Stuart Kelter interviews Ian Bogost, an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis and a professor in multiple disciplines: computer science, engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning digital game designer, an internationally-exhibited artist, a contributing editor and frequent writer for The Atlantic since 2013, and the author of eleven books, including Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games, published in 2016. Today’s interview will focus on his latest book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, published earlier this month.
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Stuart Kelter interviews Jamison Firestone, an American-born attorney, now living in London. In 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, he moved to Russia to establish its first independent foreign law firm, specializing in corporate law, in a newly forming, highly dynamic, extraordinarily lucrative financial environment. He lived in Russia for 18 years, six of them as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia. Firestone was in the front lines, not only as a witness but also as a major actor in the unfolding events in Russia, as it started to transform itself into a free market economy, only to see it hijacked by corruption, violence, and organized crime. He is the co-founder, along with Sir William Browder, of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which was named for Firestone’s employee, Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor who was investigating high level corruption when he was arrested on false charges, imprisoned in harsh conditions, and a year later murdered in prison. Firestone was also a friend and ally of Alexei Navalny, who was similarly murdered for challenging state-sponsored corruption in Russia. Today’s interview will focus on Firestone’s recently published memoir, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia.
Stuart Kelter interviews Gaurav Suri, a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at San Francisco State University, where he is the director of the Readiness, Activation, and Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a visiting professor at Stanford’s Center for Affective Science. He is the coauthor of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel, which was published in 2007 and won the American Publishers Award. Gaurav is the coauthor and a protégé of Jay McClelland, a leader in the conceptualization of neural networks to explain cognitive phenomena, such as recognition of both written and spoken words. This interview will focus on their recently published book, The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines.
Stuart Kelter interviews Jacqueline Saper, an award-winning writer, public speaker, commentator, and translator, with columns and essays in national and international publications and interviews in mainstream media in both English and Farsi. We’ll be talking about her memoir, published in 2019, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran, which chronicles her life from childhood to early adulthood in Iran, which spans the last 16 years of the rule of the Shah, as well as the first ten years following the Islamic Revolution. The book ends, at age 26, with her emigration to the United States with her husband and two children. The memoir provides a highly personalized account of what it was like to grow up in Iran in tumultuous times, a multifaceted story informed by multiple ethnic identities.
Stuart Kelter interviews Benjamin Robert Siegel, a history professor at Boston University and former writer for Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in both mainstream media and academic journals, focusing on economic issues that affect everyday life, including food production and drug supplies. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, published in 2018, explores the struggle of newly independent India to overcome famine and malnutrition. His second book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, published two months ago, tells the story of opium, its cultivation and trade, both legal and illegal, and its role in the building of empires and the fomenting of international conflicts. Siegel’s next book will be about the the price of protein, i.e., its political and environmental costs. This interview will focus primary on his most recent book, Markets of Pain.
Stuart Kelter interviews Jane Draycott, a professor of Ancient History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University of Glasgow’s Games and Gaming Lab, focusing on Roman history and archaeology. In addition to interviews and writing book chapters and articles for academic and mainstream media, she is the author of several books, three on ancient medical practices in Ancient Rome, and two on prominent ancient women: Cleopatra’s Daughter: Egyptian Princess, Roman Prisoner, African Queen, published in 2023 and Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome, published in 2025, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Manil Suri, a distinguished university professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is also the author of three internationally acclaimed novels set in his native India: The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva, and The City of Devi, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have won multiple literary awards. As a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, he has written several widely read pieces on mathematics, India, and LGBTQ+ issues. In November of 2022, I interviewed Manil about his book, The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, which marshaled his talent for storytelling in the sharing of his love of mathematics. Today’s interview is about his latest book, in which he ably tackles yet another genre, A Room in Bombay, a Memoir, a sensitive and poignant portrait of his relationship with his parents and how he navigated their emotional dependency on him and still have his own life.
Stuart Kelter interviews Robert Karen, a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City and author of numerous articles both in academic journals and mainstream media. His first book, Becoming Attached: Unfolding the Mystery of the Infant-Mother Bond and Its Impact on Later Life, published in 1994, provided a thorough and highly readable history of the ideas and thinkers behind attachment theory, which at the time was just starting to gain wider acceptance among both developmental researchers and psychotherapists. Thirty years later, in 2024, Dr. Karen, published an expanded, second edition of the book, with the title, Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love, which takes full stock of how attachment theory has become mainstream, not only as an explanation for how emotions and interpersonal lives develop throughout the lifespan, but also as a primary foundation for psychological interventions and for social policies that affect young children and their parents. He is also the author of The Forgiving Self: The Road From Resentment to Connection, an award-winning book published in 2001, which explores possibilities for relinquishing the stance of victim-in-need-of-revenge and, in the process, becoming open to the repair of our most intimate relationships.
