At Length With Steve Scher. - The House Of Podcasts

Cancer has been part of life since the origins of evolution.

Baseball inspires poets and scribes to wax on about some essential baseball-ness that reflects larger values. Maybe baseball is not simply a game, but something grander, a philosophy that might help people order the broader human experience?Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher who thinks about baseball. His latest book is Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark

We think of the astronauts, those brave people who took a ride on a giant rocket ship into the unknown on their way to the moon. Charles Fishman got to thinking about the more than four hundred thousand working people who actually invented the space program, switch by switch, stitch by stitch, making the dream a reality.

What will the digital world of the future be like? Will humans, or our eternally humming digital simulacra, live in heaven or hell?

Journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has looked at domestic violence around the world in her new book “ No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.”

health, according to Dr. Sandro Galea, isn’t going to actually occur, for individuals or societies, if we stay focused at that level of attention and care.Health should be considered how everyone lives in their neighborhoods, the opportunities that exist in education and employment.Sandro Galea is an innovator in epidemiology. He is Dean and Professor at Boston University School of Public Health.

After a career of carefully editing so many accomplished writers, language and punctuation remain a joy to Marry Norris, renowned New Yorker Copy Editor. Her first book, “Between You and Me: Confessions of AComma Queen,”was nominated for a Thurber Prize for American Humor.In her follow up,“Greek To Me: Adventures of The Comma Queen,” Norris shares her love for the Greek language, culture and land.

A broken democracy, perhaps like a broken clock, can be right sometimes. Journalist Hedrick Smith’s new film, “Winning Back Our Democracy,” profiles citizen activists around the United States who are making a difference. As one Florida activist put it, if it can happen in their state, maybe community by community, an end to gerrymandering and a commitment to one person one vote can become a reality.

A broken democracy, perhaps like a broken clock, can be right sometimes. Journalist Hedrick Smith’s new film, “Winning Back Our Democracy,” profiles citizen activists around the United States who are making a difference. As one Florida activist put it, if it can happen in their state, maybe community by community, an end to gerrymandering and a commitment to one person one vote can become a reality.

Siri Hustvedt talks about scholarship, teaching story to psychiatry residents and her new book about memory and time in her new novel, “Memories of the Future.”

“Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell us About Ourselves” by Frans De Waal raises a troubling question that challenges humans place in the world. If animals, from mice and fish to apes and birds, have emotional intelligence, can recognize happiness or distress in themselves and in others, then aren’t we humans obligated to at least allow them to live decent lives. Science, unyoked from the stimulus-response view of animals as automatons is discovering that animals order their worlds as we do, around fairness, power and accommodation with one another. Knowing this, will we make a place for animals on the planet?

Arne Duncan served as President Obama’s Secretary of Education. His assessment of the nation’s efforts to educate children and of his own tenure in federal office is “How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education.”

Octavio Solis is an award-winning working playwright immersed in the culture and politics of our time. His plays tell the stories of rural America, of Latino America, of border America.He comes to Town Hall Seattle December 4th,the Rainier Arts Center, to read from his new book, a collection of short dream-like stories of his life growing up along the US Mexico Border, “Retablos: Stories From a Life Lived Along the Border.”

An extended walk through Seattle’s Chinatown/International District with scholar Marie Wong. “Building Tradition: Pan-Asian Seattle and Life in the Residential Hotels”is the Seattle University professor’s historical examination of this vibrant Seattle neighborhood.The interview came out of an assignment for Seattle Magazine, published in the December 2018 issue.

An extended walk through Seattle’s Chinatown/International District with scholar Marie Wong. “Building Tradition: Pan-Asian Seattle and Life in the Residential Hotels” is the Seattle University professor’s historical examination of this vibrant Seattle neighborhood.The interview came out of an assignment for Seattle Magazine published in the December 2018 issue focused on Wong’s work and the future of the ID.

Through their wealth, philanthropists influence society. Is that fair?As it is currently set-up, Rob Reich says it isn’t. Reich (pronounced “reesh”) is a professor of political science and faculty co-director for the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford. He has written “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy And How it Can Do Better.”

Uber has disrupted the taxi industry around the world. But its way of doing business may be reshaping other industries. Alex Rosenblat is a technology ethnographer, a social scientist who learns from strangers and analyzes the technologies they use that shape their place in society. She took hundreds of rides with hundreds of drivers around the US. She found that drivers are not actually free-wheeling entrepreneurs but constrained workers managed and manipulated by algorithms. Her book, “Uberland: How Algorithm’s Are Rewriting the Rules of Work” explores the brave new world that Uber is shaping.

Peter Sagal, the very funny host of NPR’s News quiz “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” has written a serious and funny book about his attraction to the physical and psychological benefits he gets from running.Sagal talks about his history with running, his hair-raising experience at the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, and the way running helped him as his marriage and family came apart.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Truthdig columnist and RT TV talk show host Chris Hedges reports on what he sees as a declining empire, where oligarchs rules, people are disenfranchised, poorly served by their media and racing towards global climate disaster. He is talking about America.

The origins of humanity have become less uncertain as scientists like David Reich and his colleagues extract ancient DNA from the bones of our distant ancestors. The fast moving science is revealing our common ancestry and our surprising relationships with ancient humans. Reich notes there is much more knowledge to come as more tests are done on ancient bones in Africa, Asia and the Americas.