I talk with SHARON WEINBERGER, for years the National Security and Foreign Policy Editor at the Wall Street Journal, now the Editor-in-Chief of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, about her new, important, and timely book, VALLEY OF DEATH: How BIG TECH Is Fueling the Future of War. The tech bros are staking out a new relationship with government, taking crucial decisions out of the hands of the people’s representatives – however flawed. Think Starlink in Ukraine. Private command of the development and implementation of potentially self-controlling technologies scares me. You can learn more at sharonweinberger.com.

This past April, Trump signed an executive order accelerating development of psychedelic drugs as medical treatments for mental-health conditions. CHARLES GROB MD has conducted approved clinical research with psychedelics since the early 1990s and has published numerous articles and chapters in the medical and psychiatric literatures. He’s editor of Hallucinogens: A Reader; co-editor (with Roger Walsh) of Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics; and co-editor (with James Grigsby) of the Handbook of Medical Hallucinogens. You can learn about his current studies at lundquist.org.

For years, Harvard professor ERAM ALAM has been looking at the role immigrant physicians play in US healthcare. We fill a chronic shortage of new domestic MDs with doctors trained elsewhere. Nearly a quarter of our physicians went to medical school outside the U.S. or Canada . We talk about her book, THE CARE OF FOREIGNERS: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare. I feel this is one of those issues where too many of us either don’t recognize its existence or don’t realize its implications. You can learn more at eramalam.com

SVEN BECKERT, in his latest book, CAPITALISM: A Global History, traces its story across the world since the dawn of the last millennium. He reminds us that capitalism is not natural or inevitable, but a human invention, one that has survived – even dominated – as its form has changed. What can we learn from history? If we invented capitalism, does that offer the possibility we could invent something to replace capitalism or that we could invent a capitalism that values sustainability and justice?  You can learn more at svenbeckert.com