Free Forum with Terrence McNally

Aired: 11/17/13The gap between rich and poor is huge and growing...legislative stalemate paralyzes the country...corporations fight federal regulations...the influence of money in politics is greater than ever...new inventions speed the pace of daily life. Sound familiar? Those headlines from the early 1900s set the scene for Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book The Bully Pulpit-a history of the first decade of the Progressive era - a time when courageous journalists and an ambitious president took on the Robber Barons - the 1% of their day - and won.Goodwin tells the tale through the long friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft - a relationship that serves both until it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that cripples the progressive wing of the Republican Party and helps elect Woodrow Wilson. Getting equal billing in her account is the golden age of journalism led by the muckraking press at McClure's magazine. Together a bold and progressive press and a strong and progressive president served the people of the US rather than the super wealthy and the corporations. What lessons can we learn to help us turn this country around a century later?

Aired: 11/10/13THE SQUARESundance Audience Award WinningDocumentary re Egypt’s revolution(s)JEHANE NOUJAIM, DirectorKARIM AMER, Producer KHALID ABDALLA, Participant

Aired: 11/4/13Nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much aswe can from what works? Today's guest, JAY HARMON is doing just that, translating nature's lessons and models into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. He's the author of THE SHARK'S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. I believe biomimicry - a way of looking and working and designing - has enormous potential to save us from ourselves. I find this one of the most exciting developments in the world at this time.

Aired: 10/06/13What do you feel when at sporting events or other public gatherings crowds join in a call to "support the troops?" If you're like me, I always have some misgivings. On the simplest level, the gesture seems pretty meaningless. What am I or anyone else in that crowd actually doing to support the troops? And when they add some clichéd phrases about fighting for our freedoms, a voice in my head always asks, "Yeah, how? Where?" In Iraq, Afghanistan, operating a drone that's flying over Pakistan or Yemen? Today's guest ANDREW BACEVICH has thought long and hard about such things, and has written a series of fairly short, very readable books that pursue questions that too many ignore or pretend don't matter. The United States has been "at war" for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a gap has widened between America's soldiers and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." In his latest book, BREACH OF TRUST, Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its implications, which include a nation with an appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a volunteer army and a huge number of private contractors unable to achieve victory.

Aired 092913A new documentary film opened Friday 9/27 in 23 cities, including Los Angeles, starring former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, Berkeley professor, best-selling author, and frequent guest on this program, Robert Reich. Titled INEQUALITY FOR ALL, can it do for this "inconvenient truth" what the original did for climate change? My first guest this week will be the film's director JACOB KORNBLUTH.Early reviews are positive. It's got a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93%. Here's Ken Turan in the LA TIMES: Smart, funny and articulate, Robert Reich is the university professor we all wish we'd had. He's so accessible and entertaining he takes a subject that sounds soporific and makes it come alive like you wouldn't believe. Here's just a few numbers to remind you how crazy things have gotten:* In 1978, a typical male worker made $48K, a typical member of the top 1% $393K. In 2010, a typical male worker made $34K - a drop of 30%, while a typical member of the top 1% made $1,101K a gain of 180%.* In 2013, the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150M.* And as remarkable as those numbers are, I think the most important number in the film is this one: Consumer spending = 70% of the US economy. (i.e., Middle class = job creators).The last quarter of the show, we'll get an important update on the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant from HARVEY WASSERMAN.

Aired: 09/22/13Standing on an island off the Alaskan coast, PHILIP CAPUTO marveled that Inupiat Eskimo schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the same flag as the children of Cuban immigrants in Key West, six thousand miles away. And a question began to take shape: How does the United States, peopled by every race on earth, remain united?CAPUTO resolved to drive from the nation's southernmost point to the northernmost point reachable by road, talking to everyday Americans about their lives. Fourteen years later, nearing 70, CAPUTO, his wife, and their two dogs drove a truck and an Airstream trailer from Key West, Florida, to Deadhorse, Alaska, covering 16,000 miles. They avoided interstates, and invited conversations with Americans you meet when you avoid interstates. Somewhere in many of those conversations, Caputo would ask two questions: What holds a country as vast and diverse as the United States together? Was it holding together as well as it once did?

