Showing Up

A most hopeful discussion with the recently graduated senior class President of Warwick High School, in which experiences around racism, the intersection of conservative, libertarian and liberal democratic values and this country's history are factored in. (Oh yes; country music, too.) Vidar Hageman is a strongly positive voice for a generation of pandemic-graduating high schoolers. As he hea...

In which an attempt is made to discuss larger implications of anti-racism work and the discovery is made that you can't talk meaningfully about the politics of it without talking about our lives in it. One woman's (Jamie Munkatchy's) journey from her segregated, white-Anglo upbringing in El Paso, Texas to progressive politics in New York City and the suburbs is highlighted. 

Reflections about our country's birthday, growing up white, stories our ethnic-groups-of-origin tell us about ourselves and our country and the blinders we wear when it comes to recognizing, and supporting, black people who've been in this country hundreds of years before us. Contributions Relational Life Therapy can make towards understanding our own racist ways and beginning to move pa...

An interview with California author Mike Chen, about his post-apocalypse novel, "A Beginning at the End"

My guest is Anastasia Shown, a lecturer/global educator who has worked at the University of Pennsylvania and in Ghana, Cameroon & Ethiopa for many years. She joins me for a discussion about racism, the implications of the events of early June 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, in which tens of thousands of people of all races marched and protested in towns and cities across the United...

A consideration of what is hurting us now, as Americans, with some hints of how to begin on a path of healing. Thinking about the reckoning that is coming. 

This episode considers the future as constructed by three sci-fi/dystopian fiction writers; myself (author of CONVERGENCE), Katie Delahanty (author of KEYSTONE), and educator/author Erika Kane (author of SELAH & THE BLOOD BARRENS). What's already come true? Why, and how, can a bleak future be written about when we're in the middle of a fairly bleak present-time? Should we all be writ...

Pizza is transformative. This episode looks at the effect pizza has had on several people's lives, including Long Islanders and New Yorkers. Discussion of regional variations of pizza are included, but the focus comes back to how involvement with pizza transforms one man's life and brings about business opportunities that he could only have barely imagined as a hard-working 15-year-old....

How do guys learn how to treat each other? Are we doomed to remain 9th graders far into our adult years? Or can people change (even WITHOUT therapy)???  In this episode I go back to interview the person whom I was intimidated by 51 years ago, in the hallways of high school. What had been going on? And what has gone on since? If you are in need of some hope and inspiration, look no further than tod...

In which I return to the world of high school and a beloved teacher (Mr. Handler), circa 1970's. Memories are shared with someone else who was a student of his, and the ups and downs of high school are briefly considered by people who ended up the lucky recipients of healthy, mind and soul-expanding examples of living. Best of all, I get to interview Mr. Handler at age 94.