Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. The latest of his eleven books is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. His King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. He is a three-time winner of the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the California Book Awards. His reporting from five continents has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Web page: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/person/adam_hochschild/

Dr. Stephen Zunes is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, where he served as founding director of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Recognized as one the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and of strategic nonviolent action, Professor Zunes has served as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus project of the Institute for Policy Studies, an associate editor of Peace Review, and a contributing editor of Tikkun until June 2024. Dr. Zunes was honored to serve March-June 2024 as Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Research Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. [See his Vitae, Photo and Contact/Appearances.]

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently THE BEZZLE (a followup to RED TEAM BLUES) and THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Thomas Singer, MD, is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst who trained at Yale Medical School, Dartmouth Medical School, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author and editor of many articles and books, including a series of books on cultural complexes in Australia, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Cultural Complexes and the Soul of America won the IAJS award for Best Edited Book of 2020. In addition, Dr. Singer has co-edited a series of books on Ancient Greece/Modern Psyche. His most recent book, Mind of State: Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring US Society and Politics, explores the many layers of conflict contributing to the polarization and dystopian mood of our times. Dr. Singer serves on the Board of ARAS (Archive for Research into Archetypal Symbolism) and has edited ARAS Connections for many years.

Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-nine novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Resurrection Walk, Desert Star, The Dark Hours, The Law Of Innocence, Fair Warning, and The Night Fire. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series, the Lincoln Lawyer series, the Renée Ballard series, and the Jack McEvoy series, have sold more than eighty-five million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He is the executive producer of the tv series Bosch and Bosch: Legacy on Prime Video, and The Lincoln Lawyer series on Netflix, and the documentary films Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He is the creator and host of the podcasts Murder Book and The Wonderland Murders & The Secret History Of Hollywood. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Dennis Prager is the co-founder of PragerU, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, and columnist who has authored nine books and is known as one of America’s most respected conservative thinkers.

Alexander Nemerov is the author of many books on American art, most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as "one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender"; and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named by Vogue one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Nemerov is a professor of art history at Stanford University.

Richard V. Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM). Before founding AIBM in 2023, Reeves was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. While at Brookings, he focused on policies related to economic inequality, racial justice, social mobility, and boys and men.

Reeves is the author of several books, including "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It" and "Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to do About It."

Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded AIBM to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions.

Ron Elving is Senior Editor and Correspondent on the Washington Desk for NPR News, where he is frequently heard as a news analyst and writes regularly for NPR.org.

He was previously the political editor for USA Today and for Congressional Quarterly. He has been published by the Brookings Institution and the American Political Science Association. He has contributed chapters on Obama and the media and on the media role in Congress to the academic studies Obama in Office 2011, and Rivals for Power, 2013. Ron's earlier book, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law, was published by Simon & Schuster and is also a Touchstone paperback.

During his tenure as manager of NPR's Washington desk from 1999 to 2014, the desk's reporters were awarded every major recognition available in radio journalism, including the Dirksen Award for Congressional Reporting and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2008, the American Political Science Association awarded NPR the Carey McWilliams Award "in recognition of a major contribution to the understanding of political science."

Felicity Barringer created the online magazine, & the West, for the Bill Lane Center in 2016, with Geoff McGhee, a data journalist who has been her partner in the enterprise ever since. Felicity, who is 73, started the work about 18 months after retiring from a 28-year career at The New York Times, where she had been a reporter and editor on the national, foreign and business desks. Her career at The Times began in Moscow, where she reported on the reawakening of Soviet society under Mikhail Gorbachev – and covered Chernobyl, including a visit to the plant. Her last decade at The Times was spent as a national environmental reporter, covering everything from the build-out of natural gas wells in western Wyoming to the passage of California’s groundwater management law. Before joining The Times in 1986  she worked for nearly a decade at The Washington Post. The Heart of & the West's coverage has always been environmental reporting – from droughts to floods to land use and wildlife issues. We try to look behind the news and look over the horizon at the issues that will soon dominate environmental coverage.

