Say More

“A black pit opened underneath me… a void that was infinitely black.” This is what author Sebastian Junger saw while near death on an operating table in a Massachusetts hospital. Junger survived, but his brush with death would alter his life - and his attitude about the existence of an afterlife. Junger is best known for writing the book “The Perfect Storm” - which later was made into a blockbuste...

Growing up in East Boston, Robert Lewis Jr. and Sal LaMattina have been best friends since they were in the first grade. They both received an education of a lifetime when, in 1974, a federal court order forced the city to bus kids to different schools in the name of racial integration. Forced busing resulted in a racist backlash that tore their East Boston neighborhood apart. They remember it lik...

Would you let your kid play in traffic? Co-Founder and CEO of Boston’s Concussion Legacy Foundation Chris Nowinski has some tough questions for parents who sign their kids up for tackle football while their brains are still in vulnerable stages of development. Chris is a neuroscientist who played football at Harvard and wrestled in the WWE. He's had uncountable concussions and the terrible symptom...

Glenn Loury is not your average economist, and his memoir is full of shocking details. You might enjoy the parts about policy and markets, and pay even closer attention to the parts about sex workers and an enduring addiction to crack cocaine. While he was working during the day in places like Harvard and Boston University, he was spending nights on the streets, getting into trouble. Shirley joins...

Murky rules for health care coverage are not new, but now, companies are increasingly turning to AI to help make complex decisions about medical decisions — leading to some devastating mistakes. STAT News reporters Casey Ross and Bob Herman were recently named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for exposing how the large insurer UnitedHealth Group used AI to deny care. On Say More, they talk to Glob...

Nate Silver is famous for using statistics to predict elections. He’s a self-professed “numbers guy” and likes to use math to make complicated decisions. Nate’s new book ‘On the Edge’ is about people who take big calculated risks, for better or for worse. Nate says he and his fellow risk takers are members of a community called “The River.” On this episode of Say More, Nate takes Shirley on a guid...

Trump picked Vance. Harris picked Walz. Boston Globe Opinion has thoughts. Shirley sits down with Joan Vennochi and Carine Hajjar from Globe Opinion to discuss the VP picks, campaign strategies, and women voters. Email us at saymore@globe.com.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Men and boys are less likely to excel in high school or go to college. They are more likely to get hooked on drugs or die of suicide. More broadly, boys and men are at a crossroads. While the #MeToo movement has provided a needed global reckoning for women and girls, it left boys with a long list of “don’ts” without enough “dos.” This week on Say More, author and scholar Richard Reeves talks to Sh...

If things had gone differently, right now Boston would be swarmed with athletes and spectators from around the world for the 2024 Summer Olympics. A coordinated grassroots campaign in 2015 shut down a bid to host the games. It turns out - Boston isn’t alone. Movements in cities around the world have since blocked local efforts to host the games. This week on Say More, Shirley talks to political sc...

Boston has two major NPR stations, and in recent months they’ve both slashed jobs and canceled shows. Public media is in a recession. Fewer people are listening to the radio and ad revenue is insufficient. Attacks from the right accuse the network of having a liberal bias. Can these beloved media institutions survive? Shirley discusses the future of NPR with Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan...

The Karen Read case initially caught the attention of a local group of  diehards. But now it’s hard to go anywhere in Massachusetts these days without finding strong opinions about a woman accused of murdering a Boston police officer. After a grueling eight-week trial, and a deadlocked jury, the judge declared a mistrial. This week, Shirley is joined again by Boston Globe reporter Sean Cotter, and...

One solution to burnout is simple: say NO to more stuff. Our plates are too full.  It turns out, many people struggle with saying NO - especially women - especially at work. This phenomenon helped to birth the “No Club” - five women digging into the science of why we can’t just say no to stuff and what to do about it. In a special bonus episode of our BEATING BURNOUT series, Shirley talks to two m...

Sex educator Emily Nagoski didn’t set out to be an expert on stress. But it turns out, stress is affecting peoples’ sex lives, big time. After helping her sister Amelia through two life-threatening burnout episodes, the two got together to write a book about the science of stress and how it leads to burnout. For them, the journey to understanding stress became a deeper quest for sisterhood and mea...

We are living in a time of deep uncertainty, marked by global conflicts, economic anxiety, and societal divisions. No wonder we're so uneasy. Founder and host of the “On Being” podcast Krista Tippett says these uncertain times require a larger spiritual quest for meaning and stillness in modern life. We inhabit a noisy, distracting world of Slacks and texts, and we need to learn how to get quiet....

Cal Newport says we’ve been thinking about productivity all wrong. Cal is an MIT-trained computer scientist and bestselling author specializing in how to work better in our overstimulated world. In this second installment of Say More’s series, BEATING BURNOUT, Shirley talks to Cal about the ways the modern office worker is primed for professional burnout, how hybrid work makes it worse and what we...

Harvard Medical School Dr. Aditi Nerurkar says “COVID accelerated everything,” and now 7 in 10 Americans are facing burnout and stress. While many of us expected the post-pandemic period to be a big party, Dr. Nerurkar explains why many of us are still struggling. And why some of us feel even worse than we did before. In the first installment of Say More’s four-part series BEATING BURNOUT, Dr. Ner...

If you ever thought opera was a dead art, you have never talked to Nina Yoshida Nelsen, the new artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera. Nina, who is Japanese-American,  spent years feeling pigeon-holed playing Asian roles in Madame Butterfly but she says those feelings were just the start of an exciting conversation about the future of the art form. This week on Say More, Shirley talks to Nin...

It’s hard to say the exact mix of mystery and intrigue that causes a true crime story to blow up. But one thing is true: the viral stories tell us something important about ourselves. Right now in Massachusetts, many people are fervently following the trial over whether Karen Read murdered her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. Some say she’s simply guilty, and some say she’s being ela...

Daniela Rus’s dream is to imbue the power of robotics with the wisdom of humanity. She runs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As part of his ongoing series on the promise and perils of AI, Globe Ideas Editor Brian Bergstein talks to Rus about her new book “The Heart and the Chip.” She says robots won’t just do our chores and work in our factories; they can teach us how...

Author Amy Tan doesn’t just watch birds, she “feels the life within them.” Amy’s new book, “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” takes us into her daily journal, drawing and musing on the lives of birds in her backyard in California. Shirley Leung talks to Amy about her breakthrough novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” the agony of fiction writing, and whether she considers herself an Asian-American writer or jus...

Climate change isn’t just one thing, it’s a million things. It’s “everything everywhere all at once,” according to acclaimed author and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert. In her new book “H is for Hope,” Elizabeth goes through the letters of the alphabet explaining the complexities of climate change and musing on weather, power, hope, despair and everything in between.  She joins Shirley this Ea...

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a historian who is best known for writing about America's presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson. She has a new book out, and this time it’s personal. In "An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s," Doris tells the story of her late husband Dick Goodwin, who was a speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Dick was supposed to write the...

Khan Academy has taught millions of students the fundamentals of math and science, as well as topics ranging from economics to art history. As part of his ongoing series on the promise and perils of AI, Globe Ideas Editor Brian Bergstein talks to Khan Academy founder Sal Khan about the ways that artificial intelligence can (and will) revolutionize education. Sal introduces Brian to “Khanmigo,” an...

If you liked our last episode with Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath, you might like this bonus episode. It’s from a new podcast called “Pulitzer on the Road” from our friends at the Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe’s executive editor Nancy Barnes talks to Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov about his Oscar-winning documentary “20 Days in Mariupol." The film is a stunning f...