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.
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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.
Stuart Kelter interviews Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, and a seminar examining police surveillance technologies, privacy, and civil rights. Before becoming a professor, Professor Ferguson worked as a public defender for seven years, representing adults and juveniles, and was also lead counsel in numerous jury and bench trials, arguing cases before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Ferguson has written over 35 law review articles and book chapters and provided legal commentary for the New York Times, the Economist, CNN, NPR, among other media. He is also the author of four books, including, Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action, published in 2012, which was the first book written for jurors on jury duty. His award-winning second book, The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement, was published in 2017. We’ll be discussing his recently published latest book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance (2026), which reveals how smart devices dramatically enhance the scope of potential evidence for criminal prosecution. Unfortunately, in the process, we’re giving away our privacy and rendering ourselves vulnerable to harassment or worse by an authoritarian government.
Stuart Kelter interviews Nathaniel Greenberg, an Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at George Mason University, focusing on the intersection of technology, politics, and culture in the modern Middle East and North Africa. A Comparative Literature scholar by training, he also worked as a freelance journalist and was one of the few Americans to report on the first days of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Egypt. He is the author of four books, including How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt, published in 2019, and The Long War of Ideas: American Diplomacy in Arabic After 911, to published this March.
Stuart Kelter interviews Scott Wallace, an award-winning writer, television producer, and photojournalist, who for over 40 years, has focused on the environment, vanishing cultures, and conflict over land and resources around the world. He has written feature stories for the New York Times and The Smithsonian, among other major publications, and has been a frequent contributor to National Geographic. He is the author of the bestselling book, The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes, published in 2011, a firsthand account of an expedition through the land of a mysterious tribe living in extreme isolation deep in the Amazon rain forest. As a reporter for CBS News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek, the Independent, and the Guardian, Wallace covered the civil wars in Central America throughout the 1980s, and is the author of and photographer for Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq, published in 2024. In 2017 he joined the faculty of the Journalism Department of the University of Connecticut. Today’s interview will focus on his earlier book, The Unconquered.
Stuart Kelter interviews Ralph Eubanks, the former Director of Publishing for the Library of Congress, former editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia, and currently faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Awarded the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature and appointed cultural ambassador for Mississippi, he is the author of numerous articles in major newspapers and magazines, as well as four books, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi's Dark Past, published in 2003, The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South, published in 2009, A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, published in 2021, and most recently, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land, published in 2026. Our interview will focus on his latest book, which brings out the rich and painful history of the region, its enduring consequences, and possible springboards for hope.
Stuart Kelter interviews Anne-Marie Erickson, the author of the memoir, In the Evening, We’ll Dance: A Memoir in Essays on Love and Dementia, which bears witness to the demise of her beloved husband, Dick Cain. As might be expected, this is a sad story, but not only. Right up until the very end, about ten years ago, the couple was able to express their love of one another and, thanks to their mutual love of language, Ann-Marie was, much of the time, able to decipher Dick’s not-necessarily-intentional use of metaphor to convey deep insights into their relationship, the world, and mortality. It’s an inspirational book that assiduously avoids clichés and platitudes, deeply honest about what it’s like to stay committed to the love of one’s life. She acknowledges the heartbreak, the exasperation, and the rage that goes with this territory, but she also doesn’t allow herself to become mired in negativity, and manages to gather sacred moments as they come, of meaning and closeness, as jewels on a strand that ultimately must end.
Stuart Kelter interviews Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, whose main interests include philosophy of mind, metaphysics, the nature of belief, the impact or lack thereof of ethical thinking on behavior, and classical Chinese philosophy. He is the author of four books: Perplexities of Consciousness, published in 2011, Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic co-written with Russell Hurlburt, also published in 2011, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures, published in 2019, and The Weirdness of the World, published in 2024. He is also a science fiction writer and was a contributor to Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories: Exploring the Boundaries of the Possible. Starting in 2006, Eric has written a blog called, “The Splintered Mind.”
Stuart Kelter interviews Rebekah Peeples, the Deputy Dean of the College at Princeton University with oversight of the undergraduate curriculum. Previously at Princeton, she taught sociology and writing. She is also the author of two books: Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, and Unchanged Trebles: What Boy Choirs Teach Us About Motherhood and Masculinity, published four weeks ago, and which is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Emma Duval, a self-described member of the “millennial generation,” who include the growing number of women who are childless and as, Emma puts it, “childfree” by choice. Although now married, Duval’s early inspirations were independent, unmarried women, and as a teenager she contemplated becoming a nun in rejection of societal norms surrounding marriage. She is the author-illustrator of the recently published book, Unwed & Unbothered: The Defiant Lives of Single Women, which celebrates the courageous lives and remarkable contributions of such women throughout history, going back thousands of years.
DELVING IN: Suzanne Mettler on the Origins and Remedies for the Rural-Urban Political Divide10/19/2025
Stuart Kelter interviews Suzanne Mettler, a senior professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of several books, including The Submerged State and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, published in 2014, The Government-Citizen Disconnect, published in 2018, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, co-written with Robert C. Lieberman and published in 2024, and most recently, Rural vs. Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy, co-written with Trevor E. Brown and published just a few weeks ago.
Stuart Kelter interviews Philip Connors, a National Parks Service fire watcher in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness since 2002. In addition to essays in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, published in 2011; All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, published in 2015; and A Song for the River -- about the threat to the Gila River, one of the last wild rivers in the western U.S., threatened by a proposed dam -- published in 2018. His work has won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction, the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition, a Southwest Book Award, and an n+1 Writer's Fellowship. His fourth book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary, published just a few weeks ago, blends haiku and diary entries that beautifully convey his experience of solitude, his reverence for nature, and his witnessing of devastating forest megafires on an unprecedented scale. He also speaks to our longstanding foolish overconfidence in the ability to indefinitely prevent forest fires.
Stuart Kelter interviews Ira Chaleff, past President of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates and award-winning author of several books, including The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders, published in 2009; Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You're Told to Do Is Wrong, published in 2015; Intelligent Disobedience for Children: A Handbook for Parents and Other Caregivers, published in 2018; To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader, published in 2024, and in a completely different genre, a collection of original poems about aging, Falling Apart Into Wholeness, published in 2020. Ira has conducted workshops on Leader-Follower relations for a wide range of organizations, including multinational corporations and governmental agencies. He served as Executive Director, as well as Chair of the Board, of The Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit group that provides management research, training and consulting for the U.S. Congress.
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