@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. 

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

@KGNUClaudia (Claudia Cragg) speaks here with Sari Wilson whose beautifully crafted, just published novel, Girl Through Glass, is causing a sensation.

Her story tells the tale of a young girl’s coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet—a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.

In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet.

Enduring the mess of her parent’s divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism.

Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory.

It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.

Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness.

As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.

In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self.

When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us.

Author Janice Y K Lee comes to Denver's 16th Street 'Tattered Cover' this coming Monday 25th January at 7:00 pm. For further details, please call: 1 303 436 1070

KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Janice Y.K. Lee "whose New York Times bestselling debut was The Piano Teacher (called “immensely satisfying” by People, “intensely readable” by O, The Oprah Magazine, and “a rare and exquisite story” by Elizabeth Gilbert.)"

"Now, in her long-awaited new novel, 'The Expatriates', Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong."

Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling.

In this KGNU interview, for 'It's The Economy, Claudia Cragg speaks with David Montgomery, a professor of earth and space sciences, and his wife, biologist and environmental planner Anne Biklé. In their recent book, 'The Hidden Half of Nature', they unravel the universe of microbes that make dirt fertile and allow us to digest food.

Both the lining of our colons and the ground beneath our feet, the authors explain, are "bio­logical bazaars where plants and people trade nutritional wares and form alliances." Combining lucid explication of emerging science with personal anecdotes, Montgomery and Biklé, who confronted a cancer diagnosis while writing the book, reveal that our immune defenses depend on protecting and nourishing these microscopic brigades.

According to USC's 'Center for Effective Organisations' Alec R. Levenson, 'Millennials' have been burdened with a reputation as spoiled, lazy, and entitled, but the reality behind the stereotype is far richer and more complex. But who are Millennials and what do they really want?

In this interview for KGNU's 'It's The Economy' Claudia Cragg speaks with Levenson who explains who Millennials really are, and offers practical advice to help those who manage, lead, and work with them to improve teamwork, increase productivity, strengthen organizational culture, and build a robust talent pipeline.

'What Millennials Want From Work', co-written and researched with Jennifer J. Deal, is based on fieldwork and survey data from global research on more than 25,000 Millennials and 29,000 older workers in 22 countries, this book paints a comprehensive, scientifically accurate picture of what really motivates Millennials around the world.