In Deep with Angie Coiro: Interviews

Show #250 | Guest: Mark Schapiro | Show Summary: Angie sits down with researcher and journalist Mark Schapiro to explore his new book, Seeds of Resistance, an expose of the high-stakes battle underway for control of the world’s seeds.

Show #249 | Guest: Richard A. Clarke | Show Summary: Cyberwar—or cyber-anything, has always carried a whiff of science fiction about it. But it's not fiction, it's certainly not entertainment, and, terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke warns us— multiple cyberwars are underway already. The battlefronts range from simple identity theft to the disruption of nuclear programs and medical care. The Pentagon even has a word for this new front line: the fifth domain. That's where ongoing skirmishes for our security as individuals and as citizens are being fought.      Richard A. Clarke has long experience in American security matters. He's served as a key advisor on intelligence and counterterrorism to three US presidents. In 1998 President Bill Clinton appointed him as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism for the U.S. National Security Council. His latest book, The Fifth Domain: Defending our Country, Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats, calls on that long experience to tackle one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in modern security.

Show #248 | Guest: Professor Ronald Purser | Show Summary: Angie sits down for a fascinating hour with Ron Purser, Professor of Management at San Francisco State University, to discuss his new book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became The New Capitalist Spirituality.     The booming popularity of the mindfulness movement has also turned it into a lucrative cottage industry. Business savvy consultants pushing mindfulness training promise that it will improve work efficiency, reduce absenteeism, and enhance the “soft skills” that are crucial to career success. Some even assert that mindfulness training can act as a “disruptive technology,” reforming even the most dysfunctional companies into kinder, more compassionate and sustainable organizations. So far, however, no empirical studies have been published that support these claims.

Show #247 | Guest: Dr. Louise Aronson | Show Summary: Elderhood: old age. Many of us can expect to live more years as “elders” than in either childhood or adulthood, a span of up to 40 years, yet that era of our lives has long been treated as more a symptom and burden—elderhood outright ignored or demonized.     In her extraordinary new book Elderhood, already praised by readers like Mary Pipher and Abraham Verghese, Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson offers an honest and full-hearted re-examination of the later decades, with all of their joys and frustrations. Drawn in part from her medical practice and expertise, in part from personal experience, history and popular culture, Elderhood, exalts the worth of life’s third stage, inviting readers into a new relationship with the so-called “twilight” years of life.

Show #246 | Guest: Shannon Watts | Show Summary: The “NRA’s Worst Nightmare” is an army of moms led by former stay-at-home mother of five Shannon Watts from Indiana, who ignited a grassroots advocacy movement against gun violence which now touches every single one of the 50 states.     Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America began as Watt’s project after the tragic news of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting broke. With her youngest in elementary, Watts felt compelled to act, but quickly realized that the epidemic of gun violence which wrought tragedy on so many families was primarily being legislated by large groups of men. Looking for the voice of other women protecting their families, she found nothing—so she started something profound.     Can 80 million moms make a difference? From blocking legislative hallways with strollers and electing gun-sense candidates, to getting “open-carry” out of Starbucks and running for office themselves, the large-scale impact of Moms Demand Action suggests that they can.      In her new book Fight Like a Mother, Watts shares exactly how to have that kind of impact for our future, even if you have no previous experience advocating for a cause. Watts’ story of taking back public policy from the gun lobby is one that began with sudden initiation and continues to yield powerful change. We are all just one good reason away from fighting for what we believe in.     Watts had five.

Show #245 | Guest: Jamil Zaki | Show Summary: Empathy is in short supply. Isolation and tribalism are rampant. We struggle to understand people who aren’t like us, but find it easy to hate them. Studies show that we are less caring than we were even thirty years ago. In his groundbreaking new book, The War For Kindness, Jamil Zaki shares cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy is not a fixed trait—something we’re born with or not—but rather a skill that can be strengthened through effort.

Show #244 | Guests: Laura Hawkins, Camilla Fox | Show Summary: Laura Hawkins is the executive director of the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley. Camilla H. Fox is the founder and executive director of Project Coyote, a national organization that promotes compassionate conservation and coexistence between people and wildlife.

Show #243 | Guest: Jenny Odell | Show Summary: Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Her work involves acts of close observation, whether it's birdwatching, collecting screen shots, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. Her new book is How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Show #242 | Guest: Tony Horwitz | Show Summary: It has been twenty years since Tony Horwitz's bestselling Confederates in the Attic brought America's modern North-South divide into the light, inviting readers on a trek through Civil War country.     Now Horwitz retraces the footsteps of a New York Times correspondent who went South as a "spy" for the paper, a full decade before the War. Horwitz traces the route of sleuthing correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted; like Olmsted, collecting as he goes the voices and impressions that informed spectrums of race, money, politics, and power in the pre-war era. Olmsted was driven by what he learned to create spaces welcoming to all, culminating in his landscape design for Central Park.     Horwitz, in his turn, has written Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. He probes Olmsted's travels and dispatches looking for lessons for today's brutally divided America. Two journeys, more than a century apart, illuminate our current divide.

