Delving In with Stuart Kelter

Jeff Hobbs is the author of five books, including a novel, The Tourists, and four books that apply a novelist writing style to the struggles of individuals striving to overcome racial, class, and social disadvantages. These include The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man who Left Newark for the Ivy League, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Show Them You’re Good: Four Boys ...

Samina Ali teaches fiction writing at Stanford University and is an award-winning author, whose debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, published in 2004, won several literary awards, including Poets & Writers Magazine’s Top Debut of the Year. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and other publications and has been interviewed by national media.

Samina has been an activist for Musl...

Charles Piller is an award-winning investigative journalist for Science magazine, reporting on such topics as public health, biological warfare, and infectious disease outbreaks. In addition to articles in major newspapers, he is the co-author, with Keith Yamamoto, of Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies, published in 1988, which examines the U.S. military biotechnology program and discusses ...

Omar Mohammed was the previously anonymous blogger who courageously reported on the atrocities he witnessed that were perpetrated by the Islamic State, also called ISIS, when in 2014 it took over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Currently, he teaches Middle East History, Cultural Heritage Diplomacy, and Counter Terrorism at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and is also the head of the Antisemitism Research Initia...

Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, urban planner, and oral historian. He previously served as the chief researcher for Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, as editor in chief of the online magazine Urban Omnibus, and as a real estate project manager with Urban Edge, a Boston-based community development corporation. Currently, he teaches writing and argumentation at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in B...

Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees are co-authors of two books, The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck, published in 2020 and The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance, and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent, which was just published a few months ago and is the subject of today’s interview. G...

Erik Baker is a historian, writer, and teacher based in Boston, a lecturer in the History of Science department at Harvard University and associate editor of The Drift, a magazine about culture and politics. In addition to articles about labor, politics, and American history, he recently published his first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which explores how social scientists ...

Derek W. Black is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the Constitutional Law Center. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy, on such topics as school funding and ensuring equal opportunities for disadvantaged students. His research is often cited in court opinions and briefs, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. He has ...

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political science professor at New York University and past president of the International Studies Association, who has served as an adviser to the U.S. government on national security and to numerous corporations on business negotiations. In addition to many articles in the professional literature and major newspapers, he is the author of 23 books. Perhaps his best known, as well as most accessible, is...

Patrick Parr is an historian and biographer of writers and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, and Kato Shidzue. Teaching in Japan since 2018, he currently writes a history column for Japan Today, about historical figures or businesses coming to Japan for the first time. His new book, Malcolm Before X, provides an in-depth accounting of Malcolm X’s fami...

Jonas Olofsson is a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he directs the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab, with a particular focus on the sense of smell, as well as its loss, as it interacts with memory, emotion, language, and information processing. He is the author of the recent book, The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose, which is the subject of today’s inte...

Farhad Khosrokhavar is a retired professor and former Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, whose work focuses on the social movements in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the uprisings during the Arab Spring of 2010-12, the Jihadist movements in France and the rest of Europe, and the philosophical foundations of the social sciences...

Sadri Hassani is a professor emeritus of Physics at Illinois State University, who continues to teach courses in thermal and quantum physics as the University of Illinois. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University, has authored several books on mathematical physics for undergraduate and graduate students, and in addition has a strong, ongoing interest in raising the scientific awareness of the genera...

For seven years Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz was a policy advisor in the Obama Administration, focusing on homelessness and Native policy. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark. She currently teaches public policy at the University of Iowa, and is also the Director of the Native Policy Lab. ...

Jeffrey Zax is an economics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, whose research focuses on labor economics, public economics, and urban economics. He has served as a consultant for various public entities, including the Attorneys General of several states. He has also been a Fulbright Lecturer and has taught at the University of Ghana. This interview focuses on the economic causes and dynamics of inequality and di...

Author and environmental activist, Richard Munson, has served as senior director of the Environmental Defense Fund, and senior vice president at Recycled Energy Development. He has been a coordinator for the Northeast-Midwest Institute and Congressional and Senate Coalitions and several other environmental organizations, including bipartisan caucuses that conduct policy research and draft legislation on issues p...

Matthew Taylor is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where he specializes in American Christianity, American Islam, Christian extremism, and religious politics. He also serves as an associate fellow at the Center for Peace Diplomacy in New Orleans, where he works on preventing religion-related violence surrounding U.S. elections. We’ll be talking about his new book, The V...