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The white working class is dying – literally. Their death rate in middle age is rising, while that of all other Americans continues to fall. It’s a shocking discovery, and a revealing one. We’ll have comment from HAROLD MEYERSON—he wrote about it for the Washington Post op-ed page.

Also: In 1692, Massachusetts executed 14 women, 5 men, and 2 dogs for witchcraft. We had another “witch-hunt” in the 1950s, with McCarthyism, and after 9-11, with the roundup of young Muslim men. STACY SCHIFF explains—her new book is The Witches: Salem 1692. (Our conversation was held at the L.A. Central Library as part of the Library Foundation’s ALOUD series; listen to the ALOUD podcast HERE.)

Plus: KPFK Sports! DAVE ZIRIN analyzes the campaign against racism at the U. of Missouri, where the football team led a startlingly successful movement—refusing to play until the president resigned.  Dave is sports editor of The Nation.

LISTEN online HERE iTunes podcast HERE
JOHN DENSMORE, drummer for The Doors, talks about Bernie Sanders — and about the new film Window of Opportunity, a suspensful dark comedy thriller about corporate greed that he produced. It’s screening Oct 28 at 7:30 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood—a benefit for Bernie. WATCH the trailer HERE.

Plus: The day that Dylan went electric: we’ll speak with ELIJAH WALD about the legendary moment in our history at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965—and listen to rare audio of Dylan playing “Maggie’s Farm” that day. Wald’s new book is Dylan Goes Electric!
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Also: Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is documentary made by the award-winning filmmaker ALEX GIBNEY — is our featured thank-you gift this hour of the KPFK fund drive. We’ll be speaking with Alex Gibney about why people join Scientology—and what happens when they try to leave.

LISTEN online HERE  iTunes podcast HERE
MARGO JEFFERSON remembers what she calls “Negroland”—the world of the black elite in the fifties, the world in which she grew up. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for her work at the New York Times; now she’s professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts, and she has a new book out: Negroland: A Memoir.

Also: GREIL MARCUS has written many books, starting with the classic Mystery Train and including the unforgettable Lipstick Traces. Now he has several new books coming out, starting with Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations; then the monumental Real Life Rock, the complete collection of his columns over the last 30 years; and he’s found new way of talking about our past: The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs.

LISTEN online HERE iTunes podcast HERE
Seven little words from MICHAEL POLLAN:  “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His number one-bestseller, out now in paperback, is IN DEFENSE OF FOOD. Michael is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Also: HENRY FORD’s Amazon colony — historian GREG GRANDIN tells the story of Ford’s biggest failure.  His book Fordlandia is out now in paperback.

Plus: Politics and modern music: Hitler and Stalin went to the opera, and Joe McCarthy subpoenaed composers. What was going on?  ALEX ROSS explains — he’s music critic for The New Yorker, where’s he’s written not only about classical music but also about Bjork, Bob Dylan and Radiohead.  His award-winning book, out now in paperback, is THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the 20th Century, and his famous website is TheRestIsNoise.com.

LISTEN online HERE  iTunes podcast HERE
Pope Francis met Obama at the White House today, part of his campaign to press the world’s last superpower to do more to care for the planet and its poorest people.  We’ll have comment from NATHAN SCHNEIDER, he wrote about the Pope for the Catholic magazine America and for The Nation.

Plus: Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution – that’s the powerful documentary by STANLEY NELSON about Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Fred Hampton, who was killed by the Chicago police in 1969—and about the LA Panther shootout 4 days later. The film opens Friday at the Nuart in LA. WATCH the trailer HERE.
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Also: LAILA LALAMI’s amazing novel, The Moor’s Account, is out now in paperback.  It’s a fictional memoir of the first black explorer of America—a Moroccan slave who arrived with conquistadores in Florida in 1527. Laila was born and raised in Morocco and teaches creative writing at UC Riverside; her book was nominated for a Pulitzer and won the American Book Award.

LISTEN online HERE  iTunes podcast HERE
Guns on campus: the Texas story. The Texas legislature recently voted to allow faculty, staff, visitors and students over age 21 to carry concealed handguns on college campuses.  We’ll have comment from MATT VALENTINE; he teaches writing and photography at UT Austin and wrote about guns on campus for Politico.

Plus: The second Republican debate is tonight: JOHN NICHOLS will review the situation, perhaps mentioning Donald Trump.  John of course is Washington Correspondent for The Nation.

Also: The battle for the beach continues: the rich and powerful who own property along Malibu’s 27-mile coastline fight to keep the public away from the sand and surf in front of their houses. Too often the LA county sherriffs help them. But the coastline belongs to everybody, and we have a right to beach access. Now JENNY PRICE has developed an app that pinpoints beach access points—and provides help when the sherriffs arrive.
GET the app HERE: http://ourmalibubeaches.com

LISTEN online HERE  iTunes podcast HERE
Hillary Clinton spent the first half of her political life denying that she was a feminist or a progressive. Now that the political forces in the Democratic Party have shifted, she needs to convince progressives that she really is who she was once widely believed to be.  MICHELLE GOLDBERG will explain—she wrote the cover story in The Nation about Hillary.

Plus: Steve Jobs, creator of the iPhone and the iPod, is beloved by millions—yet, as ALEX GIBNEY shows in his documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, he was a ruthless corporate exec who exploited Chinese workers (and his own friends) while claiming to “think different.”  We’ll speak with Alex about the man and the movie. WATCH the trailer HERE.
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The ACLU opposes funding body cams for the LAPD, because LAPD policy “undermines transparency and accountability.”  PETER BIBRING will explain.

Also: JULIAN BOND died a few weeks ago – he was a hero of SNCC and the civil rights direct action movement of the sixties, and went on to lead the NAACP. We’ll revisit our 2001 interview with him, where we talked about SNCC’s critique of the NAACP—he remembered it well.

LISTEN online HERE  iTunes podcast HERE
The LAPD and the battle to redeem American policing – we’ll speak with JOE DOMANICK, one of our best writers on the police, has a new book out: it’s about the campaign to reform the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, and it’s called Blue.

Also: The summer the confederate flag came down: historian ERIC FONER explains what happened—and why Donald Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship is a bad idea.

PLUS: Big news yesterday: California has agreed to end solitary confinement in state prisons – several thousand people will now be freed from solitary, often for a decade or more. It’s cruel and unusual and the sensory deprivation amounts to a form of torture. We’ll speak with Sam Miller of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which won the court case and negotiated the settlement.
WATCH video depositions of men with decades in solitary HERE: http://bit.ly/1L2RFzS

Finally, we’ll revisit our 2012 interview with OLIVER SACKS, the wonderful neurologist and writer who died on Sunday—we talked about his experience with LSD in 1963, in a segment called “Tripping in Topanga.”