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Faculty Insight: Islam in the West – a clash of civilizations?

Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011!

Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard University Extension School. This third interview of the series is with Jocelyne Cesari, a level-headed yet astute specialist in contemporary Islamic society. Muslims who live in the Western world today face multiple challenges — suspicion, isolation, ignorance, fear. And post-9/11, of course, they carry the weight of that violent attack. So how are we to move forward, in an enlightened, inclusive manner? How ought we to apply our secular, humanist and individualistic values at such a time?

For starters, let’s listen to Jocelyne Cesari. She might not have all the answers, but as the director of the inter-faculty Islam in the West Program, she’s clearly the right person to ask. She is also an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and teaches in Harvard’s Department of Government, its Divinity School and its Extension School. This video of our interview is only an introduction, so….
Click here to hear the entire conversation! (16 minutes)

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Posted on December 17, 2010 in Faculty Insight, Harvard Luminaries, History, Politics, Religion
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Boston Book Festival – year two!

The second annual Boston Book Festival will be held on Saturday October 16th, and note bene, it’s free and open to the public! ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh will be hosting a discussion titled True Story: The Art of Nonfiction. As soon as it’s available, we’ll post the recording, but in the meantime, here’s the blurb:
“Writing a work of non-fiction that’s a page-turner has its challenges. The authors of three diverse works tell all: Noah Feldman’s latest, Scorpions, digs into the amazing stories of four of FDR’s most influential Supreme Court justices. Richard Cohen’s Chasing the Sun is a compendium of entertaining and scholarly lore about our solar system’s brightest star. Kathryn Schulz succeeds in being both witty and erudite while answering the question “why do we love being right?” in Being Wrong.”

Posted on October 10, 2010 in Literature
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Faculty Insight: Nuclear strategy in the post-cold war world

Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011!

Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School. This second interview of the series is with nuclear strategist Thomas Nichols, who is a professor at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a lecturer at Harvard Extension School. He speaks with ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh about the conflict with North Korea, the potential for nuclear terrorism, and the reduction of nuclear stockpiles in the post-cold war world.

Posted on September 23, 2010 in Faculty Insight, Harvard Luminaries, Politics
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Is Addiction a Choice? Harvard’s Gene Heyman says yes!

Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011!

Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with ThoughtCast and Harvard University Extension School. This first interview of the series is with Gene Heyman, a faculty member at the Extension School and a lecturer on psychology at Harvard Medical School. Professor Heyman’s controversial new book, called Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, asks if addiction is a disease, and anwers: no!

Posted on June 5, 2010 in Faculty Insight, Harvard Luminaries, Psychology
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Coral reefs, hermit crabs and tube worms with Randi Rotjan

Note: This interview was broadcast on WGBH radio, Boston’s NPR station for news and culture, on April 17, 2011!

The Cambridge Science Festival returns this week with Inspiring Minds: Meet Women in Science, a program at the Museum of Science that includes a talk by Randi Rotjan, a coral ecologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. Randi has been stung by jellyfish, coral, you name it. It’s all part of the job, studying coral reefs on location in exotic locales like the Red Sea or the Phoenix Islands, the world’s largest marine protected area. She goes face to face with hermit crabs as they line up, after the usual jostling, to form vacancy chains, waiting to trade in their old shells for newer, larger ones. It’s the classic upgrade, and it follows rules – perhaps ones we humans might care to copy.

Rules abound undersea – as does death. If the water temperature is too warm, corals bleach, starve and die. And if the tube worms that thrive near deep sea hydrothermal vents venture too far from the fissure, they’ll freeze. But most of the time, they’re doing just fine, thank you, feasting on the poisonous spewing gases they’re so fond of.
Watch this brief video on corallivory (the eating of live coral by fish!) to get you started.
And then click here (12 minutes) to listen to the audio interview, for the details.

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Posted on April 26, 2010 in Environment, Science
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New England Poetry Club Prizewinner Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman

The New England Poetry Club is apparently the oldest poetry reading series in the country. It was founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Conrad Aiken. This spring, it awarded its Sheila Motton Prize to Richard Hoffman for his book of poetry called Gold Star Road. Hoffman is the Chairman of PEN New England, the Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, and the author of Half the House: a Memoir, Interference & Other Stories, and Without Paradise, his second book of poetry.
To listen to Richard read from “Gold Star Road” (42 minutes), click here!

Wendy Mnookin

A runner-up for the Sheila Motton Prize was Wendy Mnookin for her book of poetry The Moon Makes Its Own Plea. She teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit Boston writing center. Her previous books of poetry are What He Took, Guenever Speaks and To Get Here.

To listen to Wendy read from “The Moon Makes Its Own Plea” (28 minutes), click here!