Free Forum with Terrence McNally

I speak with SHERRY TURKLE, MIT professor & Founding Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology & Self, author of Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, about her new book, ARTIFICIAL INTIMACY: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. What do we lose by outsourcing emotional needs to machines? How much of the gaps we seek to fill with AI were made worse by social media? Preparing for this conversation, I felt overwhel...

For years, Harvard professor ERAM ALAM has been looking at the role immigrant physicians play in US healthcare. We fill a chronic shortage of new domestic MDs with doctors trained elsewhere. Nearly a quarter of our physicians went to medical school outside the U.S. or Canada . We talk about her book, THE CARE OF FOREIGNERS: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare. I feel this is one of those issues where too many of us eithe...

SVEN BECKERT, in his latest book,CAPITALISM: A Global History, traces its story across the world since the dawn of the last millennium. He reminds us that capitalism is not natural or inevitable, but a human invention, one that has survived - even dominated - as its form has changed. What can we learn from history? If we invented capitalism, does that offer the possibility we could invent something to replace capitalism or that we ...

I’m one who says the 60s didn’t end until about 1973. John Jenkins was a young journalist in Washington DC in ’71 when some shit was going down. War still raging in Vietnam. Largest mass arrest of protestors in US history. Daniel Ellsberg steals, copies, and delivers the Pentagon papers and the Supreme Court rules they can be published. The deaths of George Jackson and the Soledad brothers in California, the Attic...

RICHARD HEINBERG, a guest a handful of times on this show  died July 19th, just two weeks after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He was often a few steps ahead of whatever the current conversation might be regarding humanity’s relationships with nature, energy, power, and each other. His books include A New Covenant with Nature; Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology; The End of Growth; Our Renewable Futu...

I talk with Harvard professor, DANIELLE ALLEN about (1) her latest book, RADICAL DUKE, about the third Duke of Richmond who inspired the colonies’ independence and their establishment of representative democracy; and (2) her ongoing work on the promise and challenges of democracy today. She’s Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard  and Founder and Chairper...

Trump makes a prime-time speech, lying once again about fraud in previous elections and previewing his intention to disrupt and disable the 2026 mid-terms. Time to talk with ARI BERMAN, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones' and the author of Minority Rule and Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. How realistic are our fears? What are Trump's most likely methods of attack? What scares ...

We lost perhaps our nation’s most influential Buddhist with the death of ROBERT THURMAN June 16th at the age of 84. A former monk, ordained and partly trained by the Dalai Lama, left the monastery, earned a Harvard doctorate, taught at Amherst & Columbia, and wrote, edited and translated more than 20 books on Buddhism, both scholarly and for the general public. He was a founder of the American Institute of Buddhist Studie...

I learned a lot in this conversation with CORY DOCTOROW and in his new book, THE REVERSE CENTAUR’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI. Rather than fear AI, Doctorow uses it daily, but he is also skeptical. He reminds us that nothing about the way things are unfolding with AI, technology, or society is inevitable, though that is the contention of those who profit from it. He warns that, if - in protesting AI’s threat - we buy into w...

Here’s my 2008 conversation with ROBERT COLES, child psychiatrist, Harvard Professor, and author of 75 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning six volume Children of Crisis. He died June 4 at the age of 97. He spent a lifetime listening to people - often those ignored by others - and told their stories. Coles was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, and the National Humanities...

I speak with ANNIE LEONARD & ANDRE CAROTHERS. She created the video documentary, The Story of Stuff, and led Greenpeace US for a decade. He worked for Greenpeace for 13 years and co-founded the Rockwood Institute. The new book they’ve written together, PROTEST: Respect it. Defend it. Use it includes brief essays on 42 protests from the 1700s to the present. It offers history and how-to, challenge and inspiration. Protest ...

When many believe HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - lacking in scientific, medical or public health training - is giving alternative medicine a bad name, here’s my 2003 conversation with Andrew Weil MD. We trace the evolution of Dr. Weil’s work and thinking from his earliest understandings of health and healing to his ongoing commitment to train a new generation of physicians. Weil’s definition of integrative ...

Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah lost his brother to Israeli authorities in the second Intifada. Israeli Jew Maoz Inon lost both his parents to Hamas on October 7th. In their book,The Future Is Peace, these two travel guides to Israel/Palestine and lifelong peace activists, take readers on a journey across their holy bloodstained land. They share the mythic, political, and personal history that divides but also binds them and their peopl...

Plato cautions that democracy inevitably leads to tyranny because the rich always want to get richer and the poor will follow a demagogue who promises to overthrow the rich. I first learned of Plato’s critique in this 2020 conversation with ASTRA TAYLOR, about her documentary WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? and companion book, Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. We explore democracy’s early roots a...

I speak with former federal prosecutor BRENDAN BALLOU about a number of things. His first book was PLUNDER: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America and we get an update. He’s founder and CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which sues those who seek to bribe government officials, as well as officials who seek to be bribed. We check in on that. Ballou was among those who prosecuted the attackers of January 6th so we tal...

1) History-making entrepreneurial scientist CRAIG VENTER, died last week at the age of 79. The New York Times obituary leads with these words, “A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition, and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.” In 2000, his team published the first sequence of the human genome – earlier and for far less money than the government-sponsored Human Genome Project. Here&rsq...

Climate scientist MICHAEL MANN (The New Climate War) has been a target of threatening abuse ever since he led the team that produced the “hockey stick graph” making clear the extreme rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution. PETER HOTEZ (Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism) has likewise been targeted since his highly visible role in vaccine development and public heath communication during the Covid 19 pa...

In “even-a-broken-clock …” news this week, Donald Trump did something I applaud. He signed an executive order to accelerate research and access to psychedelic drugs for medical use, particularly to treat serious mental illness. Psychedelic substances have been used for ceremony and as medicine for millennia. Such properties were being cultivated and studied in the US in the 1960s and early ‘70s till widespr...

When tech billionaires make nice with authoritarians and AI challenges are everywhere, I check in with JONATHAN TAPLIN, Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, a former tour manager for Bob Dylan & The Band, a producer of films including Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS, and the author of MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy and THE END OF REALI...