The College Tuition Spiral: KPFK 6/11

LISTEN online HERE — iTunes podcast HERE
TOM FRANK reveals the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media.  Tom writes for Salon.com.

Plus: RICKY JAY is one of the world’s great sleight-of-hand artists, distinguished by the remarkable variety of his accomplishments as an author, actor, and historian.  In  Jay’s Journal of Anomalies he describes some of his favorite strange entertainments through the ages.

Also: What are your 54 favorite films?  We’ll ask KENNETH TURAN, film critic for the LA Times—his new book is Not to be Missed: 54 Favorites from a Lifetime of Film.  We’ll talk about “Kiss Me Deadly,” “Touch of Evil,” “Vertigo” — and Lars Von Trier’s “Five Obstructions.”

 

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’: KPFK 6/3

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“We kill people based on metadata,” a former head of the NSA told DAVID COLE.   Can the NSA be controlled?  David will comment — he teaches law at Georgetown, he’s legal affairs correspondent for The Nation and writes also for the New York Review.
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Plus: $1 Billion to restore the LA River: LEWIS MacADAMS, founder and president of Friends of the LA River, will explain the historic victory that was announced last week—11 miles of the concrete flood channel of the river will be ripped out, from Griffith Park to downtown.

Also: Maybe you heard: yesterday was primary election day in California. we’ll have our political postmortem with HAROLD MEYERSON of the American Prospect and the Washington Post.

Rebecca Solnit: ‘Men Explain Things To Me.’ KPFK 5/28

LISTEN online HERE — iTunes podcast HERE
What goes wrong in conversations between men and women: REBECCA SOLNIT explains.  She writes for TomDispatch and Harper’s and the London Review of Books; her new book is Men Explain Things to Me.
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Also: The CIA has done many bad things, but it had one agent who might have brought some justice to the Palestinians: Robert Ames.   KAI BIRD, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author and contributing editor of The Nation,  talks about THE GOOD SPY: The Life and Death of Robert Ames.

Plus: China is the biggest story of the century : why does a government with more success lifting people out of poverty than any other civilization in history operate in such a repressive and dictatorial way?  EVAN OSNOS will explain – he’s been The New Yorker’s China correspondent, and his new book is Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China.

The Nixon Library Needs a New Director–Now TheNation 5/14

August 8 will be the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. That’s a good target date for the long-overdue appointment of a new director of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.  The library has been without a director for two and a half years, ever since the departure of Timothy Naftali in 2011. . .
… continued at TheNation.com HERE

Inequality and Capitalism: KPFK 5/6

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“The most important study of inequality in the last 50 years,” and “the most influential work of economics of the century”: that’s Thomas Piketty’s book CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.  TIMOTHY SHENK will explain—he wrote the cover story on Piketty in The Nation.  Piketty’s Capital is our featured thank-you gift in the KPFK fund drive—please call and pledge during the show 818-985-5735.

Plus: A secret history of the workplace: the office, and the cubicle, where 60 percent of Americans now work.  NIKIL SAVAL has that story—he’s an editor of n+1, and his new book is CUBED. “The very boringness of the office turns out to be what is most interesting”—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed.

7 Questions for Bill Maher: The Nation 5/1

Q. You do live shows all over the place. What’s it like to do your left-wing live show in a right-wing state like Alabama?
A.  I’ve been to Alabama twice this year. It’s a lot of fun. I’ve yet to find a place in America that’s so backward I can’t find two or three thousand screaming liberals to come out on a Friday night and cheer for the blue team. I think they’re gratified to look around the room and see so many people who they didn’t realize live in their area and think like they do.
. . . . continued at The Nation, HERE

It’s May 1–Happy, er, Loyalty Day! TheNation, May 1.

For more than a century, May 1 has been celebrated as International Workers’ Day. It’s a national holiday in more than eighty countries. But here in the land of the free, May 1 has been officially declared “Loyalty Day” by President Obama. It’s a day “for the reaffirmation of loyalty”—not to the international working class, but to the United States of America.
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

Sandra Tsing Loh, “The Madwoman in the Volvo”: KPFK 4/30

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SANDA TSING LOH talks about her “year of raging hormones”–and about middle-aged women, America’s largest demographic group.  She’s an award-winning author, a contributing editor of The Atlantic, and host of “The Loh Down on Science,” heard on the radio weekly by four million people. Her new book is The Madwoman in the Volvo.  Sandra will be reading and signing Thurs May 1 in Pasadena, ticket info HERE.

Also: LA’s sky-high rents – and what to do about them:  HAROLD MEYERSON has some ideas.  Harold writes a column for the Washington Post op-ed page, he’s editor-at-large for The American Prospect, and he wrote about rents in LA for the LA Times.

Plus: PETER VAN BUREN is the State Department whistleblower who wrote We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.  After the State Dept. fired him, he got the only job he could find as an ex-whistleblower.  We’ll talk to him about “Life in the New American Minimum-Wage Economy” – he wrote about it for TomDispatch.com.