Philip Connors is a National Parks Service fire watcher in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness since 2002. In addition to essays in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, published in 2011; All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, published in 2015; and A Song for the River -- about the threat to the Gila River, one of the last wild rivers in the western U.S., threatened by a proposed dam -- published in 2018. His work has won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction, the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition, a Southwest Book Award, and an n+1 Writer's Fellowship. His fourth book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary, published just a few weeks ago, blends haiku and diary entries that beautifully convey his experience of solitude, his reverence for nature, and his witnessing of devastating forest megafires on an unprecedented scale. He also speaks to our longstanding foolish overconfidence in the ability to indefinitely prevent forest fires.

Recorded 8/8/25.

Ira Chaleff is past President of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates and award-winning author of several books, including The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders, published in 2009; Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You're Told to Do Is Wrong, published in 2015; Intelligent Disobedience for Children: A Handbook for Parents and Other Caregivers, published in 2018; To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader, published in 2024, and in a completely different genre, a collection of original poems about aging, Falling Apart Into Wholeness, published in 2020. Ira has conducted workshops on Leader-Follower relations for a wide range of organizations, including multinational corporations and governmental agencies. He served as Executive Director, as well as Chair of the Board, of The Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit group that provides management research, training and consulting for the U.S. Congress.

Recorded 9/16/25.

Tim Franks has been a journalist with the BBC since 1990, as a producer, reporter, and presenter. He has covered British politics, including the conflict Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, as well as international issues, as a foreign correspondent on the scene in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, and in war zones, such as Iraq during the war of 2003, and in Gaza during the current war there. Since 2013 he has been a presenter – or in American parlance, an anchor – for Newshour, the BBC World Service flagship radio news program. This interview will focus primarily on his recently published book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew, and an Argument About Identity.

Recorded 9/9/25.

Sophie Pavelle is a U.S. born and UK-based science writer and communicator, whose debut book, Forget Me Not: Finding The Forgotten Species of Climate-Change Britain, won The People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction (2023) and was long-listed for the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. She worked for conservation charity Beaver Trust for four years, presenting their award-winning documentary Beavers Without Borders (2020), and also sat on the Advisory Committee of the UK based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Today’s interview will focus on her latest book, published in May of this year, To Have or to Hold: Nature’s Hidden Relationships, a wide-ranging exploration of symbiotic relationships between unrelated species.

Recorded 9/2/25.

Amin Saikal is an emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University, where he was also the Founding Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies. He has won several academic awards and is a member of many national and international academic organizations. In addition to numerous articles in international journals, he has also written feature articles in major international newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The Guardian and has been a frequent commentator on radio and television news programs. He has written several books about relations between Islam and the West and on political developments in Iran, Arab countries, and his home country, Afghanistan. This interview will focus on his most recent book, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, published in 2024.

Recorded 8/26/25.

Henry ("Hank") Greenspan is an emeritus psychologist and oral historian in Holocaust studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, award-winning playwright and actor, lyricist, essayist, and poet, and social activist in the area of healthcare rights. During the interview he’ll be performing one of the monologues from his remarkable play, REMNANTS, in which he channels the personalities and pivotal experiences of holocaust survivors with whom he formed deep relationships over the course of 50 years. (A video of his performance of the complete play can be viewed, at no charge, here.) We’ll also be talking about his new book, released just last week, REMNANTS and What Remains: Moments from a Life Among Holocaust Survivors, which for the first time publishes the text of the play, as well as providing reflections on its history, production, and reception. (A long excerpt of another of his plays discussed during the interview, The Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto, can be viewed, at no charge, here.)

Recorded 8/19/25.

Psychologists Diane Ehrensaft and Michelle Jurkiewicz are the co-authors of the recently published book, Gender Explained: A New Understanding of Identity in a Gender Creative World. Diane is cofounder and director of mental health at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at the University of California, San Francisco, where she is also a researcher and professor of pediatrics. She is the author of two previous books on this subject: The Gender Creative Child and Gender Born, Gender Made. Michelle Jurkiewicz is a gender specialist in private practice in Berkeley, California and an early pioneer and trainer in gender-affirmative care with transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive youth.

Recorded 8/13/25.

Remi Adekoya is a political science lecturer at the University of York in the UK, focusing on national and sub-national identities and their role in international relations, especially as they affect Africa. Before joining academia, Remi was a journalist, whose writing appeared in major mainstream publications in Europe, the U.S. and Africa. He has also provided analysis and commentary for wide-ranging international media and is the host of the podcast How to Become a Leader in Africa. Remi’s cultural background – as the son of a Nigerian father and a Polish mother, growing up in Nigeria and living as an adult in Warsaw and now London – give him multifaceted, first hand, international perspectives. Today’s interview will focus on his book, published in 2023: It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth: How the Economics of Race Really Work.

Recorded 7/29/25.