Princeton Alumni Weekly Podcasts

Jeffery Schwartz *87, the author of Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work, leads the Future Work practice for Deloitte. Over the last decade or so, his team has said that we are on the precipice of major transformations in how and where we do our work. In this PAWcast, he speaks about his findings over the years and how COVID-19 has, in many regards, resulted in changes his team saw coming, such as working remotely, and how the timeline for the onset of those changes to the status quo has accelerated dramatically due to the pandemic.

Our guest this month is Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb Research Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. Maria, who received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1971, has recently published a book, Fairest of the Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters, which explores Disney’s Snow White and all of the Snow White-esque folklore found in cultures across the globe. Tatar shifted the focus of her scholarship to folklore in the 1980s and was one of the first American scholars to seriously study fairy tales and folklore. Maria discusses why the theme of mother-daughter jealousy has proved to be so universal, and why fairy tales are retold in new ways with each generation.

Eleanor Roosevelt was many things: an orphaned child in a prominent family, a stellar student, an ambitious social reformer, a savvy political spouse, a tireless humanitarian, and a syndicated columnist whose daily dispatches were followed by millions of readers. According to David Michaelis, author of the new biography Eleanor, the former first lady built a remarkable legacy by engaging with the public and pursuing her passions. “She truly was a far more evergreen person, in a way, even than her husband,” Michaelis says, “because she kept growing.”

This month, Cara Jones ’98 and her father, Farley Jones ’65 discuss their relationship with the Unification Church created by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Cara grew up deeply devoted to the religion, like her father, and accepted a marriage arranged by the Rev. Moon. But in a new documentary, Blessed Child, she explains how that marriage ultimately led to her disillusionment with the religion and her decision to separate from the church.

Jennifer Howard ’85 has just released a book called “Clutter: An Untidy History.” Faced with the daunting task of cleaning out her elderly mother’s chaotic and jam-packed home, Howard began to ask herself: “Why is this scenario so common? And what drives our need to acquire and accumulate so many things? And what becomes of our belongings when we, or often our loved ones, finally dispose of them?” Howard is a former contributing editor at The Washington Post and a former senior reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education, whose writing has also appeared in Slate and Humanities magazine.

This month Bart Gellman ’82 discusses his work on the Edward Snowden disclosures, the subject of his new book, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Gellman discusses the drama that unfolded around receiving and publishing the news about the NSA’s unlawful surveillance of Americans, and weighs in on his opinion of Snowden and tips for how to keep your data safe.

Jordan Blashek is from the Class of 2009, and his co-author, Chris Haugh, is a UC, Berkley graduate; the pair met while in law school together at Yale. Blashek served for five years as an infantry officer with the United States Marines and is now part of a new company called Schmidt Futures, founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Class of 1976, which works on a wide array of public-interest projects. Chris has served as a speechwriter for the State Department and is a journalist who has written for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Atlantic. In their new book, ”Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground,” Jordan, a Republican, and Chris, a Democrat, describe a series of road trips they took throughout the last four years, arguably some of our country’s most politically divisive. During these cross-country journeys, the two friends worked at finding common ground in their political differences while also meeting with people from all over the nation — and even in Mexico — who are the most impacted by United States policies and its politics.

In this Commencement episode of the PAWcast, valedictorian Nicholas Johnson ’20, an operations research and financial engineering concentrator, reflects on his time at Princeton. Johnson’s achievement is especially notable because he is the first black valedictorian in the University’s 274-year history. “It’s extremely overwhelming and a lot to take in, but also very empowering at the same time,” Johnson said. He will be heading to MIT in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in operations research. Johnson spoke with Carlett Spike over Zoom about his historic achievement, the impact of the pandemic on his last semester at Princeton, and the message he hopes to send to his peers in the Class of 2020.

Most people in the developed world can control the amount of wildness in their daily lives by simply shutting the door and adjusting the thermostat. But the COVID-19 outbreak has reminded us that the uncertainty and discomfort of the biological world is never completely locked away. Limiting our interactions with the nature has consequences, according to professor and author Paul Wapner *91, including a tendency to “put the burden of our comfort … onto the lives of those who are less fortunate.” The use of fossil fuels and destruction of natural habitats has also increased wildness in a global sense through climate change and extinction, and bold scientific interventions aimed at curbing those threats could push us further from the natural world. In his new book, Is Wildness Over?, Wapner advocates for a different path: “re-wilding.” (Photo by Sylvia Renick)

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to seize the globe in late March PAW revisited a podcast conversation from 2019 with Ashoka Mody, a visiting professor in international economic policy. In his book, EuroTragedy, Mody detailed the fragility of the European single currency. Now, amid global economic distress, he weighs on what the coming months will entail.