Stuart Kelter interviews David Kertzer, a professor of social science, anthropology, and Italian studies at Brown University and the author of thirteen books. The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and the American Historical Association prize for best book in Italian history. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a National Book Award finalist in 1997 and will be adapted for film by Steven Spielberg, with the screenplay by Tony Kushner. His latest book, published this year, is The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler, which is the subject of today’s interview.
DELVING IN: David Kertzer on The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler9/25/2022
DELVING IN: Peter Kapenga on his Childhood and Subsequent Work as an Educator in the Middle East9/11/2022
Stuart Kelter interviews Peter Kapenga, a retired educator and educational administrator, most of whose career took place in the Middle East. Growing up in Oman as the son of missionaries, Peter is a bilingual native speaker of English and Arabic. After teaching English in Cairo and studying advanced Arabic in Jordan, he taught and was subsequently an administrator at the Friends Schools of Ramallah/El-Bireh in the de facto capital of the Palestinian territories and then for another ten years the principal of the Al-Raja school in Bahrain. He currently lives in El Paso with his wife and nearby to his son and two of his grandchildren.
Stuart Kelter interviews Nona Willis Aronowitz, a writer and editor who has a biweekly sex and love advice column for Teen Vogue. She’s also written columns for the New York Times, The Cut, Elle, VICE, and Playboy. She co-authored the road-trip book, Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism, with Emma Bee Bernstein and is the editor of two award-winning anthologies of her mother, Ellen Willis’s work, one about rock music criticism, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, and another, The Essential Ellen Willis. Nona recently published a memoir entitled Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution, which she has described as a memoir-social history blend that examines the enduring barriers to true sexual freedom.
Stuart Kelter interviews Jay Wellons MD, MSPH, a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, Radiology, and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and University. He is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Vice Chair of the Departments of Neurological Surgery and the Section of Surgical Sciences. He also co-founded and directs SOCKs, the Surgical Outcomes Center for Kids. He has published over 250 scientific and medical articles on all aspects of pediatric neurosurgery and is a recognized national lecturer and expert in fetal neurosurgery, the Chiari Malformations, brachial plexus surgery, surgical clinical outcomes research, and health care disparity. Dr. Wellons lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Melissa, also a physician, two teenage children Jack and Fair, and dog Watney.
Today’s interview focuses on his recently published memoir, All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience. As the title suggests, the book recounts dramatic stories of pediatric neural surgery, but the book also conveys what it is like to live a life of high-stakes, heightened reality, emotionally viable through profound appreciation of patients and their parents, supportive colleagues, friends and family, and inspiring life lessons from his father. DELVING IN: Peter Debenedittis on Facing the Problem of Alcohol-Related Deaths in New Mexico8/21/2022
Stuart Kelter interviews Peter Debenedittis, a decades-long advocate for substance abuse prevention. He has written 11 volumes of youth prevention lessons, and has been a motivational speaker across the country to combined audiences of over a quarter million students. Peter D. has consulted for the Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the White House Office on Drug Control Policy.
Dr. Debenedittis moved to Santa Fe in 1995 and in 1999 launched a media literacy education firm specializing in substance abuse prevention. Having previously staffed a successful gubernatorial campaign in the U.S. territory of Guam and having, himself, run for Governor of New Mexico in 2018, he has honed the political marketing skills with which to address public health issues. He is the author of the Alcohol Literacy Challenge curricula, which aims to prevent underage and binge drinking. He also become a leading proponent for legislation that would raise taxes on alcohol as a research-backed strategy for reducing alcohol consumption in New Mexico. According to recent articles by Ted Alcorn of New Mexico in Depth, New Mexico is the state with by far the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths. Stuart Kelter interviews Eve Fairbanks, a journalist and essayist who grapples with the processes and meanings of change: in cities, countries, landscapes, morals, values, and our ideas about ourselves. A former congressional correspondent for The New Republic, her essays and long-form journalism have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Her reporting has been funded by grants from the Fulbright Program, the Institute of Current World Affairs, the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and the Writing Invisibility project at the Max Planck Institute. From a young age growing up in Virginia, Eve was transfixed by the moral questions raised by the Civil War and the unfinished changes in its aftermath. Drawn to also exploring racial tensions in post-Apartheid, South Africa, she traveled there on a Fulbright award, moving first to Capetown and then to Johannesburg, where she still lives. Her recently published book, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Jack Shlachter, a Ph.D. physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for over three decades, also at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, as well as two organizations based in Vienna, Austria: the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. Dr. Shlachter's training was as an experimentalist creating and diagnosing plasmas, high temperature mixtures of electrons and ions, with applicability to nuclear fusion, a potentially carbon-neutral source of nearly unlimited energy.
At Los Alamos, he served as Division Leader of the Physics Division and later of the Theoretical Division, the only individual to have held both roles in the history of the Lab. These positions involved the responsibility for budgets in excess of $100M and the management of hundreds of scientists, technicians, administrators, students, and postdoctoral assistants. Dr. Shlachter is also a rabbi, having been ordained in 1995 by Rabbi Gershon Winkler of Cuba, New Mexico. He has held Jewish leadership roles both in Los Alamos and in Santa Fe, and well as serving as a visiting rabbi in Vienna and Beijing. In addition to his current pulpit in Santa Fe, he conducts lifecycle events – such as weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, and funerals – under the banner of “Judaism for your nuclear family.” Stuart Kelter interviews Camilla Townsend, a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University, whose scholarship focuses on indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and in the relations between natives and newcomers. She is deeply immersed in the study of Nahuatl, the Aztec language, particularly the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians. Through the historical annals they produced, we catch a glimpse of indigenous conceptualizations of history as they existed at first contact. In 2010, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to in recognition of her work in analyzing the Nahuatl historical annals from the 16th and 17th centuries, written by the Nahuas (or Aztecs) in their own language, using the Latin alphabet taught to them by Spanish friars for the purpose of reading the Bible to more easily convert them to Christianity. Her 2019 book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, won the 2020 Cundill History Prize.
Stuart Kelter interviews Loren Williams, a biophysicist, biochemist, astrobiologist, and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His research passions include the structural basis for macromolecular reactions, from the role of nucleic acids as targets of chemotherapeutics to the ancestral biochemistry of the ribosome during the origin of life. He is currently director of the NASA-funded Center for the Origin of Life (COOL) at Georgia Tech and a Co-Lead of the Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environment Consortium. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Since 2008, Williams' research group has been focusing on the ribosome across the tree of life, constructing models of ancestral ribosomes by combining biophysical chemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics.
Stuart Kelter interviews Dawn Browning, a research ecologist at the Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, who studies the complex factors that link ecology with the characteristics of soil. Past scientific interests include tadpoles, rattlesnakes, and falcons. Dawn is also a yoga therapist and entrepreneur, who for 36 years and counting, has been living with Type 1 diabetes, viewing the disease as a powerful lens for self-understanding and personal growth. In 20 Dawn founded HolSol Wellness LLC to share her insights and well-honed tools to help others with their own personal development.
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