Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired 07/11/10 MALOU INNOCENT is a Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute, and her primary research interests include Middle East and Persian Gulf security issues and U.S. foreign policy toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China. Following dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Mass Communications and Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master of Arts degree in Inte...

Aired 05/30/10 We're hearing a lot about the trouble Europe is in. The debt crisis in Greece, and perhaps Spain, Portugal, and Italy, is threatening the Euro and the European Union. What's really going on? How did it happen? How bad is it? How will they deal with it? And what does it mean for the rest of the world and for the US in particular? We'll deal with those issues this Sunday, but that's n...

Aired 05/23/10 JACK KORNFIELD is co-founder of two major meditation centers in the US and author of several books including After the Ecstasy the Laundry, and Buddha's Little Instruction Book. Kornfield makes a rare appearance in Southern California to offer a 3 hour workshop Saturday May 29th as a benefit for InsightLA, a local meditation center in Santa Monica. http://www.jackkornfield.org/index...

Aired 05/16/10 I'll be joined by GRANT DAVIS DENNY, a knowledgeable expert and advocate for public financing of elections. Among other things, we'll talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs FEC and Prop 15, a clean money pilot program on the California ballot June 8th. http://www.caclean.org/ http://www.commoncause.org/ http://www.yesfairelections.org/

Aired 04/25/10 LIVE FROM the LA TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS at the UCLA CAMPUS with REZA ASLAN, author, NO GOD BUT GOD and BEYOND FUNDAMENTALISM and TERRY McDERMOTT longtime LA Times reporter, author, PERFECT SOLDIERS: The 9/11 Hijackers, and his latest, 101 THEORY DRIVE: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory http://www.rezaaslan.com/index.html http://tmcdermott.com/default.aspx

Aired 04/25/10 LIVE FROM the LA TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS at the UCLA CAMPUS with SEAN CARROLL Caltech Physicist, author, FROM ETERNITY TO HERE and D.T. MAX New Yorker writer, author, THE FAMILY THAT COULDN'T SLEEP http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/ http://preposterousuniverse.com/self.html http://dtmax.com/

Aired 04/18/10 SIMON JOHNSON, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is currently Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. He is the co-author of STARTING OVER IN EASTERN EUROPE and co-founder of the blog site THE BASELINE SCENARIO with James Kwak, with whom he also...

Aired 04/11/10 Father Boyle has made a point of collecting and telling uniquely powerful stories of life and death, and his work has supplied him with more than anyone should know. He has so far buried 168 of his homies, and fills his first book TATTOOS ON THE HEART with their stories. I read it cover to cover on a plane flight Chicago to LA, and cried at least a dozen times. Boyle's compassion is...

Aired 04/04/10 Michael Lewis received a BA in art history from Princeton University and an Masters in economics from the London School of Economics. He worked as an investment banker for Salomon Brothers in the 80s before leaving to write LIAR'S POKER. Other books include MONEYBALL, on the Oakland A's, Billy Beane, and baseball's new wave of Ivy League general managers; PANIC: The Story of Modern...

Aired 03/28/10 JOHN WEST has been the managing partner and owner of two law firms, practiced civil rights and employment law, and worked as a public defender. John is currently in the process of preparing an intense lobbying effort in various state legislatures where issues of patients' rights, especially Death With Dignity, are being debated and decided. The Last Goodnights Organization is the su...

Aired 03/21/10 I've been trying to book William Greider ever since I read an article of his last August about restructuring the Federal Reserve. For some, the Fed is the at the center of all that ails us. For others, it is the right place to house any new financial regulatory powers we might gain as a result of the current crisis. There are now 32 co-sponsors for S604 in the Senate and 317 for HR1...

Aired 03/14/10 Though Atul Gawande is a best-selling author, a Harvard professor, and an innovator in best practices for the W.H.O., he still performs 250-plus surgeries a year. A framed copy of Sylvia Plath's poem "The Surgeon at 2 a.m." stands on the desk in his office." Her surgeon's words: "I worm and hack in a purple wilderness." Gawande likes the Plath poem because it casts the surgeon in an...