British born Canadian Malcolm Gladwell is a Non-fiction writer, journalist, public speaker and podcaster, (Revisionist History) and a New Yorker staff writer since 1996 and the author of eight books, Including The Tipping Point; Blink; Outliers; What the Dog Saw; Talking to Strangers; The Bomber Mafia and Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Jim Louderback is among the most respected figures in digital media with a 30-year history of leadership at the intersection of traditional media, digital media, experiential and technology. He recently ended an 8-year run with VidCon, starting in 2014 as editorial director of the industry track, taking over as CEO in 2017. In early 2018 he led the sale of VidCon to Viacom (now Paramount). He previously led investments in numerous startups as a Venture Partner at Social Starts, built and sold online video network Revision3 to Discovery, was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine and founding content lead for cable network TechTV. Jim writes the popular weekly newsletter "Inside the Creator Economy" on LinkedIn, advises startups, and develops, curates and moderates events and experiences globally.

A founding co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, David Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University. Professor Kennedy received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2000 for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War. He received an A.B. in History from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy’s scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women’s history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War (1999) recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

Elizabeth Farnsworth

Documentary filmmaker (The Judge and the General) and former chief correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She was a reporter covering crises in Iraq, Cambodia, Vietnam, Botswana, Chile, Haiti, Iran and Israel and is a recipient of the Alfred I DuPont Columbia Award. She is also the author of the memoir A Train Through Time and the novel Last Light, which takes place in Kansas in 1943 with a young woman newspaper reporter and an amnesiac POW who claims to be a corporal but acts more like a high officer.  We will discuss memoir and novel writing and documentary film making as well as the present geopolitics in some of the hot spots she worked in and covered as a reporter.  Your questions and comments welcome!

Veteran journalist, editor and speaker and author of the best-seller, Buddha or Bust and Becoming Gandhi. He has written for The New York Times, The L.A. Times and National Geographic. We will talk to him about Gandhi and the Mahatma’s legacy in India’s independence and passive resistance and the challenge of trying to live his 6 moral truths in immortal times as well as the importance of faith, fasting, vegetarianism, celibacy, non-violence and the role of compassion and goodness.  How is the often called father of India viewed in today’s India under Modi and do Gandhi’s ideals and principles continue to hold up?  We invite you to submit our questions and comments here: www.askgreymatter.show

This week's conversation at 11am Pacific time will feature a live conversation with best-selling author (The Joy Luck Club; The Kitchen God's Wife; The Bonesetter's Daughter) Amy Tan. We will focus on her most recent best-seller, The Backyard Bird Chronicles  -- a fascinating immersion into nature, the world of birds and the dedication to drawing them. You don't need to be a bird lover to listen and join in. Start sending in your questions and comments now to Amy Tan here at www.askgreymatter.show.

Click View Event for more information about Amy Tan.

A Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024).

Ethan Elkind is the Director of the Climate Program at CLEE and leads the Climate Change and Business Research Initiative on behalf of the UC Berkeley and UCLA Schools of Law. He taught at the UCLA law school’s Frank Wells Environmental Law Clinic and served as an environmental law research fellow. He has a background in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), climate change law, environmental justice, and other environmental law topics. In 2005, he co-founded The Nakwatsvewat Institute, Inc., a Native American nonprofit organization that provides alternative dispute resolution services and support for tribal governance, justice and educational institutions.

Aimee Allison is the founder and president of She the People, a national organization that elevates the voice and power of women of color as leaders of a new political and cultural era. She made political history in 2019 when she organized and moderated the nation’s first presidential forum for women of color which led to to widespread recognition of the issues and strength of this voting block.

Matt Abrahams is a leading expert in communication with decades of experience as an educator, author, podcast host, and coach. As a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, he teaches popular classes in strategic communication and effective virtual presenting. He received Stanford GSB’s Alumni Teaching his teaching students around the world. When he isn’t teaching, Matt is a sought-after keynote speaker and communication consultant. He has helped countless presenters improve and hone their communication, including some who have delivered IPO road shows as well as TED, World Economic Forum, and Nobel Prize presentations.

