@KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here for #NursesWeek with Theresa Brown, RN.

Twitter: @TheresaBrown

Her book, The Shift, is as eye-opening as it is riveting. Brown is a practicing nurse and New York Times columnist and she invites readers to experience not just a day in the life of a nurse but all the life that happens in just one day on a hospital’s cancer ward.

Theresa Brown is also a PhD in English Literature and, before she took up nursing, was a former professor at Tuft's University. 

In the span of just 12 hours, lives can be lost, life-altering medical treatment decisions made, and dreams fulfilled or irrevocably stolen. In Brown’s skilled hands--as both a dedicated nurse and an insightful chronicler of events--she offers an unprecedented view into the individual struggles as well as the larger truths about medicine in the US today, and by shift’s end, readers have witnessed something profound about hope and healing and humanity.

Every day, Theresa Brown holds patients' lives in her hands. On this day there are four. There is Mr. Hampton, a patient with lymphoma to whom Brown is charged with administering a powerful drug that could cure him--or kill him; Sheila, who may have been dangerously misdiagnosed; Candace, a returning patient who arrives (perhaps advisedly) with her own disinfectant wipes, cleansing rituals, and demands; and Dorothy, who after six weeks in the hospital may finally go home. Prioritizing and ministering to their needs takes the kind of skill, sensitivity, and, yes, humor that enable a nurse to be a patient’s most ardent advocate in a medical system marked by heartbreaking dysfunction as well as miraculous success.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Joseph Blasi, the J. Robert Beyster Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and the author of THE CITIZEN’S SHARE: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century with Richard Freeman and Douglas Kruse.

Twitter:@JosephBlasi

Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya has announced that he is to give his workers a taste of capitalism by granting them a share in the value of the company. Ulukaya, who is also the CEO of the company, promised 2000 employees ten percent of the value of the entire corporation if the company goes public or is sold in the future. The potential value of this stake is quite significant since the media reported Chobani’s potential estimated value as high as $ 2-3 billion.

The Chobani story comes at a time when the economic plight of the middle class is fueling strong interest by voters according to primary exit polls. High passions and vigorous debates by both politicians and citizens characterize the rhetoric swirling through both the Republican and Democratic primaries. This issue has clearly scrambled the entire electorate in a way that is nothing short of historic and in every way volatile.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Catie Marron about her second book, 'City Squares: "City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World".

In this important collection, eighteen renowned writers, including David Remnick, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Skloot, Rory Stewart, and Adam Gopnik evoke the spirit and history of some of the world’s most recognized and significant city squares, accompanied by illustrations from equally distinguished photographers.

Over half of the world’s citizens now live in cities, and this number is rapidly growing. At the heart of these municipalities is the square—the defining urban public space since the dawn of democracy in Ancient Greece. Each square stands for a larger theme in history: cultural, geopolitical, anthropological, or architectural, and each of the eighteen luminary writers has contributed his or her own innate talent, prodigious research, and local knowledge.

Divided into three parts: Culture, Geopolitics, History, headlined by Michael Kimmelman, David Remnick, and George Packer, this significant anthology shows the city square in new light. Jehane Noujaim, award-winning filmmaker, takes the reader through her return to Tahrir Square during the 2011 protest; Rory Stewart, diplomat and author, chronicles a square in Kabul which has come and gone several times over five centuries; Ari Shavit describes the dramatic changes of central Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square; Rick Stengel, editor, author, and journalist, recounts the power of Mandela’s choice of the Grand Parade, Cape Town, a huge market square to speak to the world right after his release from twenty-seven years in prison; while award-winning journalist Gillian Tett explores the concept of the virtual square in the age of social media.

This collection is an important lesson in history, a portrait of the world we live in today, as well as an exercise in thinking about the future. Evocative and compelling, City Squares will change the way you walk through a city.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks here for the radio show/podcast 'It's The Economy' with Susan Packard, the co-founder of HGTV and the only female founding member of Scripps Networks. (Twitter: @PackardSusan)

Women in the workforce have heard it all: Lean in, lean out, be bossy, be passive, separate work and home life…the conflicting guidance can be dizzying. So, Packard has simplified the rules. In NEW RULES OF THE GAME: 10 Strategies for Women in the Workplace (Prentice Hall Press/Penguin, February 2014).

In this, she uses her thirty years of experience - from 'secretary' to Executive VP - to give women an encouraging and achievable strategy for accomplishing workplace goals: gamesmanship.

Packard says that she has realized what’s really important in corporate America: to her, it is learning a man's rules for grit and gamesmanship and then outplaying them. It's not about platitudes or appearances, but rather utilizing the strategic thinking regularly found in sports and video games that men typically excel in to develop creativity, focus, optimism, teamwork and ultimately success.  

