Riverside Chats

Tim Guthrie is a visual artist, art professor at Creighton, and an award winning filmmaker. His work has been included in collections at the Boise Art Museum, the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art, the Plemmons Collection of Contemporary Art, and the Leigh Lane Edwards Collection of Contemporary Art. His documentary, Missing Piece , which chronicles his own grieving process after the death of his...

Charles Kay Jr. is a first-generation Thai-American visual artist whose work explores assimilation, identity and the American Dream. Kay’s parents immigrated from Thailand in the 1960s and anglicized their names to fit in. Much of Kay’s work explores the toll of assimilation on his own family and the immigrant experience at large. His exhibition “Unseen: Emerging from the Currents of Assimilation”...

We talk about the climate crisis a lot on this show and a common theme that comes up is not just that we need to hope for miracle cures but that we need to rethink our relationship with the natural world. But what does that look like? Some people work to reduce their emissions through who they vote for or where their electricity comes from, and others seek to reduce the amount of plastic they cons...

A lot of waves have been made in the past decade regarding student loans and the sometimes predatory nature of higher education. It has become a common refrain among Democrats to support varying degrees of student loan relief and forgiveness, essentially framed as an economic stimulus and a salve for those stuck with crippling debt. Republicans generally find this kind of targeted debt relief to b...

Last year, a petition circulated which would replace the Nebraska State Board of Education, Education Commissioner, and Nebraska Department of Education with a new, ambiguous Office of Education, which would be accountable directly to the Governor. It didn’t pass, but it’s not the first time this idea has been floated here, and such proposals have passed in states like Oregon. But what is the Nebr...

If you’ve ever voted before, you probably were really excited or scared about a couple of candidates at the top of the ballot. We talk all the time on this show about how a healthy democracy requires some investment in the less splashy stuff lower on the ballot too–like the county attorney or municipal board director–but another element of the ballot that can cause headaches for the average, not p...

Chip Davis has been making music for over five decades, scoring his first chart-topper in 1976 with "Convoy," the song he co-wrote with Bill Fries. He was named Country Music Writer of the Year in 1976 and of course you’ve probably heard of the group he founded, Mannheim Steamroller, and the label he created to release its music, American Gramaphone, both of which have captivated listeners and aud...

The culture war these days is heavily focused on schools, with many prominent elected officials in Nebraska calling for defunding public education in favor of vouchers for charter schools. Today Rachel Gibson and Sarah Smolen talk to Tom Knoblauch about the education climate, how to navigate a culture war that often is intentionally vague and operating in bad faith and possible solutions they are...

Wes Dodge is on the boards for Rank the Vote Nebraska, Common Cause Nebraska, Represent Us Omaha, and Non-Partisan Nebraska. He sees the possibility of meaningful reforms to our political chaos through adopting ranked choice elections and moving toward a nonpartisan vision of governance instead of our highly polarized current climate. Today he and Tom Knoblauch talk about what ranked choice voting...

Dr. Lisa Knopp teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has written several books, including Bread, What the River Carries, and Field of Vision. Her latest book is From Your Friend, Carey Dean: Letters from Nebraska’s Death Row, which chronicles her friendship with Carey Dean Moore, who spent 38 years on death row before his execution in 2018.  On today's show, K...

Cindy Maxwell-Ostdiek is an independent candidate running to represent District 4 on Nebraska's State Legislature. She is the president of Rank the Vote Nebraska and serves on the advisory board for Nonpartisan Nebraska . Today she talks to Tom Knoblauch about her vision for a nonpartisan approach to governing as both a way to address hyperpolarization and to better ensure that constituent concern...

A common concern expressed on this show is about not just the climate crisis but the seeming inability that we have to talk about existential risks like global warming because so much of our bandwidth is taken up by the noise of culture wars. In previous conversations regarding updating our grids to accommodate renewable energy, a concept has come up that didn’t get much time but is gaining tracti...