Show #241 | Guests: Dr. Joseph Marshall, Dr. Judy Chu | Show Summary: What's the best a man can be? And how has that ideal changed over time? What accounts for the rising profile of ugly, even violent misogyny, and how does the American village work to grow healthy men in its shadow?     In Deep turns its eye to the future of masculinity in America. If past is prologue, what can we anticipate for coming generations struggling with the expectations of manhood?     Stanford lecturer Dr. Judy Chu, an expert on boyhood, and Dr. Joseph Marshall, founder of the Alive and Free anti-violence program and the radio show Street Soldiers, shed light on this complex challenge.

Show #240 | Guest: Elizabeth Cobbs | Show Summary: History writers have a choice: relaying a story bound by fact and record to produce a non-fiction account, or bring the people and times alive with a narrative arc. Acclaimed author Elizabeth Cobbs has succeeded in both. Her best-selling historical novel The Hamilton Affair gave life and depth to Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and his wife, Eliza. Her nonfiction account of World War I telephone operators, The Hello Girls, became an off-Broadway musical. Now she's turned her deft hand to American hero Harriet Tubman in her new book The Tubman Command. This "Moses" of the Underground Railroad risked her life regularly to conduct escaped slaves to freedom. Cobbs fleshes out the facts of record into a fully-rounded tale of a strong woman, her times, and her love.

Show #239 | Guests: Roz Chast and Patricia Marx | Show Summary: Novelist, New Yorker and TV comedy writer Patricia Marx and memoirist and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast are close friends and collaborators. They range far and wide in this conversation with Angie, ostensibly about their new book Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?

Show #238 | Guests: David Downs, Dr. Danielle Ramo | Show Summary: Join Angie and guests David Downs, Editor-in-Chief of Leafly.com and co-author of Marijuana Harvest, and Dr. Danielle Ramo, director of research operations at Hopelab, and adjunct faculty in psychiatry at UC San Francisco.

Show #237 | Guests: Amy Everitt, Monica McLemore | Show Summary: Perhaps the central political and rights issue of our time, the matter of abortion continues to ignite passions and protest throughout the country. n Angie sits down with two experts on the subject, Amy Everitt, vice president for Special Projects at NARAL, and Monica McLemore, PhD, professor of women's health at UCSF, for a discussion of the language, laws, political trends and tactics concerning the divide.

Show #236 | Guest: Eddie Muller | Show Summary: Join Angie for an enjoyable discussion of Hollywood, Femmes Fatales, and the doomed losers of Film Noir with the Czar of Noir, Eddie Muller.

Show #235 | Guest: Makana | Show Summary: Slack Key Guitarist Makana: The Soft Spoken Activist. Makana returns to In Deep for an update on his unique career mix of political activism and music. The resurgent arms race between superpowers is on the agenda, along with live performance of his newest songs.

Show #234 | Guests: Hadar Aviram, Joel R. Paul | Show Summary: How to untangle the swirl of investigations of and around President Donald J. Trump, is the subject of this fascinating hour with Professors Hadar Aviram and Joel Richard Paul, both of Hastings College of the Law.

Show #233 | Guest: Jill Abramson | Show Summary: One of the news media's most qualified voices examines critical information battlegrounds: old media vs. new, documented veracity vs. clickbait.     Jill Abramson follows four companies—The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE— over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment in her new book, Merchants of Truth. The two venerable newspapers wrestle the challenge of an aging readership; the two upstarts confront a ballooning but fickle audience of millennials.     She profiles the defenders of the legacy presses and the larger-than-life characters behind the new speed-driven media competitors. Those players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron, Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet, Jonah Peretti, and Shane Smith as well as their reporters and anxious readers.     What does all this portend for the discriminating reader?

Show #232 | Guest: H. Bruce Franklin | Show Summary: Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.     Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.

Show #231 | Guest: Roger McNamee | Show Summary: The warnings are coming from inside the house. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Roger McNamee are denizens of the same enchanted world: Silicon Valley's inner circle. And they used to all be on the same page, each playing their part growing Facebook into an internet phenomenon— until it hit unprecedented reach and influence. Then they weren't on the same page any more. McNamee was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Facebook, as both a musician and an investor. But he grew disenchanted as he watched the negatives pile up: privacy issues. Screen addiction. Disinformation and political manipulation. Even spying. Digging into the technology and psychology involved, he grew more alarmed at "business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs".     Now Roger McNamee has teamed with others from the tech world to challenge our new normal - to persuade us that internet titans Facebook and Google present an urgent existential threat to users and society. His new book Zucked makes a persuasive case.