CLICK 'Pod' icon above left to listen to the interview

#MayaAngelou RIP 

In May of 2013, KGNU News Director, Joel Edelstein, generously invited colleague Claudia Cragg to speak by phone with Dr. Maya Angelou for a one on one interview. It turned out to be one of the very last she ever gave to talk about her then latest book. Explored here is the influence the great woman has had on another Maya, Maya Carter. She is a 19 year old from Denver,(now just finishing her College freshman year) and, listening to the original KGNU interview, young Maya here tries to explain the effect that Dr.Angelou's life, work, poetry and thinking has had on her and in her initiation of the Motivate & Empower Movement she has founded in her honour. 

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the radio interview

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department. He spent a year in Iraq, an experience that led to his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. As a result, the US Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department with his full benefits of service.

The main point of discussion here though is Van Buren’s personal work experience (in the hiatus when suspended from the State Dept) working for a store he calls 'Bullseye' in the minimum wage Big Box economy. This led to his new book Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent based on his up close take on the drastic effects of social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980’s right up to today.

Notes for the book (from Van Buren's Blog); Some Background from a Real Economist

Economist Thomas Piketty’s new bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes clear there has been a significant increase in income inequality in America. Our inequality rate is higher than it ever has been in our own history, is growing, and is higher than in countries in Western Europe and Canada.

In the United States, the top one percent own 35 percent of all capital, and the top ten percent of wealth holders own roughly 70 percent. The bottom 50 percent have roughly five percent. Note also that until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were also considered capital.

The inequality is driven by two complementary forces.

By owning more and more of every thing (capital), rich people have a mechanism to keep getting richer, because the rate of return on investment is a higher percentage than the rate of economic growth. This is expressed in Piketty’s now-famous equation R > G. The author claims the top of layer of wealth distribution is rising at 6-7 percent a year, more than three times faster than the size of the economy.

At the same time, wages for middle and lower income people are sinking, driven by factors largely in control of the wealthy, such as technology employed to eliminate human jobs, unions being crushed and decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage more and more Americans now depend on for their survival.

CLICK 'Pod' icon above left to listen to the interview

In June 2011, KGNU's Claudia Cragg spoke with the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson about her then just published book, 'Reckless Endangerment'. More than 5 years on since the world financial catastrophe of 2008, nothing much has changed and many consider 'endangerment' not only persists but may now be even more prevalent. 

In Reckless Endangerment, Gretchen Morgenson exposes how the watchdogs who were supposed to protect the country from financial harm were actually complicit in the actions that finally blew up the American economy. Drawing on previously untapped sources and building on original research from coauthor Joshua Rosner—who himself raised early warnings with the public and investors, and kept detailed records—Morgenson connects the dots that led to this fiasco.

Morgenson and Rosner draw back the curtain on Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance giant that grew, with the support of the Clinton administration, through the 1990s, becoming a major opponent of government oversight even as it was benefiting from public subsidies. They expose the role played not only by Fannie Mae executives but also by enablers at Countrywide Financial, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, HUD, Congress, and the biggest players on Wall Street, to show how greed, aggression, and fear led countless officials to ignore warning signs of an imminent disaster.

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Ryan Carson about the 70 people who work at Treehouse, an online education company that teaches people about technology. They work only four days a week at the same full salary as other tech workers. Yet the company’s revenue has grown 120 percent, it generates more than $10 million a year in sales, and it responds to more than 70,000 customers, according to a post in Quartz by CEO Ryan Carson.

Carson has been working four-day weeks since 2006, when he founded his first company with his wife, he told ThinkProgress. He quit his job to start it, only to find that they both put in seven days a week. “I remember distinctly my wife and I were on the couch one evening,” he recalled, “and she said something like, ‘What are we doing? I thought that starting a company means you have more time and more control, but it seems like we have less time and less control and we’re more stressed out.’” They decided to cut back by not working Fridays, and after they hired their first employee, “we decided to officially enact [a four-day week] and we never looked back.”

Carson has since started three other companies at which he’s instituted this rule, Treehouse being the latest. While it’s hard to quantify, he believes his company benefits from better output and morale. “The quality of the work, I believe, is higher,” he said. “Thirty-two hours of higher quality work is better than 40 hours of lower quality work.” The impact on his employees’ outlook is also “massive,” he said. “I find I just can’t wait to get back to work” after the weekend, and he suspects the same is true for others. On Mondays, “everyone’s invigorated and excited.” He recounted a time when a developer told him that his hope was to work at the company for 20 years. In the Quartz article, he noted that a team member gets recruitment emails from Facebook, but that his response is always, “Do you work a four-day week yet?”

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the radio interview

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Dee Williams (PAD, Portland Alternative Dwellings) to discover how she found a way to lower her monthly bills to only $8 dollars as outlined in her new memoir and 'how to' The Big Tiny.

After a heart condition diagnosis ten years ago, a new sense of clarity took hold for Dee Williams. As she looked around her overpriced, oversized house, Williams thought: What was all this stuff for? So she downsized, building a new life in 84 square feet. Now a pioneer in sustainable living and an accomplished teacher and lecturer on tiny house-building, Williams has achieved a happy balance and created a model for simple, sustainable, practical living.