DELVING IN: Erin Vincent Reflects on the Death of Her Parents When She Was Fourteen Years Old4/26/2026
Stuart Kelter interviews Erin Vincent, an author, essayist, journalist, and public speaker. In addition to literary contributions to anthologies and other publications, she has also appeared on national television and radio programs both in her native Australia and in the US. Her memoir, Grief Girl, published in 2008, chronicles her life and emotions following the death of her parents from an automobile accident. It was named a New York Public Library Best Book and was an American Library Association Best Book Nominee. Her second book, Fourteen Ways of Looking, published just this month, revisits the year her parents died by exploring wide-ranging associations to the number 14, evoking a wide variety of images and feelings in the process.
Stuart Kelter interviews psychologist Ross Greene, the originator of the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model and the non-profit Lives in the Balance.org. He is the author of several books about how teachers and administrators can help children with challenging behavior. The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children, first published in 1998 and now in its sixth edition, introduced parents to an alternative to disciplining their child with rewards and punishments. Parents learn instead to engage their child in together solving the problems that lead to frustration and melt-downs. Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them, published in 2008, extended the model for the school setting. Ross’s most recent book, The Kids Who Aren’t Okay: The Urgent Case for Reimagining Support, Belonging, and Hope in School, published just last month, provides a persuasive case for school personnel to transition to the Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model in their own school. Ross was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 20 years and is currently an adjunct professor at Virginia Teach and also in Sydney, Australia.
This week, we aired a 2023 interview from our archive. Las Cruces mountaineer, Ron Lautenbach, who climbed Mount Everest and Denali. With humor and insight, he conveys his penchant for adventure and intensity, his reverence for nature and faith in a higher power, his love and respect for people, and hard-won wisdom acquired from taking measured risks that include possible death as part of the equation.
You can hear the interview here: Stuart Kelter interviews Richard Bessel, a professor emeritus of twentieth century history at the University of York and a former member of the editorial boards of German History and History Today. He is a specialist in the social and political history of modern Germany, the aftermath of the two world wars, and the history of policing. He is the author of several books, published between 1984 and 2004, about the Nazi and post-Nazi eras of German history. His book, Violence: A Modern Obsession, published in 2015, explores how Western perceptions of violence have evolved over the last 150 years. This interview will focus on his recently published, Postwar Europe: A Very Short Introduction, part of The Oxford Very Short Introduction series.
Stuart Kelter interviews David Sussillo, an internationally recognized neuroscientist, currently working as a senior research manager at Meta Reality Labs, leading a team that is developing brain-machine interfaces for next-generation computer technologies. He is also an adjunct professor in the electrical engineering department at Stanford University, where he conducts research in computational neuroscience and neural dynamics. This interview will focus on his soon-to-be published book, Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind, about his remarkable overcoming of profound childhood adversity, including his earliest years growing up with drug-addicted parents, followed by nearly a decade in orphanages. In this interview we will try to imagine what it was like for David during his childhood, including the hardships, the sources of engagement and hope, and what it took to achieve the improbable: a highly successful life, both professionally and personally.
Stuart Kelter interviews Michael Boylan, a philosophy professor at Marymount University and a prolific writer who focuses on a wide range of ethical domains, including public health, the environment, medical advances, business practices, technological innovation, foundational philosophical texts from Ancient Greece, and the practice of teaching. He is also a poet and a fiction writer, exploring philosophical issues through his own writing of poetry, short stories, and novels. This interview will explore the major approaches to ethics, both in general terms and as applied to hypothetical, fictional, and real situations.
Stuart Kelter interviews Nicholas — or Nick — Jelley, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford, known for his expertise in renewable energy and energy science. He was the UK group leader for the Nobel Prize-winning Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment, a major achievement in particle physics. More recently, he has conducted research on solar energy for use in the developing world. He has authored several books on energy topics, including the textbook, Energy Science: Principles, Technologies, and Impacts, co-written with John Andrews, and Renewable Energy: A Very Short Introduction, the second edition of which was recently published and which is the subject of today's interview.
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