Stuart Kelter interviews Wladimir Lyra, an astronomer at New Mexico State University whose research focuses around high-end computer simulations of planet formation, both in our own solar system and beyond, i.e., exoplanets and their solar systems. In today’s interview we’ll be focusing mainly on the theory of the Big Bang, black holes, and the possible implications of new observational data recently made available by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope.
Stuart Kelter interviews Ricardo Nuila, a writer, physician, and professor of medicine, medical ethics, and health policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where he teaches the practice of hospital medicine and directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab. The son of Salvadoran immigrants and a native Houstonian, Ricardo has worked as an attending physician in the city’s largest safety-net facility, Ben Taub Hospital, for more than ten years. His fiction has appeared in the Best American Short Stories anthology and his journalistic pieces have been published on the website of the New Yorker, covering such subjects as the medical response to Hurricane Harvey and to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has won awards for his teaching and advocacy, as well as for his writing, including the New England Review’s inaugural Award for Emerging Writers. He recently published his first book, The People’s Hospital, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Peter Frankopan, a Professor of Global History at Oxford University with comprehensively wide-ranging interests, including the history and politics of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, ancient Persia and modern Iran, Central Asia, and China. Peter often writes for the international press and is the author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, The Silk Roads: a New History of the World, and The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World, which have been translated into forty languages, become international best-sellers, and garnered multiple, prestigious awards. His latest book, which is the subject of today’s interview, is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, an environmental history of both the human and natural past, from billions of years ago until the present, across the entire planet.
Stuart Kelter interviews Las Crucen, Ron Lautenbach, about his experiences of, and life lessons in, climbing 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 his hard-won wisdom to take measured risks that included possible death as part of the equation.
Stuart Kelter interviews Kevin Elliott, a philosophy professor at Michigan State University, who studies the role of values in science and the ethical issues related to science and technology, such as conflicts of interest involving environmental pollution and financial stakes in research. He also collaborates with environmental scientists at the European Food Safety Authority and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the book, Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research, published in 2011. He is also the author of the 2017 book, A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science, and the 2022 book, Values in Science for the Cambridge University Press Series, Elements in the Philosophy of Science.
Stuart Kelter interviews Naomi Oreskes, a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and her TED Talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” has been viewed more than 1.5 million times. She is the author of several books on the intersection between politics and science, including Why Trust Science? published in 2019 and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean published in 2021. Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway have collaborated on three books, including the recently published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at The Financial Times, London. He has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award. He was a member of the UK’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010–11. The Wikipedia entry on Wolf notes that he is widely regarded as one of the most influential economics journalists in the world. Lawrence H. Summers has called him "the world's preeminent financial journalist. "Paul Krugman wrote of him that "Wolf doesn't even have a PhD. And that matters not at all; what he has is a keen sense of observation, a level head, and an open mind.” Wolf is the author of five books on broad-ranging economic issues. His latest book, published just this year, is entitled, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Stuart Kelter interviews Leah Hazard about her recent book, Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began. Leah graduated from Harvard University, working in print journalism and television before the births of her two daughters prompted her to change direction. She is now a practicing NHS midwife in Scotland and has worked in a wide variety of clinical areas, from labor wards to outpatient clinics, delivering hundreds of babies and caring for countless families along the way. Her memoir, Hard Pushed: A Midwife’s Story was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK. Leah hosts the popular podcast What the Midwife Said and is a frequent commentator on women’s health across the media.
Stuart Kelter interviews Stephen Grossberg, one of the principal founders of the fields of computational neuroscience, connectionist cognitive science, and artificial neural network research. At Boston University he has been Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems since 1989, founder of the Center for Adaptive Systems since 1981, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering. In 1987 he founded the International Neural Network Society and its journal, Neural Networks, which became the official journal of the three major neural modeling societies in the world, and was its Editor-in-Chief until 2010. Grossberg has won numerous awards for his work for “seminal contributions to understanding brain cognition and behavior and their emulation by technology.” His recently published book, Conscious MIND, Resonant BRAIN: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, is about Adaptive Resonance Theory, his model of how our brains pay attention, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world.
DELVING IN: Natalie Hodges on her Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time4/2/2023
Stuart Kelter interviews Natalie Hodges, who is both a writer and a classical violinist. Born and raised in Denver and currently living in Boulder, Colorado, she has performed throughout Colorado and in New York, Boston, Paris, and the Italian Piedmont, as well as at the Aspen Music Festival and the Stowe Tango Music Festival. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied English and music. Her recently published first book, a memoir entitled Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, explores the intersections of music and time, lived experience as flow states and their interruption, the price and rewards of devotion to art, and coming to peace with the relinquishing, or at least transformation, of a lifelong professional ambition.
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