The Connection with Marty Moss-Coane

In 1900, the average person could expect to live until their 47th birthday. By 2000, life expectancy was 77 years, an extraordinary gain of 30 years over the course of a century! Using those same metrics, many children today will live to be 100. So now that more people are living longer, is it time to rethink the aging process? What do we do with those extra years, how do we rebalance work, education and family life and create quality out of quantity? There are challenges that come with getting older, most notably loss and there are opportunities for growth. There are also baked-in prejudices about old people and there’s a premium, especially in America, on looking young. We’ll talk about all that with our guests psychologist Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and physician Lisa Walke, Chief of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger almost died. His new book explores coming to terms with his own mortality and what might come after death.

When Pixar’s Inside Out opened in movie theaters almost a decade ago, viewers were introduced to 11-year-old Riley and the emotions that defined her young life…joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust, each drawn as a different character. In Inside Out 2, Riley is 13 and she’s dealing with the raging emotions that come with PUBERTY!….embarrassment, envy, ennui and most notably anxiety…a big-mouthed, bug-eyed, character with wild, carrot top hair. This week on The Connection…understanding the important role that all emotions, including anxiety, play throughout our lives. Our guests were consultants on the film. Psychologist Dacher Keltner is co-director of the Greater Good Science Center at University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is titled Awe. Psychologist Lisa Damour specializes in treating adolescents. Her most recent book is The Emotional Lives of Teenagers

No one is perfect. We all make mistakes, disappoint people we care about and fall short from time to time. We know that’s true and yet, it is tough to be criticized. It can make us feel like a failure…ashamed, exposed, vulnerable.  This episode — giving and taking criticism at home and at work. We’ll talk about the difference between constructive and destructive criticism, the role of trust and empathy when delivering and receiving negative feedback, why the “feedback sandwich” doesn’t work, and how to handle the loudest critic of all: the one in our head. Psychologist Andrea Bonior, author of Detox Your Thoughts: Quit Negative Self-Talk for Good and Discover the Life You’ve Always Wanted and Christine Porath, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Most of us try to be honest but sometimes we don’t tell the truth. Psychologists Christian Hart and Drew Curtis have made researching lying their life’s work. They found that the average person tells about one lie a day, while chronic liars fib ten times a day. Their latest book is titled Big Liars. On this episode, we delve into the psychology of deceit, what we are learning about people who lie as a way of life and how to be on the look out for signs of lying. Hart and Curtis found that the most successful politicians are the ones who bend the truth. The more honest ones generally don’t get re-elected. And since we are headed into what promises to be a political season filled with mis and disinformation, it’s going to be vital knowing how to tell the difference between what’s false and what’s true.

Ecologist Douglas Tallamy talks about an approach to conservation that starts with letting your yard grow wild with native plants to save wildlife in ‘Nature’s Best Hope.’

Whether or not you are a poet or poetry reader, this hour will open your eyes to the power of poetry. We’ll explore why we need poetry and how it can connect us, heal us and help us pay attention to people and experiences outside of ourselves. We’re joined by three poets. Patrick Rosal is a professor of english at Rutgers-Camden and his latest book is The Last Thing. M. Nzadi Keita recently retired from teaching english at Ursinus College and her new book is Migration Letters. Trapeta Mayson is former Philadelphia Poet Laureate, founder of Healing Verse Philly and a licensed clinical social worker.

Psychiatrist Frank Anderson has been a leading expert in the treatment of trauma. Even though he was a much-in-demand speaker and wrote books about the subject, he never dealt with his own traumatic childhood and the abuse he experienced at the hands of his father…until now. When Anderson became a father, he saw himself acting and reacting like his dad in his relationship with his sons and went into therapy. His new memoir, To Be Loved, is about how facing the truth of his trauma has made him a more authentic and better person. Trauma is common, resulting in shock, numbness, and a feeling of disconnection from the self and others. Untreated trauma can have lifelong mental health consequences leading to depression and anxiety. Frank Anderson joins us to discuss what trauma can teach us and how it can be healed.

Filmmaker, hip-hop artist and professor MK Asante’s 2013 memoir Buck described growing up in Philadelphia in the 90s “unsupervised, with my brother gone, my dad gone, my mom gone and me just on the block in the neighborhood, roaming the streets of Philly — just lost.” The book explored his transformation from petty drug dealer to poet. Now over a decade later, Asante has a new memoir, Nephew: A Memoir in 4-Part Harmony and join us this week to talk about it. It begins with Asante sitting vigil by his nephew Nasir’s bedside at Temple University hospital, where he is close to death after being shot nine times. The book is written to Nasir about their family’s complicated legacy of secrets, loss, faith, and redemption. It’s also about the power of music and language to connect us and heal old wounds.

There’s been a lot of fighting over how to teach the history of America – and it’s turned classroom curriculums into political battlefields. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we get emotional confronting our past, with so many painful chapters. How do we get people to face the ugly truths of the American story? Can we feel sorrow, shame and anger while still taking pride in the things that make this country great? We’ll talk with a social psychologist and a history professor about why we need to teach “hard history” and how to develop the mental toolkit to reckon honestly with our past. Our guests are Dolly Chugh, psychologist and professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University and author of A More Just Future and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement.