Terrence Mcnally Podcast

PHIL DONAHUE pioneered the modern television talk show. DONAHUE ran for 29 years and used its time to explore and debate issues that mattered to its audiences. Despite being one of MSNBC's highest rated programs, Donahue's brief return to television was cancelled in February 2003. A leaked internal NBC memo statede that Donahue had to be fired because he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war”. Now PHIL DONAHUE has collaborated with veteran documentary filmmaker Ellen Spiro to give us an unsanitized account of one young man's evolution from enlisted soldier to anti-war veteran. Tomas Young grew up in Kansas City and like many patriotic young men and women, he responded to a call to action after 9/11. After less than one week in Iraq, he received a bullet injury to the spine that paralyzed his body. The film cleverly inter-cuts two parallel stories: Tomas struggles to deal with the complexities of his injuries while we see the congressional deliberations granting President Bush authority

TOTAL DENIAL documents abuses of Burmese villagers caused by the Yadana pipeline. Milena Kaneva's “guide” during this journey is Ka Hsaw Wa, one of the leaders of the student movement for democracy in Burma in 1988, who hid in the jungle for more than seven years. Wanted by the police in both Burma and Thailand, Ka Hsaw Wa gathered the evidence of thousands of victims of human rights and environmental abuses. In 1992, two Western oil companies - French TOTAL and UNOCAL, then based in California embark on a joint venture with the Burmese military regime, to build a gas pipeline. The Burmese army, hired by the companies to provide security for the project, forces many in the local population into slave labor. Burned villages, raped women, tortured and killed porters, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children hiding in the jungle is the picture of a silent genocide. In 1995, with KATIE REDFORD, the co-founder of Earth Rights International, Ka Hsaw Wa brought the precedent-setting lawsuit to the U.S. co

Robert Reich was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and now teaches public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He delivers weekly commentaries on public radio's Marketplace, and he blogs at RobertReich.blogspot.com. In his book Supercapitalism, economist Robert Reich looks at the divided mind of the consumer and citizen.

Aired 12/26/10 Bjørn Lomborg: Author - The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It One of the world's 100 most influential people - Time Magazine, 2004 14th most influential academic in the world - Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine, 2005. 'Young Global Leader' - World Economic Forum 2005 Former director - Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute Director - Copenhagen Consensus Center Adjunct Professor - Copenhagen Business School http://www.lomborg.com/

In 1996, Charles Ferguson sold the startup company he founded to Microsoft for $133 million. He was 41, had $14 million worth of growing Microsoft stock in his pocket after paying off investors - and was thoroughly exhausted after barely sleeping the previous year. Then for the next eight years, he wrestled with the question that relatively young entrepreneurs rarely consider until they hit it big. In 2004, Ferguson told several journalist friends and some contacts in the film industry that he wanted to make a movie about the U.S. occupation. Don't do it, was the unanimous reply. Do something easy for your first film. Make it local. Plus, Ferguson said he was told, there are 10 other filmmakers pursuing this idea. So he waited. A year later, nobody was making this movie, George W. Bush had been re-elected and as Ferguson said, "There still was very little good discussion about the nature of the occupation, the nature of American policy in conducting the occupation in the media. And I thought, '... I'm

Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning social entrepreneur, author, journalist and filmmaker. He is the founder and co-executive directions of Bioneers, a nationally recognized nonprofit dedicated to disseminating practical and visionary solutions for restoring Earth’s imperiled ecosystems and healing our human communities. He launched the annual Bioneers Conference in 1990 with his producing partner and wife Nina Simons, Bioneers co-executive director. The Conference attracts over 3,000 people each year to the national conference in San Rafael, California, and in 2007 it will be beamed by satellite simulcast to 22 localized Bioneers conferences across the US and Canada to another 10,000 attendees.

Rafe Esquith is an American teacher at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, the second-largest elementary school in the United States, located in Los Angeles, California. A graduate of UCLA, Esquith began teaching in 1981. His teaching honors include the 1992 Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, a Sigma Beta Delta Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Oprah Winfrey’s $100,000 Use Your Life Award, Parents Magazine’s As You Grow Award, National Medal of Arts, and Esquith was made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. Esquith's fifth-grade students consistently score in the top 5% to 10% of the country in standardized tests. Many of Esquith's students start class at 7:00 each morning, two hours before the rest of the school's students. Most of his students come from immigrant Central American and Korean families and are learning English as a second language. They volunteer to come early, work through recess and stay as late as 5:30 pm, and also come to

Drew Westen is Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Michigan, where he taught introductory psychology for several years. In January 2006 a group of scientists led by Drew Westen announced at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Palm Springs, California the results of a study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that self-described Democrats and Republicans responded to negative remarks about their political candidate of choice in systematically biased ways. Specifically, when Republican test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by George W. Bush and when Democratic test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by John Kerry, both groups tended to explain away the apparent contradicti

