The Lowdown with Ira Wood on WOMR-FM

Drawing on 50 hours of previously sealed interviews, correspondence from 18 archives and fresh conversations with friends and collaborators freely talking after Sondheim's death, biographer Dan Okrent reveals the emotionally turbulent life of the man who reinvented the Broadway musical and what drove him: a monstrous mother, decades of alcoholism, a war against critics, and an inability to fall in...

Josh Owens spent 4 years as video editor and field producer at Infowars, a media universe where unproven conspiracy theories were delivered with absolute certainty, having sprung from the manic mind and unhinged fantasies of the infamous Alex Jones. Owens talks about the lies he perpetrated, the communities he put in danger, the useless 'supplements' Jones sold to make himself rich, and with unfli...

Award-winning science journalist Carlos Orsi talks about the history of the world's most popular and enduring pseudo-science, Astrology: how it morphed from a 5,000 year old vehicle for telling fortunes into a multi-billion-dollar business popularly used for personality analysis; why generic and banal descriptions of peoples' character are so easily believed; how newspaper astrologers get away wit...

Historians rank eyeglasses as one of the most important inventions in human history, but why did the Catholic church throw the inventor in a dungeon for 13 years? What did people do before glasses? Why was wearing glasses equated with devil worship? Why are they so expensive? Historian David King Dunaway answers all these questions and more as we talk about his book The Four Eyed World.

When Genevieve Wheeler Brown, a decorative arts expert from The Antique Road Show, was asked to evaluate a collection of blue and white pottery, hidden away for decades in an exclusive Manhattan townhouse, she had no idea that it told the centuries-old story of women's role in a ceramic that travelled from the Middle East to China to Holland and then to Gilded Age New York and eventually the China...

Brad Gooch is an award winning biographer of such gay iconic gay artists as Keith Haring and Frank O'Hara. Having lost his first love to the AIDs epidemic, he was lucky to fall in love again, with a guy who desperately wanted kids and a family. His new book Good Morning Moon tells the story of their quest, in late middle age, to make two kids through in vitro fertilization and his own discovery th...

After World War Two, 'The Greatest Generation' returned to America determined to enjoy the freedoms of a world liberated from fascism but another group of Americans were equally determined to finish the job Hitler started by annihilating Jews and relocating Blacks to Africa. In his book The Secret War Against Hate, USC Professor of History tells the largely hidden story of those who risked their l...

Journalist Danielle Crittenden lost her 32 year-old daughter to a sudden brain tumor and with that death life as she knew it. She talks with Ira about her new book, Dispatches from Grief, in which she describes how she, and all those who lose a loved one, are dropped into a unfamiliar new landscape without a map.

Two pioneers of the Reproductive Rights movement, Byllye Avery and Loretta Ross, talk about transforming the landscape of reproductive care in the United States and ensuring three core human rights: to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent children in safe and healthy environments.

Do you hate to disagree with people? Avoid arguments? Shy away from conversations with anyone who is likely to contradict your ideas? It's understandable why many of us in today's contentious society try to minimize discord. But it comes at the cost of friendship, information, and connection. Harvard social psychologist Julia Minson talks about science -backed research that teach you How to Disagr...

Longtime Wall Street Journal editor Paul Vigna gives us extraordinary take on where money came from, how it evolved, and how it became ‘almightier’ than almighty god.

Since her death at the age of 15, the name and image of Anne Frank have become archetypal symbols of hope for victims the world; her diary adapted for film, television, theatre, dance, classical music, opera, anime, and indie rock. Award winning biographer Ruth Franklin talks about the life of the real Anne that's often overlooked.

Lindy West is a best-selling author, a comedian and an activist known for her sharp humorous work on feminism, body image, and on-line harassment. She talks about the reality of being a fat role model, contentedly living in a polyamorous relationship, and how she sometimes get a lot of crap for both.

Jessica Mitford was born in a wildly eccentric British noble family, a socialist among fascists, and became the best loved, bestselling muckraking writer in America. Award-winning biographer Carla Kaplan talks to Ira about her fierce and unruly life.

Ebony and Jet Magazine Music Writer Margena Christian talks about the woman who wrote some of Motown's biggest hits, and saved the career of Stevie Wonder, but whose name is all but unknown, Sylvia Moy.

Brian Raftery is a journalist and podcaster specializing in pop culture, film history, and entertainment. He joins Ira to talk about his new book Hannibal Lecter: A Life which traces the history of America's favorite fictional villain and his creator, the enigmatic and rarely-seen novelist Thomas Harris.

Part memoir, part natural history, David Gessner's Return of the Ospre y recounts the hilarious story of one young nature writer's obsessive quest to document the reemergence of one of America's most majestic birds of prey to the shores of Cape Cod.

NY Times bestselling author Jennifer Wallace talks to Ira about her new book, Mattering , which exposes the ways in which a many Americans, feeling unseen and unappreciated throughout their lives, go on to do harm to themselves and others. Their discussion offers a roadmap and actionable takeaways to remedy the problem.

Ira talks with bestselling author Daniella Mestyanek Young, cult survivor, US Army veteran, and Harvard-trained organizational psychologist about the proliferation of cults in American society today.