. He reminds us that nothing about the way things are unfolding with AI, technology, or society is inevitable, though that is the contention of those who profit from it. He warns that, if - in protesting AI’s...

Here’s my 2008 conversation with ROBERT COLES, child psychiatrist, Harvard Professor, and author of 75 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning six volume Children of Crisis. He died June 4 at the age of 97. He spent a lifetime listening to people - often those ignored by others - and told their stories. Coles was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998...

I speak with ANNIE LEONARD & ANDRE CAROTHERS. She created the video documentary, The Story of Stuff, and led Greenpeace US for a decade. He worked for Greenpeace for 13 years and co-founded the Rockwood Institute. The new book they’ve written together, PROTEST: Respect it. Defend it. Use it includes brief essays on 42 protests from the 1700s to the present. It offers history and how-to, challe...

When many believe HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - lacking in scientific, medical or public health training - is giving alternative medicine a bad name, here’s my 2003 conversation with Andrew Weil MD. We trace the evolution of Dr. Weil’s work and thinking from his earliest understandings of health and healing to his ongoing commitment to train a new generation of physicians. Weil’s definitio...

Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah lost his brother to Israeli authorities in the second Intifada. Israeli Jew Maoz Inon lost both his parents to Hamas on October 7th. In their book, The Future Is Peace , these two travel guides to Israel/Palestine and lifelong peace activists, take readers on a journey across their holy bloodstained land. They share the mythic, political, and personal history that divide...

Plato cautions that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny because the rich always want to get richer and the poor will follow a demagogue who promises to overthrow the rich. I first learned of Plato’s critique in this 2020 conversation with ASTRA TAYLOR, about her documentary WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? and companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. We explore democracy’s ea...

I speak with former federal prosecutor BRENDAN BALLOU about a number of things. His first book was PLUNDER: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and we get an update . He’s founder and CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which sues those who seek to bribe government officials, as well as officials who seek to be bribed. We check in on that. Ballou was among those who prosecuted the attackers...

1) History-making entrepreneurial scientist CRAIG VENTER, died last week at the age of 79. The New York Times obituary leads with these words, “A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition, and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.” In 2000, his team published the first sequence of the human genome – earlier and for far less money than the government-sponsored Human Genome Projec...

Climate scientist MICHAEL MANN ( The New Climate War) has been a target of threatening abuse ever since he led the team that produced the “hockey stick graph” making clear the extreme rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. PETER HOTEZ ( Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism ) has likewise been targeted since his highly visible role in vaccine development and public heath communicat...

In “even-a-broken-clock …” news this week, Donald Trump did something I applaud. He signed an executive order to accelerate research and access to psychedelic drugs for medical use, particularly to treat serious mental illness. Psychedelic substances have been used for ceremony and as medicine for millennia. Such properties were being cultivated and studied in the US in the 1960s and early ‘70s ti...

When tech billionaires make nice with authoritarians and AI challenges are everywhere, I check in with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, a former tour manager for Bob Dylan & The Band, a producer of films including Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS, and the author of MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined D...

When tech billionaires seem okay with authoritarianism and AI may be today’s existential challenge, here’s my 2013 conversation with Jaron Lanier about his book, WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? Lanier envisions a radical solution to surveillance capitalism that he believes could restore the American middle class: we all get paid for our data - which is, after all, the source of the value of networks like Fac...

Let’s get down to basics. Does your life have a purpose? Can you justify your existence? I talk with REBECCA GOLDSTEIN, philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow, about THE MATTERING INSTINCT: H ow Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us . Goldstein asserts we are “creatures of matter who long to matter” - physical beings governed by the laws of nature, yet obsessed with our own significanc...

To remind us what has to heal to put MAGA behind us, here’s my 2020 conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning husband-wife team, NICHOLAS KRISTOF & SHERYL WuDUNN. Their book, TIGHTROPE, tells how Nick’s childhood home - Yamhill, Oregon - was devastated by the loss of well-paying jobs and policy failures in education, healthcare, and justice that led to his childhood friends’ deaths of despair -...

I talk with TROY BRENNAN, professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and former Chief Medical Officer at CVS Health about his latest book, WONDERFUL AND BROKEN: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the US. The US accounts for roughly half of total global health care spending, even though it's only 4% of world population. The World Health Organization ranks US healthcare 37th ove...

For Oscar week, two half hour film-linked episodes from the archives. First my 2006 conversation with ROGER EBERT, following that year’s Oscars, where CRASH beat BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN for Best Picture. The vote was controversial in the film world and the fact that a gay cowboy movie came close riled the homophobic hearts of the Christian Right. So lots to talk about. In the second half, my 2007 episo...

TRILLION DOLLAR WAR MACHINE - the title of the new book BILL HARTUNG & BEN FREEMAN wrote together - is about a trillion dollar a year machine for waging wars and for creating them. Donald Trump has discovered he likes using it. We spend more than we did in 1985 for a military half the size. Hartung & Freeman talk about a military-lobbyist-newsmedia-entertainment-sports-industrial complex....

Here’s my 2017 conversation with CHIP BERLET, investigative journalist, research analyst, activist - and friend - who died January 30, 2026. Over the last 50 years, Chip was one of a handful of folks who consistently tracked and organized against right-wing extremism. As MAGA grew and metastasized from its roots in the Silent Majority and the Tea Party, Chip was on the beat. Can’t say he didn’t wa...

How we “talk” to each other has changed dramatically since 1990 when Georgetown linguistics professor DEBORAH TANNEN brought gender differences in communication style to public awareness in her phenomenal best-seller, YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND. Personal interactions now include email, texting, What’s App, Slack, emojis, and AI. Over the years, Tannen has explored everyday conversation between men...

I believe we need compelling visions of life after the current horror is over. What if we loved our children? How would things be different? Here’s my 2011 conversation with DAVID KIRP about his book, KIDS FIRST: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children's Lives and America's Future . These innovative programs have all been tried. They work and they deserve to be invested in and expanded nationally...

In her 1997 book, BIOMIMICRY: Innovation Inspired by Nature , JANINE BENYUS - biologist, author, and innovation consultant - coined a term and invented a field. After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world has succeeded and survived. Animals, plants, and microbes have found what works, what’s appropriate, and what lasts here on Ear...

Here’s my 2002 conversation with SHARON SALZBERG, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society on her book, FAITH: TRUSTING YOUR OWN DEEPEST EXPERIENCE. Sharon is a New Yorker, and the book is her response to the experience of 9/11. Seems like it might be helpful in our current dark time. Faith in what? Where do we place our faith when the US is beset by cruel authoritarianism and the world by mul...

I speak with journalist and best-selling author, GEORGE PACKER (THE UNWINDING, LAST BEST HOPE) about his first novel in decades, THE EMERGENCY. He felt facts were no longer hitting home. It’s an allegory - not unlike those of his hero, George Orwell - in an unknown time or place with plenty of resonances with our current moment. What happens to society when the established order falls? …to familie...

As deadly protests engulf Iran and a mass pro-democracy movement seems the path forward in the US, here’s my 2012 conversation with WAEL GHONIM about his book, REVOLUTION 2.0. Ghonim, a 30-year-old Google manager, unwilling to publicly criticize the Egyptian regime, anonymously launched a Facebook campaign to protest one killing by security forces. How did the Egyptian people finally find their vo...