Speaker's Forum (Interviews)

Eva Hoffman calls time the element we live in and cannot leap out of. Although we cannot escape time, Hoffman is keenly aware that the human experience of time is highly malleable. Increasingly, Hoffman says, we bump up against the limits of human temporality. Digital technology stretches our capacity for attention, and medical advances stretch our lifespan. We now feel like we have less time, even as we live longer. Our scattered attention leads to memory loss and attention deficit disorder...

Is health care a right or just another commodity, subject to market fluctuations, to be bought and sold? As long ago as 1944, FDR said that health care was a right. A few years later, Truman tried to advance a national health plan. He got nowhere. Our health care system is located in a political economy known as capitalism often euphemistically called the free market. And because of that it is private and profit driven. The critical question which should be asked is: Is Capitalism and...

More than 60 million women are missing from the world's population today as a result of sexselective abortion, violence, and unequal access to health care and food. That's according to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He contends that the paramount moral challenge for the 21st century is achieving global gender equity. Kristof and his wife, former Times editor Sheryl WuDunn, tell stories of women's struggles in their book Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women...

At the invitation of his old friend Bill Clinton, Pulitzer Prizewinning historian Taylor Branch made 79 White House visits between 1993 and 2001 to record the president's private insights on his two terms in office. Branch's book based on those conversations is The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With the President. He spoke at Town Hall in Seattle on October 19, 2009.

Journalism is a vastly different world these days. Print papers are closing. Blogs are dominating. But David Domke isn't crying. He says the public is actually now more engaged in news than ever before! Domke did a study with old and young news consumers. The young ones asked, Why did you let only a few people decide the news for you? The sixtyfive plus group said, how do you even know what is news? The twentysomethings responded, at least we get to figure it out for ourselves. Domke is the...

Is it okay to steal a drug your child needs to survive? Would you force one person to die in order to save five others? Would you bid on a baby? These are some of the questions Michael Sandel raises in his extremely popular Justice class at Harvard University. It has so many fans that Harvard turned the course into a TV show, running now on public television. Sandel links moral questions to concrete, hotly contested, political issues like bank bailouts, affirmative action and torture. He...

Daniel Griswold challenges anyone who says free trade is a bad thing to do a closet survey: look at the tags on every item in your closet and see where the products are made. He says his closet holds 120 items, but only 10 of them are made in America. (Nine of them are neckties.) Griswold says we already vote on trade, with our dollars. He wants to dispel myths floating around about trade. For example, we aren't losing our manufacturing base because of it. We still produce plenty. And he...

The place with the oldest history in the world, Iraq, has no history at all, in a way. That's because the past is present and is now. Those are Lesley Hazleton's words. She's talking about the story of the ShiaSunni split which is the subject of her latest book on religion and politics in the Middle East. Seattle author Hazleton says she wants to bring Western readers into this story. It's a story so alive it could have happened yesterday, even though it all went down 1400 years ago....

Twice a year during the pledge drive, we pull together our favorite talks from the previous six months and give you a chance to hear them again. Tonight, a candid exmarine spills about military life. Tyler Boudreau says he was practically giddy when the Iraq war started. Once there, he even wrote about the joy in killing. But in that same diary entry, Boudreau said he was pretty sure he would eventually feel some guilt. Also, we'll get a clear health care explainer from T.R. Reid. Reid pulls...

What can babies teach grownups? Just 30 years ago, conventional wisdom was: not much. Infants were thought of as babbling, irrational, halfbaked adults. But Alison Gopnik says babies' minds have incredible depth. Gopnik is a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, with decades of experience in childhood learning and development. She says by studying babies in their own language, we can answer questions about human nature that continue to stump adults. Gopnik's latest...

Barack Obama is president, so racism in America is over, right? Not so fast, says Tim Wise. He's spent the last 15 years writing and speaking out against racism and the privileged status he enjoys as a white person. Wise says President Obama's election is meaningful: a qualified black man who has two years to interview for the country's top job can get it. But what does it mean for the lives of everyday Americans of color? Wise says racism is still alive and well in this country. He urges...

Comparing America's health care system to the rest of the world may seem like diving into a quagmire. Does all of Europe have socialized medicine? What about Canada? Aren't they happy with their system, where no one ever has to pay a doctor bill? But patients there have to wait long, painful months to see a specialist, right? T.R. Reid pulls out everything you want to know about Canadian, British and German systems, for example, and explains in plain terms how they work. In the end, he says...

Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew Conservatives have run against big government for decades. Thomas Frank says it's no accident then, that when conservatives rise to power, they get to work dismantling it. Frank says the modern conservative movement puts fundraising and patronage ahead of governing. When the public grows cynical over the ensuing waste, fraud and abuse, Frank says it helps to spread the conservative belief that government is the problem. Thomas Frank is founder of The Baffler...

Organic peach farmer and writer David Mas Masumoto's family has grown fruit on its California farm for three generations the kind of small family farm that's disappearing from America. He talks about what's being lost in his book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer. He spoke at Seattle's Elliott Bay Books on August 25, 2009.

Dr. Audrey Young says she went to work at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center because she loves the attitude there. She says the staff acts like every person who comes through the door needs to be given the best care possible, no matter whether the patient is homeless or some sort of VIP. Young writes about the hospital's daily dramas in her book The House of Hope and Fear: Life in a Big City Hospital. Here, she shares some of those stories, like one about Dr. Alice Brownstein, drinking...

As head of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Joel Berg advocates for more than one million lowincome New Yorkers who rely on the city's food banks and soup kitchens. His book about ending poverty in the United States is All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?. He spoke at Seattle's Elliott Bay Books on March 22, 2009.

In movies, the scientist is either a nerdy, socially inept goofball or a scary Dr. Evil with intentions to destroy the world. Chris Mooney says that silly stereotype seeps into kids' perceptions of the field and not enough people choose careers in science. Mooney says we need to step up our science respect. He wonders why politicians won't talk about it and he asks why few Americans can name a single science role model. Mooney says we need to bridge the divides between science and politics,...