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Social Sci/Politics

LAPL ID: 
20

Parts Per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School

In conversation with Judith Lewis
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
01:10:29
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Episode Summary
An unsettling and timely investigation into the ties between Beverly Hills, its oil wells, and a local cancer cluster. A compelling legal drama by a journalist and member of the Beverly Hills High School class of '71.

Participant(s) Bio
Joy Horowitz is a freelance journalist and former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles magazine, and many other national publications. At Harvard University, she began writing sports for The Harvard Crimson. After graduating cum laude in 1975, she worked as a copy girl, sports writer and investigative reporter for the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. After stints as an investigative producer at the local CBS-TV news station in L.A. and feature writer at the Los Angeles Times, she received a Masters in Studies of Law (MSL) degree from the Yale Law School in 1982. She has been the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship (1981), a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her reporting on indoor air pollution for the Los Angeles Times (1982), and Sunday Magazine Editors' Association award for her Los Angeles Times magazine article "Greetings from Pearlie and Tessie" (1995), which was the basis for her 1996 book, and several Brandeis University National Women's Committee honors.

Judith Lewis is a senior editor at the LA Weekly, where her writing on technology, the arts, natural resource issues, public health and the environment has appeared since 1991. Her work also appears in High Country News, WIRED, Salon, Sierra Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. She won an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for her reporting on nuclear power and global warming. Judith is a member of the Society for Environmental Journalists, and is currently at work on a lay person's guide to nuclear energy.

What's the Matter with Capitalism?

Thursday, February 3, 2011
01:13:25
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Episode Summary

Barnes, successful entrepreneur (Working Assets Long Distance) and Appleby, eminent historian (The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism) discuss whether the market can effectively serve both private interest and public good. Can capitalism be upgraded for the 21st century?


Participant(s) Bio

Joyce Appleby, professor emerita at University of California, Los Angeles, has long taken an interest in bringing history to a larger public. Past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for the History of the Early Republic, she has thought deeply about the complex relationship of the American public with the country's professional historians. As co-director of the History News Service, she now facilitates historians' writing op-ed essays for newspapers which embed contemporary issues in their relevant histories. Before becoming a professional historian, she worked on Mademoiselle magazine and the Pasadena Star-News.

Peter Barnes, entrepreneur and writer, is currently a senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes Station, California. In 1976 he co-founded a worker-owned solar energy company in San Francisco, and in 1983 he co- founded Working Assets Money Fund. He subsequently served as president of Working Assets Long Distance. In 1995 he was named Socially Responsible Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. Barnes' previous books include Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen-Soldier, The People's Land and Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism. He is also the founder of the Mesa Refuge, a writers' retreat in northern California.


Shepard Fairey, "MAYDAY: The Politics of Street Art"

Presented in conjunction with LA Weekly
Monday, March 7, 2011
01:19:31
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Episode Summary

The Los Angeles-based artist and designer behind the ubiquitous Obey Giant stencil and the now legendary Obama HOPE poster, talks about his life, his work and his move from the street to large-scale museum exhibitions.


Participant(s) Bio

Shepard Fairey is the man behind OBEY GIANT. What started with an absurd sticker he created in 1989 while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design has since evolved into a worldwide street art campaign. In 2003, Fairey founded Studio Number One, a creative design firm dedicated to applying his ethos at the intersection of art and enterprise. In 2008, Fairey's HOPE portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and the original image now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In May of 2010, his exhibition MAYDAY was the final show to be mounted at Dietch Projects, in New York City. His work has also been exhibited in museums worldwide.


Adam Hochschild, "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918"

In conversation with Jon Wiener
Thursday, June 2, 2011
01:08:31
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Episode Summary

Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost), one of America's best narrative historians, examines one of the greatest and most puzzling examples of civilized evils in history and the now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, struggle against it.


Participant(s) Bio
Adam Hochschild has won a reputation as a master of suspense and vivid character portrayal with his books King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and others. His skill at evoking individual struggles for justice amid the sweep of historic events has made him a finalist for the National Book Award and won him a host of other prizes.

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and a professor of history at the University of California - Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. His books include: Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files; Professors, Politics and Pop; and Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. Wiener hosts an afternoon drive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM featuring interviews on politics and culture.

Is There a Conservative Assault on the Supreme Court?

Moderated by Jim Newton
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
01:17:11
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Episode Summary
Chemerinsky-- founding dean at U.C. Irvine School of Law-- and Eastman-- Kennedy Chair in Law at Chapman University-- debate whether the country's highest court has been ideologically motivated during recent decades, thus denying justice to millions of Americans.

Participant(s) Bio
Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine Law School. A graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he has authored six previous books and more than 100 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

Dr. John Eastman is the Donald P. Kennedy Chair in Law at Chapman University School of Law and was Dean from 2007 until February 2010, when he stepped down to pursue a bid to become California Attorney General. He joined the Chapman law faculty in August 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property and was appointed Dean in June 2007. He serves as the Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. John also serves as Chairman of the Federalist Society's Federalism & Separation of Powers practice group.

