In Deep With Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #190 | Guest: Michael Shermer | Show Summary: Michael Shermer’s new book, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, details the lifelong skeptic’s thoughtful, wide-ranging probe into what happens after we die, with respect and humor. He joins Angie to explore life, the universe, and everything – including new strains of American atheist culture.

Show #189 | Guest: Gary Ferguson | Show Summary: Wildfire season is burning longer and hotter, affecting more and more people, especially in the west. Angie talks with Gary Ferguson about his new book, Land on Fire, which explores the fascinating science behind this phenomenon and the ongoing research to find a solution. They’ll touch on all aspects of wildfire, from climate change to fuel sources and long-term challenges.

Show #188 | Guest: Justin Dillon | Show Summary: Justin Dillon, a rockstar turned social entrepreneur is the founder and CEO of Made in a Free World, an award-winning platform that brings consumers, organizations, and businesses to disrupt the $150 billion business of human trafficking. Angie and Justin talk about his paradigm-shifting new book, A Selfish Plan to Change the World, which helps readers see how they can use their passions to help save a life and change history.

Show #187 | Guest: Al Gore | Show Summary: One of the world’s greatest environmental heroes connects the dots between natural disasters, flooding, and health risks like infectious diseases. Listen as he tells the stories of change-makers across the globe and presents the alarming facts and conclusive evidence that demonstrate the real effects the climate crisis is having and will continue to have on our planet.

Show #186 | Guest: Mary Otto | Show Summary: Millions of Americans, young and old, suffer from chronic toothaches they have no choice but to live with day in and day out. Veteran health journalist Mary Otto joined Angie for an evening addressing the appalling links tying dental hygiene to a person’s job prospects, social mobility, and education.

Show #185 | Guest: George Lakey | Show Summary: Liberals worldwide invoke Scandinavia as a promised land of equality, while most conservatives fear it as a hotbed of liberty-threatening socialism. But the left and right can usually agree on one thing: that the Nordic system is impossible to replicate elsewhere. Lakey dispels these myths and explores the inner-workings of the Nordic economies that boast the world’s happiest, most productive workers, and explains how, if we can enact some of the changes the Scandinavians fought for surprisingly recently, we, too, can embrace equality in our economic policy.

Show #184 | Guest: Jesse Eisinger | Show Summary: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, unravels a culture of cowardice, incompetence and corruption — one that has allowed the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and above all the Department of Justice to flounder in their efforts to hold not only the government, but America’s financial institutions, accountable for their crimes.

Show #183 | Guest: Victoria Sweet | Show Summary: Today, robots can perform surgery, x-rays can be conducted instantaneously, and countless tests, once unimaginable to doctors, can be executed to learn diagnoses often before symptoms are even apparent. This is truly a golden age of technological medical wonders. But at what cost?     For all these technological wonders, it can hard to remember that physicians were once craftsman. Victoria Sweet, a physician at Laguna Honda Hospital for over twenty years, wants to fix this.     Join Sweet as she sits down with Angie Coiro to share just how much the medical industry has changed over the years. With Slow Medicine, Sweet offers a revelatory personal vision for what a physician can and should be.

Show #182 | Guest: Jessica Bruder | Show Summary: For her most recent book, Nomadland, Jessica Bruder spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in our precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.     Jessica has been teaching at Columbia Journalism School since 2008. Her long-form stories have won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award.

Show #181 | Guest: Cara Jones | Show Summary: Cara Jones is a filmmaker, writer, founder of Storytellers for Good and director of the upcoming documentary “Second Coming.” Also a Moth Story SLAM winner and writing published in the Washington Post, Boston Globe and Huffington Post. Cara was raised in the Unification Church, better known as the Moonies, and was married in a mass wedding while a sophomore at Princeton. Her upcoming film “Second Coming” explored her departure from the church and this decision’s impact on her and her family.

Show #180 | Guest: Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate | Show Summary: Quinn’s new book Crash Override offers an up-close look inside the controversy, threats, and social and cultural battles that started in the far corners of the internet and have since permeated our online lives. Through her story–as target and as activist–Quinn provides a human look at the ways the internet impacts our lives and culture.

Show #179 | Guests: Jim Brosnahan, Deborah Rhode, and Peter Scheer | Show Summary: From the Google Memo to public statues to campus protests, accusations of quashed free-speech rights are flying. Is picketing a college speaker an effort to shut down discourse? How protected is an employee writing internal memos on company policy? If residents feel a memorial expresses their history, can the majority take that away? How do so many Americans mistake, say, moderation of comment sections as a breach of their First Amendment rights?     In Deep has pulled together a panel reflecting deep experience in activism, the courtroom, and the classroom to address these thorny questions.