You may or may not know that this show began as a series of live conversations in Benson, before transitioning into a podcast that was recorded at Petshop for almost a year. Petshop is the headquarters for BFF, also known as Benson First Friday, which is celebrating its tenth year of operations as a hub of Omaha artistic expression and bringing the community to the artists. BFF co-founder Alex Joc...

Matthew Wurstner returns to discuss everyone’s favorite subject: taxes. Earlier this year, the Nebraska State Legislature passed what Governor Ricketts called the biggest tax relief measures in Nebraska history. Taxes come up a lot here in assessing quality of life, what a competitive tax climate might mean for retaining young people in the age of brain drain, and in general how our taxes here loo...

Bri Full is a candidate for the Omaha Public School Board to represent Subdistrict 2. Full is an active community organizer and policy advisor at the Nebraska State Legislature. On today's show, Full talks to Tom Knoblauch what she believes OPS should do following a mass exodus of hundreds of teachers this spring to ensure a stable, successful future for education in the metro area.

Dan Mirvish is an award winning filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival. His films include Omaha The Movie, Open House, Between Us , and Bernard and Huey. His new film is 18 ½ , a Watergate thriller and dark comedy starring Willa Fitzgerald and John Magaro as a transcriptionist and reporter who find the infamous gap of tape in Richard Nixon’s White House recordings. Today Mirvish t...

Eileen Wirth is professor emeritus of journalism at Creighton University and the author of several books including From Society to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism and A History Lover’s Guide to Omaha . Her latest book is The Women Who Built Omaha: A Bold and Remarkable History , which supplements our city’s story from what has been described as a man’s town by exploring the women who play...

Erik Larson is the author of bestselling historical nonfiction like The Devil in the White City , The Splendid and the Vile, and In the Garden of Beasts. Today he talks with Tom Knoblauch about how he uses history to process his anxieties about the present and what made him turn to fiction for his latest work, a ghost story called No One Goes Alone , which is exclusively available on Audible.

Katie Otten is an actor and writer who has worked with just about every local filmmaker and has just launched her first web series called Inner Worlds, which follows a series of friends who engage in a tabletop roleplaying game of the same name. Otten created, wrote every episode of, and stars in Inner Worlds, and every episode is streaming now. She talks with Tom Knoblauch about the project, her...

Ross Benes wrote the 2021 book Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold in which he diagnoses “a gradual shift in the types of candidates we elect to our state legislature and the US Congress." He argues that "[t]he accumulative changes over the past few decades have made it extremely difficult for Democrats to be competitive outside of certain parts of our two biggest cities,...

Randy Nogg currently runs the talent agency Actors Etc. Limited and its entertainment division Theater-To-Go. He previously lived in LA where he produced the film Reefer Madness 2, which is now available on Amazon Video, before returning to Omaha to bring a bit of Hollywood back to the Heartland. Today he talks with Tom Knoblauch about the way Hollywood dreams entered his Midwestern life and how t...

Matthew Wurstner returns to the show for a history of Nebraska's unique system of governance: the unicameral. The unicameral has only one legislative house, an idea that was proposed and fought for by U.S. Sen. George Norris nearly a century ago under the belief that a unicameral legislature would cost less to the taxpayers of Nebraska and would work more efficiently than a two-house legislature....

Alisha Shelton is running to represent Nebraska’s Second Congressional District in the House of Representatives–a seat currently held by incumbent Don Bacon. Today she talks with Tom Knoblauch about what motivated her to run, how her legislative style offers a fresh perspective, and what her vision for America would look like.

Craig Moody was elected to the Omaha Public Power District in 2016, served as board chair in 2020, and currently serves as the chair of the board’s governance committee. Today he talks with Tom Knoblauch about his story and makes his case for reelection in order to continue his vision of Omaha’s response to the climate crisis by transitioning to renewable energy and participating in Nebraska’s coo...

Jazari Kual Zakaria is in the middle of a congressional campaign to represent Nebraska’s First Congressional District in the House of Representatives, a seat held by Republican Jeff Fortenberry for nearly two decades until he resigned from the position in March after being convicted of three felonies. Zakaria is a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a founder of LNK Freedges, an init...