Aired 03/07/10 JOSEPH STIGLITZ became a full professor at Yale in 1970 at the age of 27, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, as the economist under 40 who had made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Oxford, and is now University Professor at Columbia University, Chair of Columbia's Committee on Global Thought, and co-founde...

Aired 01/31/10 RICHARD WILKINSON & KATE PICKETT authors of an important new book: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better In the UK, the Guardian says The Spirit Level "might be the most important book of the year, and The New Statesman named it one of the top ten books of the past decade. Based on thirty years' research, The Spirit Level shows that unequal societies...

Aired 01/24/10 Has government of, by and for the people perished from the United States? January 21st, a divided Supreme Court reversed precedent and law, voting 5-4 in Citizens United v. FEC to remove limits on corporate contributions to political campaigns. We'll discuss the decision in the context of money in politics, looking at potential outcomes and possible remedies. BOB EDGAR is President...

Aired 01/17/10 BRUCE LIPTON, Ph. D., a leading voice in new biology, bridges science and spirit. A cell biologist by training, he taught at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine, and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University. He's the author of The Biology of Belief, and his latest with Steve Bhaerman, SPONTANEOUS EVOLUTION STEVE BHAERMAN is an author, humorist, and poli...

Aired 01/10/10 DAVID DEGRAW is the day-to-day director of http://mediachannel.org/ whose slogan is "As the media watch the world, we watch the media." Founded by Danny Schechter and Rory O'Conner, MediaChannel deals with the political, cultural and social impacts of the media, large and small. David created http://ampedstatus.com/ to combine cutting-edge technology with human intelligence. He and...

Aired 01/10/10 JIM WALLIS Founder/President, Sojourners; editor, Sojourners magazine; Author, GOD'S POLITICS; THE GREAT AWAKENING; and his newest, REDISCOVERING VALUES on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy. In REDISCOVERING VALUES, JIM WALLIS argues that the worst thing we can do now is to go back to normal. Normal is what got us into this mess. We need...

Aired 01/03/09 MARION BLANK PhD is an accomplished children's therapist with over thirty years of practical experience in helping children with reading and learning challenges. In addition to producing books, articles, tests and software programs, BLANK is currently the director of the A Light on Literacy program at Columbia University in New York and serves as a consultant to a wide range of scho...

Aired 01/03/10 TEMPLE GRANDIN, who believes her autism allowed her to see the world more as an animal might, and led her to design enormous improvements in how we treat livestock. Her latest book is ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN. TEMPLE GRANDIN, Ph. D., now a designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, Dr. Grandin didn't speak until she was thr...

Aired 12/27/09 There’s been a lot of talk about the battle between science and religion the last few years. At the same time, there’s been some fascinating and powerful work bringing science and spirituality closer together. Recent developments in psychology and the neurosciences have led to insights about how our brains work and how these neurological functions shape our experiences of the world....

Aired 12/20/09 A fellow of The Open Society Institute and The Nation's environment correspondent, MARK HERTSGAARD also covers climate change for Vanity Fair, TIME and Die Zeit and has written for many of the world's leading newspapers and magazines. He is the author of the highly acclaimed study of the media during the Reagan years, On Bended Knee, as well as Earth Odyssey; A Day in the Life: The...

Aired 12/13/09 REBECCA SOLNIT is the author by my count of 10 books, and a co-author of at least 15 more. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and the Nation. She appeals to a wide spectrum of readers. As evidence, RIVER OF SHADOWS: Eadweard Muybridge and th...

Aired 12/06/09 This past week marked the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Organization's confrontation in Seattle with 50,000 protestors against corporate globalization. We look back at Seattle and at the ten years in between with two guests who played important roles. First, we talk with NORM STAMPER -- who oversaw the police response -- about those events and about his life and work in the d...

Aired 12/12/09 Attorney AMY BACH spent eight years investigating the chronic lapses in courts across America. Lawyers sleep through trials. False confessions and mistaken eye-witness identifications convict the innocent. The rich walk, the poor go to prison. ORDINARY INJUSTICE goes beyond one particular injustice, one specific court, or one aspect of the legal system. Bach rejects the easy explana...