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. 

Ann Jones speaks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg, in a special edition of 'It's The Economy' for the 2016 KGNU Denver/Boulder Spring Fund Drive.

Please do kindly consider supporting independent journalism and keeping it alive by making a tax deductible donation to KGNU Denver/Boulder. 

She recently wrote a highly respected article for TomDispatch's TomGram on 'Social Democracy for Dummies', a discussion which is particularly pertinent for #Election2016.

She is also the author of many well-known books including 

They Were Soldiers

War Is Not Over When It's Over

Kabul in Winter

Women Who Kill

Next Time She'll Be Dead

Ms. Jones is an independent scholar, journalist, photographer, and the author of ten books of nonfiction. 

Her work focuses on women "and other underdogs" and on the historical/social/political structures which, she considers, do so much to perpetuate injustice.

She has written extensively about violence against women, reported from Afghanistan, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East on the impact of war upon civilians, and embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan to report on the damage done to America’s soldiers.

Widely published, her articles currently appear most often in The Nation and online at TomDispatch.com. She holds a PhD in English and history from the University of Wisconsin.

In recent years, her work has received generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the U.S.-Norway Fulbright Foundation. She is now (2015-16) an associate of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University