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine. She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation. She has also penned some very popular Op-Eds about applying to college, becoming an empty nester and giving advice to teenagers in the New York Times.

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and best-selling author.

The Washington Monthly called him as “one of America’s most important journalists.” The Portland Oregonian said his work equals the original muckrakers: Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

Johnston met Donald Trump in 1988 and in April 1990 revealed that Trump’s was no billionaire. When Trump announced his run for the White House in June 2015, Johnston was the only nationally-known journalist who immediately said Trump was serious this time and might get the GOP nomination. His reporting over the next year led to the Making of Donald Trump, published around the world in English and German on August 2, 2016, by Melville House.

Peter Coyote has performed as an actor for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Sidney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau.

Peter was the co-host of the Academy Award show with Billy Crystal in 2020. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 160 documentary films, including Ken Burns acclaimed The Roosevelts, for which he received his second Emmy nomination in July 2015. Other Ken Burns documentary films include National Parks, Prohibition, The West, the Dust Bowl and Vietnam, The History of Country Music, Ben Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, The Holocaust and America.

Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, principally at The New York Times, where his various roles have included op-ed columnist, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic. He was the Times’s first openly gay op-ed columnist and in 2016 was honored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association with the Randy Shilts Award for his lifetime contribution to L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He has made frequent television appearances, including on The Daily Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers and Real Time with Bill Maher. He also writes books. The Age of Grievance, published in late April 2024, became his fifth New York Times best seller; his previous best sellers include his memoir The Beauty of Dusk, about his medical, emotional and spiritual journey after a stroke in late 2017 diminished and imperiled his eyesight, and Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, about the college admissions mania. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the Sanford School of Public Policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and to produce occasional essays as a Contributing Opinion Writer for the newspaper. He lives in North Carolina.

Siri was launched in his home. That was the first consumer app that had AI inside of it. He’s launched hundreds of companies in his career. Elon Musk gave him the first ride in the first Tesla. Mercedes Benz gave him its first ride in its autonomous vehicle.

In his career he has written six books that properly predicted decade-long changes in the tech industry. Qualcomm’s head of Augmented and Virtual Reality wrote one of those, “The Infinite Retina,” was a “must read.” That all started when he was a strategist at Microsoft Corporation, during which the Economist Magazine wrote that he had “humanized Microsoft.” Since then he is the only human to completely map out the AI industry on X.com at https://x.com/scobleizer/lists and is followed by most of the influencers in the AI industry. He continues to be the first to launch interesting AI and robotics companies.

Recognized by Forbes as one of the top fifty female futurists globally, for nearly 40 years, Maddy Dychtwald has been deeply involved in exploring all aspects of the age wave and how it’s fundamentally transforming our lives and the world at-large. This has led her to become an award-winning author, acclaimed public speaker, and thought leader on longevity and aging, health, wellness, and the new retirement. 

Maddy co-founded Age Wave, the world’s leader in understanding and addressing the far-reaching impacts of longevity and our aging population. The Age Wave team has worked with more than half of the Fortune 500 in industries ranging from healthcare and medical technology to financial services and consumer products.

Steven Brill is the author of the best sellers The Teamsters, America’s Bitter Pill, and Tailspin, among other books. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other national publications. Brill is the cofounder and co-CEO of NewsGuard, which rates the reliability of news and information Web sites. He is also the founder of The American Lawyer, Brill’s Content magazine, Court TV, the CLEAR registered traveler program, and the Yale Journalism Initiative. He lives near New York City.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Ellen Galinsky is President of Families and Work Institute. She’s conducted research on child-care, parent-professional relationship, parental development, work-family issues and youth voice. She also serves as senior science advisor to AASA, the School Superintendent Organization and as senior advisor to the Immediate Office of the Assistant Secretary of Youth Mental Health at the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Ellen is the author of the best-selling Mind in the Making, more than 100 books/reports and 300 articles.