Free Forum with Terrence McNally

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 f...

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 un...

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 t...

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...

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 technolog...

This week we replay an interview recorded March 25 2017 in the early days of Trump with JONATHAN SMUCKER. Currently a grassroots organizer in his hometown of Lancaster PA, Jonathan was involved with Occupy Wall Street and has a lot to say about what worked and what we can learn from what didn't. I turn to him now because the grassroots will go a long way to determining turnout in November, and tur...

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind, once as high as #4 on the NYTimes best-seller list, currently #4 in LA, tells the story of the scientific research as well as his personal experience of guided sessions with psychedelics. Award-winning LA Weekly columnist, Seven McDonald, does the same in an article for Playboy on the therapeutic use of MDMA (ecstasy) to treat PTSD. I'm joined by McDonald...

Late summer 2004, I recorded conversations with Thomas Frank on What's the Matter With Kansas? and with George Lakoff on Don't Think of an Elephant. We were deep in two wars and three months from the Bush-Kerry election. Both Frank and Lakoff point to blind spots about the way we see the world, how we frame what we experience, and how powerful both can be. What do they have to tell us today three...

Want to spend less time online and more time in the real world? Brain science has learned a lot about habits. That has given corporations new power with which to manipulate us, but it also gives us greater power over our own behavior. Listen to my 2012 conversation with CHARLES DUHIGG about his book THE POWER OF HABIT, in which he tells us what a habit is, how they form, how they can be broken, an...

Under John Roberts, Supreme Court decisions are consistently pro-business, recently based on corporate rights of free speech and freedom of religion. How did we get here? Will it only get worse with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh? Listen to my conversation with ADAM WINKLER, constitutional law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America and his la...

With the retirement of Justice Kennedy and the looming fight to hold back the confirmation of a replacement until after the mid-terms - which would increase voter turnout on both sides - let’s listen to my 2013 conversation with MARCIA COYLE re her book THE ROBERTS COURT: The Struggle for the Constitution. Coyle confirms my belief that the most crucial issue in considering the last few GOP-nominat...

As alarming as the news may be, we must not only oppose and alter the bad news, but we must also envision a possible future for the US that people deserve - as well as a path to get there. That is the mission of historian, political economist, activist, and writer, GAR ALPEROVITZ, co-chair of the Next System Project at the Democracy Collaborative, and someone who’s thinking seriously about what re...

Midterm elections take place November 7th – less than 20 weeks from the day we record this interview. Our democracy is under threat and the validity, accuracy, and reliability of our voting and vote-counting is as well. I talk about those threats and what we can do about them with BRAD FRIEDMAN, an independent investigative blogger, journalist, and muckraker who’s broken numerous stories over the...

On a national level and in many states, the GOP know that if politics and elections are played fair and square, they lose. So they turn to gerrymandering, voter suppression, the refusal to act on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, etc. I talk with DAVID FARIS about the ideas in his new book, IT’S TIME TO FIGHT DIRTY: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American P...

Consider this a two-part episode. This week, my 2011 conversation with JACOB HACKER & PAUL PIERSON, authors of WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Next week, a NEW one w/ NANCY MacLEAN on her book DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS, which reveals the GOP’s strategy of Citizens United, gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. to retain power...

Before the Powell Memo, before the Kochs. In DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, NANCY MacLEAN tells the story of a Nobel prize-winning economist whose ideas fuel the right’s relentless campaign to gerrymander districts, eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, change the Constitution, and curb democratic majority rule. Accor...

If the service is free, you’re the product. How Facebook, Google and the rest use our data against us. My May 2nd 2018 conversation with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, producer of films including Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS. His book, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGs: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and...

This weekend as we celebrate Mothers Day, you’ll hear my 2013 conversation with HAZEL HENDERSON – who in the 70’s, as a mom who’d never been to college, got upset about pollution threatening her young child, became a local activist, and developed into a global expert on economics and sustainability. She’s creator of the television show and website Ethical Markets, and author of 10 books, including...

Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie wrote a cover story at the Nation magazine: How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe. This is a big deal. 95 out of 100 American adults owns a cellphone. Big Wireless copied the playbook of Big Tobacco & Big Oil to hide the facts about their products - an example of the unethical abuse of science and the truth by power and wealth that is all too c...

In The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, JEREMY LENT writes, “The right wing has not won on the issues, but by telling a grand story of America - a story that is false and based on a set of values that are driving civilization to a precipice. It’s been successful because there has been no coherent counter-narrative.” We look at that history and look ahead fo...

Donald Trump proudly admitted at a rally that he had made stuff up in his meeting with Canadian PM Trudeau. CHARLES LEWIS titled his 2014 book 935 Lies because that was the number of untruths the Bush-Cheney administration used to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Trump has taken lying to a unimaginable level (at least 2000 lies in his first year), but the book lays out the conditions that made Tru...

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD asks why residents of the nation's second poorest state vote for candidates who resist federal help? Why, when corporations devastate their lives and their land, do they most hate the government? After five years talking with folks in Southern Louisiana, she sensed that a particular “deep story” they share holds their political contradictions together. We’ll talk about that story...

“We did not understand the country’s identity crisis…Consequently, we left in the hands of the opposition the hearts and minds of those we could have persuaded to support reform…Looking for an answer to their question of cultural identity, we gave them a political answer instead.” ALI NOORANI, Executive Director, National Immigration Forum, talks about successful responses to that challenge.