The Open Mind, Hosted by Alexander Heffner

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Dragana Kaurin, a human rights activist, researcher and founder of the Localization Lab. It's an organization that builds bridges between developers, organizations, end users and communities in need, resulting in more accurate and timely translations and unlocking access to the Internet for users all over the world.  A fellow a...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Charles Graeber, an award winning science journalist and contributor to myriad publications including the New Yorker , National Geographic , MIT Technology Review and Wired for which he is a contributing editor. His new book, “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer” probes the treatment that aspires to make canc...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Seth Fletcher, who follows a team of elite scientists on a historic mission to take the first picture of a black hole to help us answer deep questions about space, time, the origins of the universe, and the nature of reality.  Scientific American editor, Seth Fletcher is author of “Einstein’s Shadow, a Black Hole, a Band of Astronom...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome University of California, Irvine professors, Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall. Disinformation; misinformation, what is the science of how false beliefs spread? This is the critical understanding that my guest today argue is required to correct falsehoods and to ensure that they don't hijack and certainly don'...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome author and South Carolina U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel. In 1957 we introduced the American people to then little known civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who had just returned from the Montgomery bus boycott. Along his side was Judge J. Waties Waring of South Carolina, US District Judge for the Eastern District....

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome author Anna Merlan to discuss the acceleration of lies in the public discourse and their historical and contemporary power. While fear and paranoia have always animated American politics, there is an unprecedented rush of incentives to deceive the public through monetization, popularization and dissemination. So now we'll try t...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome long-time corporate communications counselor, Barie Carmichael, Batton Fellow at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, she is coauthor of “Reset: Business and Society in the New Social Landscape.”  Is there a future for a socially conscious capitalism, what Congressman Kennedy recently deemed moral capitalism,...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Alan Miller, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. Miller was a reporter at the LA Times for 21 years before leaving in March 2008 to establish NLP. He spent nearly 19 years in the Times Washington bureau, the last 14 as a charter member of its high profile investigative team.  As we experi...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Pam Wilmot, electoral reform director for Common Cause and executive director of Common Cause, Massachusetts. In our 2018 state and federal elections by an overwhelming majority in the popular vote the nation sought to restore democratic accountability, but that may not be possible across the Midwest where GOP gerrymandered majority...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Christopher Painter, commissioner of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. When I recorded my first ever program here in 2014, the subject with digital scholar and educator John Palfrey was the very real possibility of a digital Pearl Harbor or 9/11 in our lifetimes. It's clear from our evaluations on The Open M...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Anthony Jack, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a fellow former resident of Mather House. Jack’s research documents the overlooked diversity among lower income undergraduates, the doubly-disadvantaged, those who enter college from local, typically distressed public high schools, and the privileged...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Sabeel Rahman, the president of Demos a “think and do” tank committed to advancing policy change on issues of racial justice, democracy and inequality, working for an America where we all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy.  When perspective 2O20 Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke was asked...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome novelist ZZ Packer, the author of a story collection, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and editor of “New Short Stories from the South.” Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Packer has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writer'...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome back the foremost expert on American political communication, Kathleen Hall Jamieson.  Oxford University Press has published her newest work, “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President - What We Don't, Can't and Do Know.”  The author of 16 books, including this latest forensic examination of Russian...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Ohio Governor and former 2016 Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, a longtime congressman, chairman of the Budget Committee and member of the Armed Services Committee. Kasich was the chief architect of the 1990s deficit-ending deal that ushered into the new millennium, a clean fiscal bill of health for the nation.  Today of course, Kasich is b...

On this episode of The Open Mind, we welcome activist Sally Kohn, author of “The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing our Humanity.” One of the last surviving deep political thinking talking heads, if we can be brutally honest, and the host of the podcast State of Resistance , Kohn has penned an illuminating account of our nation's crisis of hatred, which appears more and more to be a...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini. Her organization's mission is to highlight algorithmic bias through media, art and science, to provide space for people to voice concerns and experiences with coded bias and to develop practices for accountability during the design, development, and deployment of coded systems.  In her effor...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome the Justice Democrats’ executive director, Alexandra Rojas. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the improbable and defeated an incumbent party leader and possible successor to the next speaker of the house. It was because of a new movement of dedicated Democratic Party activists. They call themselves the Justice Democrats, their mandate: it's...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Columbia law professor and inaugural Knight Institute Fellow David Pozen. David teaches and writes about constitutional law, national security law, and information law, among other topics. The future of American law and morality, the jurisprudence that will define America is our topic today. The High Court is reaching a potential crossroads, retu...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we consider the human genome, eugenics, the story of science with the author of “She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity.” Carl Zimmer has authored 13 books about science and is the New York Times “Matter” columnist on which he explores the stuff of everything scientific discovery and inquiry.  Zimmer's writin...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, William Egginton, Decker Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, discusses his new book, "The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality and Community on Today's College Campuses.” Sloan Foundation President and Williams College President Emeritus Ad...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Rob Dunn, author of “Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel, Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live.” Rob Dunn is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of five previous b...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we welcome Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Duncan served as CEO of Chicago public schools and won praise for uniting the city stakeholders behind a consensus education agenda. Today as managing partner at Emerson Collective, Duncan has returned to Chicago on a mission to improve the livelihoods of...

On this week’s episode of The Open Mind, we invite Jean Guerrero, investigative reporter covering immigration for KPBS. Named one of “San Diego's best people” by the San Diego City Beat . Jean Guerrero is author of “Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir.” Guerrero’s memoir is a spellbinding account of Mexican American heritage, a daughter's coming of age and to terms with her father's mental...

RAND CEO Michael Rich and political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh discuss their new book “Truth Decay” and the importance of media literacy.