Are you doing more sharing these days? In a virtual sense, most of us would probably answer yes. Sharing political petitions, photos shot with our mobile phones, and of course, cute cat stuff. But what about sharing in the real world - are you doing more of that? Well, as a society the answer again is yes. Whether bike sharing, which is rolling out in 500 cities, car-sharing, even Hertz is getting into the game, or apartment sharing through services like AirB&B.Habits and practices of simpler times like swapping, trading, renting, and sharing, have been reinvented through real-time technologies and peer-to-peer networks to make sharing more efficient and affordable than buying new things.nullAccording to the Economist, "Occasional renting is cheaper than buying something outright or renting from a traditional provider such as a hotel or car-rental firm. The internet makes it cheaper and easier than ever to aggregate supply and demand. Smartphones with maps and satellite positioning can find a nearby room to rent or car to borrow. Online social networks and recommendation systems help establish trust; internet payment systems can handle the billing."Whether driven by economic hard times or technological innovation, something's going on here and I'll be talking about it for the next hour with April Rinne, Chief Strategy Officer of the Collaborative Lab.

Aired: 8/12/13This week we’re going to talk about happiness. So let’s start with a true-false test. I’ll tell you a supposed fact about happiness, and you decide whether you think it’s true or false. 1. Unexpected pleasures are the most rewarding. True or false? 2. Novelty in a relationship has similar effects on our brain as a high from drugs. True or false? 3. Daily hassles impact our well-being more than major life events. True or false? 4. When it comes to sex, women require more novelty than men. True or false? 5. The genes that underlie who gets divorced are passed down from parents to children. True or false? 6. A smoking habit is not a bigger risk factor for heart disease as a troubled marriage. True or false? 7. Renters are happier than homeowners. True or false? Okay, let’s see how you did…It turns out, according to today’s guest, all seven statements are true. Yup, renters are happier and women want more novelty in sex than men. Where do I get off making those assertions? All based in science. Today’s guest, SONJA LYUBOMIRSKY, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, is one of the nation’s top students of happiness, and we’re going to talk today about the findings in her new book, THE MYTHS OF HAPPINESS: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t; What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does.Originally from Russia, SONJA LYUBOMIRSKY received her A.B., summa cum laude, from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from Stanford University. Not too shabby. Her research has been awarded a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, a Science of Generosity grant, a John Templeton Foundation grant, and a million-dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct research on the possibility of permanently increasing happiness. She is author of The How of Happiness, translated and published in 19 countries, and her newest, THE MYTHS OF HAPPINESS.

Some estimate China will surpass the US to become the leading economic superpower by 2016. On the other hand, July 19th Paul Krugman wrote, "China is in big trouble. ...The country's whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits. You could say that the Chinese model is about to hit its Great Wall..."This week's guests, ORVILLE SCHELL and JOHN DELURY, have both devoted a lot of time to studying and writing about China, including co-authoring the new book, WEALTH AND POWER: China's long March to the 21st Century. We'll explore China's current story on a number of fronts.Schell and Delury believe that China's character has become defined by its pursuit of national greatness to reverse generations of humiliation at the hands of its neighbors and the West. This quest for wealth, power and respect remains key to understanding many of China's actions today. We'll talk about China's history, character, economics, politics, and more.James Fallows, who's spent a lot of time in China, writes of their book, "I'd suggest you read it if you're at all interested in China. It's both historical and current, and it does a better job than most other books of answering a basic question the rest of the world naturally asks...What does China want?"

Aired: 07/28/13I sometimes say that in a past life I worked in the entertainment industry, comedy in particular. I co-wrote and co-produced novelty records THE HOMECOMING QUEEN'S GOT A GUN, I LIKE EM BIG AND STUPID and EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY all performed by Julie Brown. I directed comic music videos for some of these songs, and ended up co-writing and co-producing the film EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY. I've produced and hosted this show since 1996 and I consult and speak primarily to non-profits and foundations, working with them on communications, encouraging them to tell better stories. My transition seems mild compared with that of this week's guest, TOM SHADYAC, whose phenomenally successful writing/directing/producing career included the hits- ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE, LIAR LIAR, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, BRUCE ALMIGHTY, and PATCH ADAMS . His films grossed nearly $2 billion and earned him four People's Choice awards and a ton of money. His 2011 documentary, I AM recounts what happened after a cycling accident left him incapacitated for months. Though he ultimately recovered, he emerged a changed man. In the film, Shadyac meets with a variety of thinkers and doers including David Suzuki, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu - asking what's wrong with society and what can we do make things better? Tom's now written a book, LIFE'S OPERATING MANUAL, which asks whether life comes with a set of guidelines? If so, what are they? And finally, do we have the courage to pay attention and to change? Rather than spoil the plot by telling you his answers, join us for the conversation.