Speakers' Forum Podcast

Eva Hoffman calls time "the element we live in and cannot leap out of." Although we cannot escape time, Hoffman is keenly aware that the human experience of time is highly malleable. Increasingly, Hoffman says, we bump up against the limits of ...

Is health care a right or just another commodity, subject to market fluctuations, to be bought and sold? As long ago as 1944, FDR said that health care was a right. A few years later, Truman tried to advance a national health plan. He got nowhere. Our ...

More than 60 million women are missing from the world's population today as a result of sex–selective abortion, violence, and unequal access to health care and food. That's according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He contends that ...

At the invitation of his old friend Bill Clinton, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Taylor Branch made 79 White House visits between 1993 and 2001 to record the president's private insights on his two terms in office. Branch's book based on those ...

Journalism is a vastly different world these days. Print papers are closing. Blogs are dominating. But David Domke isn't crying. He says the public is actually now more engaged in news than ever before! Domke did a study with old and young news ...

Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive? Would you force one person to die in order to save five others? Would you bid on a baby? These are some of the questions Michael Sandel raises in his extremely popular "Justice" class at ...

Daniel Griswold challenges anyone who says free trade is a bad thing to do a closet survey: look at the tags on every item in your closet and see where the products are made. He says his closet holds 120 items, but only 10 of them are made in America. ...

"The place with the oldest history in the world, Iraq, has no history at all, in a way. That's because the past is present and is now." Those are Lesley Hazleton's words. She's talking about the story of the Shia–Sunni split which is the ...

Twice a year during the pledge drive, we pull together our favorite talks from the previous six months and give you a chance to hear them again. Tonight, a candid ex–marine spills about military life. Tyler Boudreau says he was practically giddy ...

What can babies teach grownups? Just 30 years ago, conventional wisdom was: "not much." Infants were thought of as babbling, irrational, half–baked adults. But Alison Gopnik says babies' minds have incredible depth. Gopnik is a professor ...

Barack Obama is president, so racism in America is over, right? Not so fast, says Tim Wise. He's spent the last 15 years writing and speaking out against racism and the privileged status he enjoys as a white person. Wise says President Obama's election ...

Comparing America's health care system to the rest of the world may seem like diving into a quagmire. Does all of Europe have socialized medicine? What about Canada? Aren't they happy with their system, where no one ever has to pay a doctor bill? But ...

Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew" Conservatives have run against big government for decades. Thomas Frank says it's no accident then, that when conservatives rise to power, they get to work dismantling it. Frank says the modern conservative ...

Organic peach farmer and writer David Mas Masumoto's family has grown fruit on its California farm for three generations — the kind of small family farm that's disappearing from America. He talks about what's being lost in his book, "Wisdom of ...

Dr. Audrey Young says she went to work at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center because she loves the attitude there. She says the staff acts like every person who comes through the door needs to be given the best care possible, no matter whether the ...

As head of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Joel Berg advocates for more than one million low–income New Yorkers who rely on the city's food banks and soup kitchens. His book about ending poverty in the United States is "All You Can ...

In movies, the scientist is either a nerdy, socially inept goofball or a scary Dr. Evil with intentions to destroy the world. Chris Mooney says that silly stereotype seeps into kids' perceptions of the field — and not enough people choose careers ...

Liberal talk radio host Thom Hartmann says we're in the middle of a cultural crisis. He says we've reached crucial thresholds with overwhelmingly large issues like the economy, politics and most definitely the environment. But unlike many of his ...

Chris Hedges says America is gone. It's lost to consumer culture and the cult of the self. We're barreling towards collapse. Hedges points to Michael Jackson's funeral, made into a maudlin form of entertainment where a celebrity attendee like Magic ...