KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with actor Ian Ruskin about his production 'To Begin the World: The Life of Thomas Paine'. This is staged in full 18th-century regalia with Ruskin, as actor director, addressing his way through a broad spectrum of key historical events including the French Revolution. In Ruskin's work, the essence of Paine emerges, peppered with quotes from "Common Sense" and other immortal writings from this most radical of pre-Revolutionary American colonists. "One must always speak the truth as one sees it, no matter the consequences."

To learn more about Ian Ruskin's IndieGogo efforts to raising funding for a cinematic or TV production of the play, visit To Begin the World Over Again, Thomas Paine for PBS. 

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In this interview, journalist Claudia Cragg speaks here with Linda Tirado about her thought-provoking and (to some) controversial Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. Unlike the sheltered, ivory-tower social scientists who usually write about poverty, Tirado is an actual poor person. Or at least, she was. Last fall she posted a lengthy response to someone in an online forum who asked why poor people make decisions that seem so self-destructive. Her essay went viral and before long the shrewd and politically savvy Tirado had crowdfunded more than $60,000 to write a book. No longer officially poor, Tirado has endured a backlash from those suggesting she’s a fraud — which only proves her point that it’s easier to dismiss poor people than to listen to them.

Christmas is a time of seasonal cheer, family get-togethers, holiday parties, and-gift giving. Lots and lots--and lots--of gift giving. And says Joel Waldvogel, in this interview, it's hard to imagine any Christmas without this time-honored custom. But let's stop to consider the gifts we receive--the rooster sweater from Grandma or the singing fish from Uncle Mike. How many of us get gifts we like? How many of us give gifts not knowing what recipients want? Did your cousin really look excited about that jumping alarm clock? Lively and informed, Scroogenomics illustrates how our consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste--to the shocking tune of eighty-five billion dollars each winter. Economist Joel Waldfogel provides solid explanations to show us why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays.

 When we buy for ourselves, every dollar we spend produces at least a dollar in satisfaction, because we shop carefully and purchase items that are worth more than they cost. Gift giving is different. We make less-informed choices, max out on credit to buy gifts worth less than the money spent, and leave recipients less than satisfied, creating what Waldfogel calls "deadweight loss." Waldfogel indicates that this waste isn't confined to Americans--most major economies share in this orgy of wealth destruction. While recognizing the difficulties of altering current trends, Waldfogel offers viable gift-giving alternatives.

 Waldvogel argues here, in an interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU Denver/Boulder's 'It's The Economy', that by reprioritizing our gift-giving habits, Scroogenomics proves that we can still maintain the economy without gouging our wallets, and reclaim the true spirit of the holiday season.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with historian, Andrew Roberts about his work 'Napoleon The Great', the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last, says Roberts, we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, Roberts argues that Napoleon was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.

An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Many believe this to be a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by a foremost historian.

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Stephen Singular’s first book, Talked to Death, set the tone for his journalistic career. Published in 1987, it chronicled the assassination of a Denver Jewish talk show host, Alan Berg, by a group of neo-Nazis known as The Order. The book was nominated for a national award — the Edgar for true crime — and became the basis for the 1989 Oliver Stone film, Talk Radio. Talked to Death explored the timeless American themes of racism, class, violence, and religious intolerance, and the critics had been alerted to a new author and an important subject.

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Singular together with his wife, Joyce Jacques Singular, an author in her own right as well as a co-author with her husband for many projects. 

The Singulars are in the midst of writing a book about James Holmes, who carried out the largest mass shooting in American history in July 2012 at the Aurora movie theater. This will examine the larger social issues involving gun control, mental health, video games, neuroscience, the death penalty, doctor/patient confidentiality, and will offer a variety of perspectives from the Twenty-Something generation that’s driven much of this violence.

Since 1991, Joyce Jacques Singular, has worked closely with her husband on many of the true crime books. They both have an intense interest in the psychological aspects of murder and have unconventional views of spirituality.  Over time, this combination filtered into their work together. They've been intrigued with the place where darkness meets the light — and with looking at certain crimes not just from a legal, forensic or sociological point of view but from a spiritual angle as well. This is especially true when killers have committed acts of violence in the name of religion.

Since 1987, Singular has published 19 more non-fiction books that reflect a wide range of interest and diversity of styles. Twice a New York Times best selling author, he’s written three books about sports, including collaborations with NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and controversial NFL superstar Terrell Owens, and biographies of Hollywood power players Michael Ovitz and David Geffen. True crime remained the focal point of his work, but he’d begun writing less about individual crimes and more about social crimes. His 1995 study of the O.J. Simpson case, Legacy of Deception, went beneath the media hysteria surrounding these murders and connected the violent bigotry of The Order with the racist corruption inside the Los Angeles Police Department. Singular’s 1999 book, Presumed Guilty: An Investigation into the JonBenet Ramsey Case, the Media, and the Culture of Pornography, performed a similar role for the infamous child killing in Boulder, Colorado. 

