For this "Summer Friday" we've put together some of our favorite conversations this year:
- Natalie Wynn, creator of the YouTube channel Contrapoints, discusses her work including her latest video titled "CONSPIRACY" in which she delves into the history of conspiracies in American politics, the allure of conspiratorial thinking, and how this way of thought negatively impacts democracy.
- James Sanders, architect, author, filmmaker, and co-writer with Ric Burns of the PBS series: New York: A Documentary Film and its companion volume, New York: An Illustrated History (Knopf, 2021) and the author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (Knopf, 2001), talks about the New York seen in films since the beginning of movie-making, as part of our centennial series.
- Each year the news division hosts the WNYC Health Convening with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as an opportunity for health care experts and practitioners to inform WNYC's health reporting. This year, as part of our centennial series "100 Years of 100 Things," Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, co-editor of The Cancer History Project, and author of The Dissident (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2023), discusses the century of cancer treatment advancements and how the U.S. government played a major part in funding the science for treatment, early detection and prevention.
- The WNYC Health Convening with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation continues with a look at the current state of cancer research in the United States.Sudip Parikh, Ph.D., chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and executive publisher of the Science family of journals;Otis Brawley, professor of oncology at The Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkin and co-editor of The Cancer History Project; andJulie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent at KFF Health News and host of the What the Health? podcast; discuss what the impacts of the Trump administration's funding cuts to the National Health Institute have meant to clinical trials—and what a future without government funding to find a cure might look like should the science continue to be underfunded.
These interviews were lightly edited for time and clarity and the original web versions are available here:
Contrapoints' Natalie Wynn Deep Dives into the Philosophy of Conspiracies (May 29, 2025)
100 Years of 100 Things: New York Films (May 19, 2025)
100 Years of 100 Things: Cancer Research (Jun 3, 2025)
A Roundtable on the Current State of U.S. Cancer Research (Jun 3, 2025)