However, her advice applies NOT ONLY to women. Men, millennials and even children, have a lot to learn from what she has to say. 

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here for the 'It's The Economy' with AOL's "Steve" Case.

Case, whose full name is Stephen McConnell Case', is an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman. He is best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL).

Twitter: @SteveCase @ThirdWaveBook

Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC.

Case serves as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) and was a member of Barack Obama'sCouncil on Jobs and Competitiveness. He also serves on the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE). Case is also chairman of UP Global, a non-profit organization focused on fostering strong entrepreneurial communities, created in 2013 from the merger of Startup America Partnership and Startup Weekend.

Together with his wife, Joan, they run The Case Foundation. 

His new book is: The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Don Tapscott, a Canadian man whose name is profoundly associated with new technologies and business practice. He is the CEO of the Tapscott Group and one of the most influential living theorists about business and society. (Twitter: @dtapscott)

In November 2013, 'Thinkers 50' named him the 4th most important business thinker in the world.

A June 2013 Forbes.com analysis of social media identified him as the most influential management thinker in the world.

He is the author or co-author of 15 widely read books about new technologies and new media, 

Tapscott is the author of 15 books about the digital revolution in business and society, including Wikinomics and the landmark work, The Digital Economy, which has just been published in a 20th Anniversary edition. He is also chancellor of Trent University.

Alex Tapscott is the CEO of North West Passage Ventures, an advisory firm building early stage companies in the blockchain space. (Twitter: @alextapscott)

Together, they are authors of the new book, The Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Mark Schatzker about his new book, 'The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor'. 

Twitter: @MarkSchatzker

Schatzker believes that we are in the grip of a food crisis. Obesity has become a leading cause of preventable death, after only smoking. For nearly half a century we’ve been trying to pin the blame somewhere—fat, carbs, sugar, wheat, high-fructose corn syrup. But that search has been in vain, because the food problem that’s killing us is not a nutrient problem. It’s a behavioral problem, and it’s caused by the changing flavor of the food we eat.

Ever since the 1940s, with the rise of industrialized food production, we have been gradually leeching the taste out of what we grow. Simultaneously, we have taken great leaps forward in technology, creating a flavor industry, worth billions annually, in an attempt to put back the tastes we’ve engineered out of our food. The result is a national cuisine that increasingly resembles the paragon of flavor manipulation: Doritos. As food—all food—becomes increasingly bland, we dress it up with calories and flavor chemicals to make it delicious again. We have rewired our palates and our brains, and the results are making us sick and killing us.

With in-depth historical and scientific research, The Dorito Effect casts the food crisis in a fascinating new light, weaving an enthralling tale of how we got to this point and where we are headed. We’ve been telling ourselves that our addiction to flavor is the problem, but it is actually the solution. We are on the cusp of a new revolution in agriculture that will allow us to eat healthier and live longer by enjoying flavor the way nature intended.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Thomas A Kochan - @TomKochan - on Shaping the Future of Work. He lays out in discussion a comprehensive strategy for changing the course the American economy and employment system have been on for the past 30 years. The goal is to create more productive businesses that also provide good jobs and careers and by doing so build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. This will require workers to acquire new sources of bargaining power and for business, labor, government, and educators to work together to meet the challenges and opportunities facing the next generation workforce.

The book reviews what worked well for average workers, families, and the economy during the era of the post-World War II Social Contract, why that contract broke down, and how, working together, we can build a new social contract suitable to today s economy and workforce. The ideas presented here come from direct engagement with next generation workers who participated in an MIT online course devoted to the future of work and from the author's 40 years of research and active involvement with business, government, and labor leaders over how to foster innovations in workplace practices and policies.

Over 2 million of the United States' 11 million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the author of Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard University.

Twitter: @RGGonzales1

In this work, Gonzales introduces the reader  to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and those who make an early exit, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations.

Gonzales' vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here (click on 'pod' link next to title to listen to the interview) with Pamela Hodges of ipaintiwrite.com.

She is "Pamela, not Pam. The non-stick spray ruined the shortened version of (her) name.
She writes about art, creativity, and everyday life with cat barf and seven litter boxes."

This is the story of one woman's creativity from Canada, to Japan, to the US, via photography, graphic design and sheer determination.

You can for free get a PDF copy of her new coloring book, "COLOR THE CATS," simply by texting 

colorthecats

to 44222 and entering your email for the blog subscription.

KINDLY NOTE 10 percent of all proceeds from Color The Cat are contractually donated by Pamela Hodges to the Best Friends Animal Society. The biggest US 'no-kill' rescue organization.