Jim Newton is the editor-at-large of the Los Angeles Times. In his 21 years at The Times, Newton has worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief and, from 2007 through 2009, editor of the editorial pages. He is the author of "Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made," a critically acclaimed best-selling biography of the former chief justice and California governor, and is finishing a presidential biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to be published in 2011. He teaches journalistic ethics at UCLA, where he is a senior fellow at the School of Public Affairs.

How the West Was Lost

Tuesday, February 22, 2011
01:16:17
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Episode Summary
One of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people and best-selling author of Dead Aid reveals the economic myopia of the West and the radical solutions it needs to adopt in order to assert itself as a global economic power once again.

Participant(s) Bio
Born and raised in Zambia, Dambisa Moyo received a PhD in economics from Oxford University and went on to work at Goldman Sachs for nearly a decade, as well as at the World Bank in Washington D.C. Ms. Moyo was named by Time magazine as one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World", and was nominated to the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Forum. Her writing regularly appears in economic and finance-related publications such as the Financial Times, The Economist magazine and the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Dead Aid.


Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage

In conversation with Gail Eichenthal
Monday, November 29, 2010
01:12:59
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Episode Summary

In a groundbreaking new account, Rowley describes the remarkable courage and lack of convention-private and public-that kept FDR and Eleanor together.


Participant(s) Bio

Hazel Rowley is the author of three previous biographies: Christina Stead: A Biography, a New York Times Best Book; Richard Wright: The Life and Times, a Washington Post Best Book; and Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beavoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, which has been translated into twelve languages. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gail Eichenthal is the Program Director of Classical KUSC 91.5 FM, and the co-producer and co-host of the Saturday 8am KUSC arts magazine program, Arts Alive. For more than twenty years, she hosted and produced the national radio broadcasts of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gail was previously an award-winning news reporter and anchor at KNX and CBS Radio. Gail's articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Times Magazine, and Symphony Magazine


I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace

In conversation with Laura Blumenfeld
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
01:19:35
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Episode Summary
A Palestinian doctor's response to the tragedy of losing four family members to an Israeli shelling has won him humanitarian awards around the world. Rather than revenge, he calls for people in the region to come together in understanding, respect, and peace.

Participant(s) Bio
Dr. Izzeldin Abeulaish is a Palestinian physician and infertility expert who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He received a scholarship to study medicine in Cairo, and then received a diploma from the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of London. He completed a residency in the same discipline at Soroka hospital in Israel, prior to completing a Masters in public health at Harvard University. Before his three daughters were killed in January 2009, Dr. Abuelaish worked as a senior researcher at the Gertner Institute at the Sheba hospital in Tel Aviv. He now lives with his family in Toronto, where he is an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Laura Blumenfeld is a national, front-page feature writer for The Washington Post. She writes about national security, politics and international affairs. Blumenfeld has also reported from the Middle East for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Financial Times and The L.A. Times. She reads and speaks Hebrew and Arabic. Upon graduation from Harvard College, Blumenfeld moved to the Palestinian town of Tira to work as a community organizer for Interns For Peace. Her book, Revenge: A Story of Hope, was a New York Times Best Seller and Notable Book of the Year. It has been translated into nine languages and incorporated into school curriculums.

Sacred Activism: Putting Spiritual Knowledge into Action

Co-sponsored by
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
01:08:12
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Episode Summary
Harvey, a poetic and passionate mystic and writer, suggests that what unites all religions \"is a truth that the service of God is putting love into action.\" He discusses his dramatic life conversion from mysticism to mystic activism with the Rector of Pasadena's All Saint's Church-known for its focus on social justice initiatives.

Participant(s) Bio
Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher. Harvey has published over 20 books including Son of Man and The Return of the Mother. Harvey is a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford from (1972-1986) and has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality, as well as, various spiritual centers throughout the United States. He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic. He is the Founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism in Illinois.

Ed Bacon is the rector of All Saints Church in Pasadena, California - a 4,000 member multi-ethnic urban Episcopal parish, with a reputation for energetic worship, a radically inclusive spirit, and a progressive peace and justice agenda. Ed has been honored several times for his peace and interfaith work: in 2005 by the Islamic Center of Southern California, in 2006 by the ACLU of Southern California, the Islamic Shura Council, and Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. In 2007 he was honored by the Pasadena NAACP and by the ACLU Pasadena-Foothill Chapter. He is currently a guest host twice a month on Oprah's Soul Series which airs every Monday on Sirius XM Radio.

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic

In conversation with Warren Olney
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
01:08:04
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Episode Summary
The author of the prophetic national bestseller \"Blowback,\" offers a vivid look at the new caste of professional warriors who have infiltrated multiple branches of government, for whom the manipulation of the military budget is of vital interest. In conversation with journalist WARREN OLNEY (\"To the Point\").

Participant(s) Bio
Warren Olney is the award-winning journalist and host of "Which Way L.A?" and "To the Point" on KCRW-FM.

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. His previous books include MITI and the Japanese Miracle.

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