TERRENCE McNALLY is my guest this week. In February 2014, I took a hiatus from this show after 17 years. I thought it might be the end of the line, and before signing off, turned to journalist and best-selling author, SARA DAVIDSON, to interview me.  I returned to these conversations In 2017 after Trump’s election. So here we are – 11 years after that hiatus and this conversation, 8 years after my return, and a few days after Trump’s second inauguration. How did things look to me then as I reflected both backward and forward?

 

McNally, Davidson 2025 – Transcript

 

STEVE WASSERMAN has spent half a century in the world of books, newspapers, and ideas, as an opinion editor at the LA Times, editor of the LA Times Book Review; and as an editor at several major publishers. We’ll talk about that lifetime of work, how publishing and the press have changed, and about his first book, a memoir, TELL ME SOMETHING. TELL ME ANYTHING. EVEN IF IT’S A LIE – with cameos from Susan Sontag, Orson Welles, Jackie Kennedy, Robert Scheer, Gore Vidal. He’s now the publisher at Heyday Books, a fifty-year old independent publisher in Berkeley. Learn more at heydaybooks.com 

With Trump acting as if he were already president – and madly so – a number of the wealthy and powerful are stepping over each other to obey in advance. A clear step on the path toward authoritarianism cited by both Tim Snyder in On Tyranny and Daniel Ziblatt & Stephen Levitsky in How Democracies Die – here’s my conversation with Naomi Klein, recorded in July 2017, 6 months into Trump’s first term, about her book, NO IS NOT ENOUGH: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. What were we thinking? How would we respond? How does our response look 8 years later?

Happy New Year! Let’s work together locally & personally in 2025 as citizens and neighbors to overcome the political and media failures that brought us to this place. Here’s my conversation with SAM DALEY-HARRIS, founder of the anti-poverty lobby Results, about RECLAIMING OUR DEMOCRACY: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy (2024 edition), out in paperback mid-January. Learn more at reclaimingourdemocracy.com. I recommend pairing this with my recent episode with MARSHALL GANZ on his book, PEOPLE, POWER, CHANGE.

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What was it like for a girl to grow up in Virginia in the days of legal segregation and civil rights battles? What was it like to go to college in the days of the women’s and anti-war movements? The first female president of Harvard (2007-18), DREW GILPIN FAUST, and I are contemporaries, and we look back together at our young years in the South and our paths through the Sixties and beyond, as we talk about her memoir, NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury. You can learn more at drewfaust.com 

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