Her book, as you will hear here, is a touching personal memoir of a woman rebuilding her life from scratch, as well as an account of the DIY tiny house movement. From suburban properties to city apartments, and from HGTV to local communities across the country, people are rethinking what it means to be a homeowner and how to build sustainable lives for themselves and their families.

But Williams also offers practical and philosophical guidance for aspiring tiny homeowners and for those just looking to de-clutter their lives (Williams can list all of her belongings on a single sheet of paper.) This is part how-to and part why-to and The Big Tiny is both a graceful and inspired meditation as well as an exploration of what it really means to build the good life and more importantly the right life.

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the radio interview

In April of 2014,  Elaine "Lainey" Lui fulfilled a lifelong dream when her first book, Listen to the Squawking Chicken: When a Mother Knows Best, What's a Daughter to do? A Memoir (Sort Of) was published (by Random House in Canada and Penguin in the USA). 

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg talks about the book, a paean to her mother aka 'The Squawking Chicken' and learns how Lainey co-founded LaineyGossip.com, an entertainment news and gossip blog and how she also became co-host of CTV's daytime talk show "The Social", and a reporter on CTV's "etalk", Canada's number one rated entertainment news show. She joined the show in 2006 as a special correspondent and has since covered the Red Carpet at the Oscars, SuperBowl XLII, Cannes and Toronto International Film Festivals, and other events worldwide. 

Her website in fact started as an email to small group of friends and colleagues in 2003 and spread by word of mouth to thousands of now loyal readers. It launched as a website in December 2004 and has since grown into an immensely popular entertainment destination visited by over 1.5 million monthly unique readers. Generating over 18 million monthly page views, it is now a leading international celebrity gossip source and a must read for well-read, educated females across North America. 

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the radio interview.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: @KerryZuckus points out that Rusasebagina's is just one side of a complex story. Zuckus believes that in"INSIDE THE HOTEL RWANDA": a different 'truth' is perhaps exposed. wp.me/p3lmJ2-4g - cut & paste link - via @rwandaissues

Twenty years ago, beginning on April 6 1994, more than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in a horrific genocide that spanned 100 days.  To mark the 20th anniversary of the horrendous events of that time, KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks where with Paul Rusesabagina, the part played by actor Don Cheadle in the film 'Hotel Rwanda'.

Genocide continues to be a tragic global issue. To raise awareness of and commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, who saved thousands of lives during the horrific events of 1994 has been re-published. 

In his book, An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina provides an inside look into his life both before and after the horrendous mass murder in Rwanda. As the manager of the exclusive 'Hotel Les Milles Collines' he sheltered more than 1,200 Tutsis and Hutu moderates from the killings. The story brings the reader inside the hotel during those 100 days, relates the anguish of those who saw loved ones brutally murdered, and describe Rusesabagina's ambivalence at pouring scotch and lighting the cigars of killers in the Swimming Pool bar, even as he was trying to cram as many refugees as possible inside the guest rooms upstairs. Rusesabagina explores his inner turmoil as he discusses the racial complexity within his own life (he is a Hutu married to a Tutsi) and his complete estrangement from the madness that surrounded him during the genocide

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the interview

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Francine Prose about her newest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. Emerging from the austerity and deprivation of the Great War, Paris in the 1920s shimmers with excitement, dissipation, and freedom.

It is a place of intoxicating ambition, passion, art, and discontent, where louche jazz venues like the Chameleon Club draw expats, artists, libertines, and parvenus looking to indulge their true selves. It is at the Chameleon where the striking Lou Villars, an extraordinary athlete and scandalous cross-dressing lesbian, finds refuge among the club’s loyal patrons, including rising Hungarian photographer Gabor Tsenyi, socialite and art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and caustic American writer Lionel Maine.

As the years pass, their fortunes-and the world itself-evolve. Lou falls desperately in love and finds success as a racecar driver.

Gabor builds his reputation with startlingly vivid and imaginative photographs, including a haunting portrait of Lou and her lover, which will resonate through all their lives. As the exuberant 20s give way to the Depression of the 30s, Lou experiences another metamorphosis-sparked by tumultuous events-that will warp her earnest desire for love and approval into something far more sinister: collaboration with the Nazis.

Told in a kaleidoscope of voices that circle around the dark star of Lou Villars, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 evokes this incandescent city with brio, humor, and intimacy. Exploring a turbulent time defined by terror, bravery, and difficult moral choices, it raises critical questions about truth and memory and the nature of storytelling itself.

(There was an excellent Janet Maslin review of the novel also in the April 10 edition of The New York Times.)

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Kimberley Palmer who writes about money – how to have more of it and how to manage the money you have. Her new book, 'The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life' (January 2014, AMACOM), tells the stories of 100 successful side-giggers who built financial security by launching side-businesses. In addition, she writes about money as the senior money editor and Alpha Consumer blogger at US News & World Report. Palmer says she loves helping people make smarter money choices, especially when it comes to navigating big life milestones, from college graduation to parenthood to homeownership. In her first book, Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back, she covers many of those topics.

CLICK 'Pod' icon (above left) to listen to the interview

For this week's KGNU programme, 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks with Tim Harford. His first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.

In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – which, he says, putting you (the reader) in the driving seat.

With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.

According to The New Statesman's Felix Salmon, 

“Tim Harford is perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world… his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics.”