We can always use stories of redemption. Ira Glass says the best story form is the one used in sermons: stories with lessons. Father GREGORY BOYLE has made a point of collecting uniquely powerful stories of life and death, and his work has supplied him with more of those than anyone should know. As of 2010, he had buried 168 of his homies, and filled his first book TATTOOS ON THE HEART with their stories. I read it cover to cover on a plane flight and cried at least a dozen times. Father Boyle’s compassion is boundless. Our conversation also includes LUIS PEREZ, one of the senior staff at Homeboy.

Biden has been President for just over a year. I last spoke with ROB JOHNSON of the Institute for New Economic Thinking November 5th 2020, two days after the polls closed, though the Presidential race had yet to be called. We’ll talk not so much about how the administration is doing – though that matters and we’ll touch on it – but even more about how society is doing? The US as a society seems broken – if broken means unable to solve critical problems. It’s bigger than politics, bigger than economics. How deep is it? How broad? What have we learned – including in this year – about what it’s going to take to turn things around? 

In BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING DREAMS, brother and sister, DAVID & MARGARET TALBOT, tell the story of the 1960s, an era they call the Second American Revolution, through the individual stories of movement leaders, including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Russell Means of the American Indian Movement, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, Heather Booth and the women behind the (pre-Roe v Wade) Jane Collective abortion network. David founded Salon.com and has written six books. Margaret is a staff writer at The New Yorker.  

Anxiously entering the third year of a pandemic, and facing other huge challenges – inequality, injustice, endangered democracy, climate change, etc. we need to take care of ourselves. Here’s my 2013 conversation with neuropsychologist RICK HANSON, author of the best-seller BUDDHA’S BRAIN, about his book, HARDWIRING HAPPINESS, where he brings together mindfulness and neuroscience and offers pro-active practices to actually shift your brain’s neural structure – the hardwiring – toward calm, contentment, and confidence.