Show #178 | Guest: Chike Nwhoffiah | Show Summary: Nigeria-born Chike Nwoffiah looked around at how American cinema depicted African people and culture, and saw almost nothing real or accurate. A filmmaker himself now living in America, he maintained ties with Nigeria and knew the creative power of film talent throughout Africa. Eight years ago he founded the Silicon Valley African Film Festival. It’s more than a collection of live-action movies, animation, and documentaries – although it is all of that. It also incorporates celebrations of wider African culture, with a procession of flags, a fashion show, and an African marketplace. Angie and Chike will discuss his own work, perceptions of Africa in American, and the evolution of the festival and its audience.

Show #177 | Guest: John Nichols | Show Summary: John Nichols, national affairs writer for The Nation magazine and a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times, joins Angie Coiro to probe what lies beneath the flashiest aspects of the Donald Trump regime. In his new book Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, Nichols details the rogue’s gallery of alt-right hatemongers, crony capitalists, immigrant bashers, and climate-change deniers now running the American government. To survive the next four years, Nichols argues, we the people need to know whose hands are on the levers of power. And we need to know how to challenge their abuses. Sticking to the hard facts and unafraid to dig deep into the histories and ideologies of the people who make up Trump’s inner circle, Nichols delivers a clear-eyed and complete guide to this wrecking-crew administration.

Show #176 | Guest: Stephen Hinshaw | Show Summary: In Another Kind of Madness, Hinshaw explores the burden of living in a family “loaded” with mental illness and debunks the stigma behind it. He explains that in today’s society, mental health problems still receive utter castigation―too often resulting in the loss of fundamental rights, including the inability to vote or run for office or automatic relinquishment of child custody.

Show #175 | Guest: James Forman, Jr. | Show Summary: Angie Coiro sits down with Forman, a professor at Yale Law School, to discuss the impact black leaders have had on mass incarceration rates and the deleterious effects of punitive justice and the American reform system.

Show #174 | Guest: Mark Decena | Show Summary: If National Governments can’t solve the climate crisis, then who will? Not Without Us follows seven grassroots activists from around the world to the 21st U.N. Climate Talks in Paris. The effects of climate change on their lives reveal what’s at stake if a strong agreement to limit carbon emissions is not reached. Yet, the landmark Paris Accords, signed by 192 nations, is nonbinding and fails to mention the main cause of global climate change: fossil fuels. How could this be?

Show #173 | Guest: Katherine Ozment | Show Summary: American culture is seeing two apparently opposed trajectories: the science that religious belief improves quality of life, and the statistics that show Americans are increasingly rejecting organized religion. But that doesn’t necessarily add up to a rejection of spirituality. The same people who’ve stopped going to the chapel or stopped tithing at the church are finding their own rituals and belief systems. Drawing on hodgepodge of traditional worship trappings – incense, candles, prayers – this “do it yourself” faction is finding meaning outside the four walls of mainstream religion.     Katherine Ozment’s book “Grace Without God” grew out of a desire to answer her son’s profound questions about life’s meaning. In the book and in her many articles, she probes the common ground between the secular and religious, and the reach of these questions into politics and larger culture.

Show #172 | Guest: Dave Callahan | Show Summary: It’s a thorny proposition: the increasing reliance on America’s ultra-rich for society’s most urgent needs. Government funding of such basic services as education, health care, and arts are becoming more politically manipulated and constrained. Enter the 1%: the Zuckerbergs, Waltons, Gateses, the Buffets. All have opened their wallets for their preferred causes; all exercise control over what meets their personal criteria. On the one hand, their generosity has funded schools, clinics, journalism – an endless list of beneficial gifts to America. On the other hand, what are the hidden costs of shifting the public good into the hands of a small cadre of powerful individuals?     David Callahan’s “The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age” is an inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists and how they’re quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life for better and for worse.

Show #171 | Guest: Tabitha Soren | Show Summary: In 2002, Tabitha Soren began photographing minor league draft picks for the Oakland As. She followed them into and through the alternate reality of baseball.     Along with Fantasy Life’s multi-media debut, Angie and Tabitha discuss her earlier work; her experiences as a woman in the intensely male baseball milieu; and her career transition from MTV News reporter to camera artist.