Free Forum with Terrence McNally

LARRY KOPALD, Co-Founder and President of The Carbon Underground, wants you to know that to successfully confront the climate crisis, it’s not enough to reduce or even halt carbon emissions. We also need to draw down accumulated carbon from the atmosphere. Nothing does that better or more simply than Regenerative Agriculture, by rebuilding soil organic matter. I don’t like talking about “the environment” as some separate entity out there. Our deepest goals in life must include a healthy relationship with the rest of nature and an effective response to the climate crisis. Regenerative Agriculture and the work of The Carbon Underground offer a pathway to both.

“Change the story to change the world.” If story actually has that power - and I believe it does - then it can change for better or worse. In his new book, THE STORY PARADOX, JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL declares storytelling the best method we’ve ever devised for manipulating each other by circumventing rational thought. As new technologies amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and fake news, he calls on us to stop asking, “How can we change the world through stories?” and start asking - before it’s too late - “How can we save the world from stories?”

In the words of today’s guest, TIM JACKSON, Director of the UK's Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, "The finite planet we call home is being altered perhaps irreversibly by the massive human activity that parades under the seductive banner of progress.” But how do we replace the current model of not just commerce - but almost of reality - with a new one that is at least as inviting and more effective at fulfilling human and planetary needs? And how do we do it in time? Jackson’s new book, POST GROWTH: Life After Capitalism, lays out the problem and envisions a way of life beyond our addiction to material growth.

We can always use stories of redemption. Ira Glass says the best story form is the one used in sermons: stories with lessons. Father GREGORY BOYLE has made a point of collecting uniquely powerful stories of life and death, and his work has supplied him with more of those than anyone should know. As of 2010, he had buried 168 of his homies, and filled his first book TATTOOS ON THE HEART with their stories. I read it cover to cover on a plane flight and cried at least a dozen times. Father Boyle’s compassion is boundless. Our conversation also includes LUIS PEREZ, one of the senior staff at Homeboy.

Biden has been President for just over a year. I last spoke with ROB JOHNSON of the Institute for New Economic Thinking November 5th 2020, two days after the polls closed, though the Presidential race had yet to be called. We’ll talk not so much about how the administration is doing – though that matters and we’ll touch on it – but even more about how society is doing? The US as a society seems broken – if broken means unable to solve critical problems. It’s bigger than politics, bigger than economics. How deep is it? How broad? What have we learned – including in this year - about what it’s going to take to turn things around? 

In BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING DREAMS, brother and sister, DAVID & MARGARET TALBOT, tell the story of the 1960s, an era they call the Second American Revolution, through the individual stories of movement leaders, including Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Russell Means of the American Indian Movement, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, Heather Booth and the women behind the (pre-Roe v Wade) Jane Collective abortion network. David founded Salon.com and has written six books. Margaret is a staff writer at The New Yorker. 

Anxiously entering the third year of a pandemic, and facing other huge challenges - inequality, injustice, endangered democracy, climate change, etc. we need to take care of ourselves. Here’s my 2013 conversation with neuropsychologist RICK HANSON, author of the best-seller BUDDHA’S BRAIN, about his book, HARDWIRING HAPPINESS, where he brings together mindfulness and neuroscience and offers pro-active practices to actually shift your brain’s neural structure – the hardwiring - toward calm, contentment, and confidence. 

Hello, this is Terrence McNally.  As we begin the new year, declaring resolutions and setting goals, here’s  my 2012 conversation with Charles Duhigg about the ideas in his book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. We also talk about his 2012 NYT Investigative series re Apple's Labor Practices.

I’m curious about the meanings and lesson of the ‘60s. Questions and values that emerged in the 1960s are alive in Millennials and younger today, and I believe they stand a chance to build something deeper and more sustainable this time. This week I speak with EDWARD MORGAN. His 2010 book, WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE 1960’s?: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy seeks to explain both what actually happened and what happened to how we remember it, how the mass media shaped the popular image, meaning and value of that political and cultural decade -  caricaturing what was a genuine small-d democratic movement of movements challenging the status quo  as a generational rebellion of indulgence. Best forgotten. You can learn more at tedmorgan.blogspot.com

I wish you and your loved ones a deeply renewing holiday season. This week, you’ll hear my 2014 conversation with REZA ASLAN about his best-selling book, ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He examines Jesus the man through the lens of the time and place in which he lived, first-century Palestine, and labels him a zealot – a radical political opponent of the Roman occupation. Since Jesus was crucified without overthrowing Roman rule, he is one of many "failed messiahs." But only he among them become the starting point of one of the world’s great religions. This approach offers a Jesus more human, if no less heroic.