First half: This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Here’s my 2006 conversation with Douglas Brinkley about his book The Great Deluge, in which he investigates the failures of government at every level, and traces the character flaws, inexperience, and ulterior motives that allowed the disaster to devastate the Gulf Coast. Second half: As school year begins, here’s my 2005 conversation with National Teacher of the Year, Rafe Esquith, on a PBS documentary celebrating his Hobart Shakespearians. Esquith leads fifth graders at LA’s Hobart Elementary, one of the nation’s largest inner-city grade schools, through a challenging curriculum of English, math, geography, and literature. At semester’s end, students – few for whom English is their first language – perform a full-length Shakespeare play. 

 

BRINKLEY, DOUGLAS (2006)-transcript

ESQUITH-2005-transcript

 

What happens when the President plays mob boss – “How much can I get away with? Who’s going to stop me?” I talk with American legal scholar ROBERT POST of Yale Law School about the rule of law, the American legal system, free speech, academic freedom, public morality, and the Supreme Court’s weakness in the age of Trump. You can learn more at law.yale.edu/robert-c-post 

Post Robert-08-18-2025-Transcript

 

A bittersweet truth about having recorded these conversations for 25 years is how many of my guests are no longer with us. I went back through my files and found at least 60 – Sixty human beings worthy, willing, and able to share an hour with me. Here’s my 2003 conversation with ROBERT FULLER, who crusaded for the dignity of all and against what he defined as “rankism” – the dismissal of society’s unknowns and underachievers as “nobodies.” We talk about his first book, Somebodies and Nobodies. Fuller died July 15th at the age of 88. 

 

Fuller-05-20-2003-transcript.2

 

In just the last two decades, we’ve experienced a global financial crash, a pandemic, multiple wars, and a climate crisis with repeated natural disasters. I talk with LIZZIE WADE about the ideas in APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. If a society enters a cataclysm – climate crisis, war, plague, etc. – behaving one way and emerges behaving another, she defines that as an apocalypse. Looking at these situations over time reveals they need not end badly. In fact, such transformation have often nudged us forward. Faced with today’s news, we could all use a dose of hope. You can learn more at lizziewade.com 

A couple of weeks ago I recorded myself reading a speech I originally gave June 9, 1989 –  36 years ago – at my 20th college reunion, Harvard class of 1969. Ours was the year of the University Hall takeover and the campus strike. In ’89, I was fully involved in the entertainment industry. In the speech, I asked how we were living up to our youthful ideals. I don’t know if my words affected anyone else, but I came back home and got much more involved in causes, setting me on the path on which I found this show 7 years later. Today I find my words prescient, hopeful and – given today’s reality – a bit tragic.

 

FF_TM 1989 Harvard Speech_Transcript