In 2001, Singular brought out The Uncivil War: The Rise of Hate, Violence, and Terrorism in America documenting the increasing dangers of the nation’s deepening cultural war. The book was published well before terrorism struck the United States on September 11, 2001, and the country had plunged into a bitterly divisive conflict in Iraq. The same themes the author had first uncovered in Talked to Death – Fundamentalist religion and intolerance, racism and violence – were re-examined in this book, but now the stakes were much higher and the stage was global. Singular was probing not just the violence itself, but its underlying emotional and spiritual causes. His 2006 book,Unholy Messenger: The Life & Crimes of the BTK Serial Killer, goes even deeper into the convergence of distorted religious beliefs and bloodshed.

In her work on the books, Joyce has attended legal proceedings, visited inmates in prison, interviewed witnesses, studied forensic data, and been involved in developing ideas for stories, photo selection, editing, creative suggestions, and re-writing. The use of both a male and female perspective has added a unique dimension to the true crimes books, three of which have been about women who committed murders. These include  A Killing in the Family which was an NBC-TV mini-series entitled Love, Lies, and Murder; Sweet Evil, about a young Colorado Springs wife and mother who killed another woman; and Charmed to Death, which became a FOX-TV movie titled “Legacy of Sin.”  In Anyone You Want Me to Be, the story of the Internet’s first known serial killer, Joyce was especially insightful in chronicling women who were drawn into online romances that ended with their deaths.

(KGNU Denver/Boulder Broadcast Link)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Naomi Klein who argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. As she points out in her latest book. 'This Changes Everything', it is as she sees it alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us. 

In Carbon Shock, veteran journalist Mark Schapiro, explains here to KGNU's Claudia Cragg, how in this book he takes readers on a journey into a world where the same chaotic forces reshaping our natural world are also transforming the economy, playing havoc with corporate calculations, shifting economic and political power, and upending our understanding of the real risks, costs, and possibilities of what lies ahead.

In this ever-changing world, carbon—the stand-in for all greenhouse gases—rules, and disrupts, and calls upon us to seek new ways to reduce it while factoring it into nearly every long-term financial plan we have. But how?

From the jungles of the Amazon to the farms in California’s Central Valley, from ‘greening’ cities like Pittsburgh to rising powerhouses like China, from the oil-splattered beaches of Spain to carbon-trading desks in London, Schapiro deftly explores the key axis points of change.

For almost two decades, global climate talks have focused on how to make polluters pay for the carbon they emit. It remains an unfolding financial mystery: What are the costs? Who will pay for them? Who do you pay? How do you pay? And what are the potential impacts? The answers to these questions, and more, are crucial to understanding, if not shaping, the coming decade.

Carbon Shock evokes a world in which the parameters of our understanding are shifting—on a scale even more monumental than how the digital revolution transformed financial decision-making—toward a slow but steady acknowledgement of the costs and consequences of climate change. It also offers a critical new perspective as global leaders gear up for the next round of climate talks in 2015.

It is clear that popular anger against the financial system has never been higher, yet the practical workings of the system remain opaque to many people. A new book by Brett Scott, The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance, aims to bridge the gap between protest slogans and practical proposals for reform. Here, KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Scott who is a campaigner and former derivatives broker who has a unique understanding of life inside and outside the financial sector. In this book, he builds up a framework for approaching it based on the three principles of 'Exploring', 'Jamming' and 'Building', offering a practical guide for those who wish to deepen their understanding of, and access to, the inner workings of financial institutions. Scott covers aspects frequently overlooked, such as the cultural dimensions of the financial system, and considers major issues such as agricultural speculation, carbon markets and tar-sands financing. Crucially, it also showcases the growing alternative finance movement, showing how everyday people can get involved in building a new, democratic, financial system.

For KGNU Denver/Boulder, Claudia Cragg learns more about Tibet's enduring myth, a story animated with Himalayan adventurers, British military expeditions, and the novel, Lost Horizon, remains an inspirational fantasy, a modern morality play about the failure of brutality to subdue the human spirit. Tibet also exercises immense "soft power" as one of the lenses through which the world views China. 

In their book, Stefan and Lezlee Brown Halper book trace the origins and manifestations of the Tibetan myth, as propagated by Younghusband, Madam Blavatsky, Himmler, Acheson and Roosevelt. The authors discuss how, after WW2, Tibet-- isolated, misunderstood and with a tiny elite unschooled in political-military realities --- misread the diplomacy between its two giant neighbours, India and China, forlornly hoping London or Washington might intervene. China's People's Liberation Army sought nothing less than to deconstruct traditional Tibet, unseat the Dalai Lama and "absorb" this vast region into the People's Republic, and Lhasa succumbed to China's invasion in 1950. 

Drawing on declassified CIA and Chinese documents, the authors reveal Mao's collusion with Stalin to subdue Tibet, double-dealing by Nehru, the brilliant diplomacy of Chou en Lai and how Washington see-sawed between the China lobby, who insisted there be no backing for an independent Tibet, and Presidents Truman and later Eisenhower, who initiated a covert CIA programme to support the Dalai Lama and resist Chinese occupation. It has been reviewed as 'an ignoble saga with few, if any, heroes, other than ordinary Tibetans'.

In this interview with Claudia Cragg for KGNU Denver/Boulder, Daniel Levitin explains how the information age is now drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.

But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.

With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Musicshowed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.