Professor Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management Professor of Economics at Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. He is a monthly contributor to the "Economic Scene" column in The New York Times. Until 2001, he was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. He has also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal, chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and was Professor of American Civilization at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. Professor Frank's books include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Luxury Fever, and What Price the Moral High Ground? The Winner-Take-All Society, co-authored with Philip Cook, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week's list of the ten bes

Stephen Duncombe is a long-time activist and a professor of at the Gallatin School at New York University. His new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy urges progressives to tap into popular fantasies and desires and to develop a politics that imagines and embodies a better world rather than simply "speaking truth." To clarify his point, he enlists a wildly eclectic group -- everything from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Las Vegas to Cindy Sheehan and the Billionaires for Bush.

Deborah Frances Tannen is an American professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Although she has lectured worldwide in her field, and written or edited numerous academic publications on linguistics and interpersonal communication, she is best known for her general-audience books on interpersonal communication and public discourse. She became well-known in the United States after her book You Just Don't Understand - Women and Men in Conversation was published in 1990. It was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, was for eight months the number one best seller, and was subsequently translated into 29 other languages and on best-seller lists in six other nations. She has since made numerous appearances on major television and radio shows as an expert on interpersonal communication, and has had material published in many major newspapers and magazines. You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, her latest book, was also on the best seller list.

Helen Caldicott is an Australian physician and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, war and military action in general, particularly the use of depleted Uranium munitions, most notably nuclear energy in recent years, Uranium mining and nuclear technology in general.

George Monbiot is a journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist in the United Kingdom who writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper. He is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine. Monbiot’s most recent book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focuses on the issue of climate change. In this book, Monbiot argues that a 90% reduction in carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. He then sets out to demonstrate how such a reduction could be achieved within the United Kingdom, without a significant fall in living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport. Monbiot concludes that such changes are possible but they would require considerable political will.

This interview was recorded on Ferguson's recent trip to Los Angeles - before the election and before the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, so neither of these big stories will be mentioned. Ferguson is more conservative than my usual guest. The first two thirds deal with his views of the 20th century and their implications for our present moment. In the final third I confront his early support for the US invasion of Iraq.

"The Party's Over," Richard Heinberg places this momentous transition in historical context, showing how industrialism arose from the harnessing of fossil fuels, how competition to control access to oil shaped the geopolitics of the 20th century, and how contention for dwindling energy resources in the 21st century will lead to resource wars in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South America. He describes the likely impacts of oil depletion, and all of the energy alternatives. Predicting chaos unless the U.S.-the world's foremost oil consumer-is willing to join with other countries to implement a global program of resource conservation and sharing, he also recommends a "managed collapse" that might make way for a slower-paced, low-energy, sustainable society in the future.More readable than other accounts of this issue, with fuller discussion of the context, social implications, and recommendations for personal, community, national, and global action. Heinberg's book is a riveting wake-up call for humanki

Paul Rieckhoff founded and is Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). A non-partisan non-profit founded in 2004 with tens of thousands of members in all 50 US states, IAVA is America’s first and largest Iraq and Afghanistan veterans' group. Rieckhoff’s first book, a critically acclaimed account of his experiences in Iraq and activism afterwards, titled Chasing Ghosts, was published by Penguin in May 2006 (paperback to be published May 2007). While the IAVA is not tied to any political party or candidate, Rieckhoff has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. A 1998 graduate of Amherst College, he now lives in New York City.

IRAQ VETS SPEAK OUT 11:22:05

The bestselling author of The End of Nature issues an impassioned call to arms for an economy that creates community and ennobles our lives. In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. For the first time in human history, he observes, "more" is no longer synonymous with "better"—indeed, for many of us, they have become almost opposites. McKibben puts forward a new way to think about the things we buy, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the money that pays for it all. Our purchases, he says, need not be at odds with the things we truly value.

Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of TIME. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003) and of Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). His biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life and Universe, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2007. In 2007, he became a columnist for TIME on international affairs.

Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, which has won a National Magazine Award under his tenure. He coined the phrase The Long Tail in an acclaimed Wired article, which he expanded upon in the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006). He currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and five young children. He is the Chairman of a new startup, www.BookTour.com Before joining Wired in 2001, he worked at The Economist, where he launched their coverage of the Internet. He also has a degree in physics from George Washington University and did research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has also worked at the journals Nature and Science. The Long Tail has possible implications for culture and politics. Where the opportunity cost of inventory storage and distribution is high, only the most popular products are sold. But where the Long Tail works, minority tastes are catered to, and individuals are offered greater choice.