Swing State

Our Final Swing State Episode: How We Rebuild Our Economy Oct 29, 2020

It will be Trump or Biden, with everything that choice means. In Covid time, with many millions out of work and so much uncertainty around basic questions of health, housing, money for food, the future of businesses and jobs, we wanted to look straight at the US economy in the midst of pandemic and political instability. The great economic journalist and analyst David Wessel, long of the Wall Street Journal news pages, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, now at the Brookings Institution joins us. In our final Swing State episode, as we arrive as promised to November 3, Tom and Heidi share what's next!

The Final Push: Trump, Biden and The Media Oct 21, 2020

Voters are already out in record-setting millions, many in line for hours to have their say. We've tried to be a point of honest clarity in this election run-up, but we all know it's an information war zone out there. We have two leading lights from the news business for their take on the battlefront. Margaret Sullivan is media columnist for the Washington Post, former public editor at the New York Times, and author of "Ghosting the News." Bina Venkataraman is editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, a science policy maven out of Harvard and MIT, author of "The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age." who's now taking on the whole world of policy, politics, and our information Wild West. We pulled them out of the news torrent to talk 2020, the loss of local news, and how to fix our information ecosystem.

Why Are We Ignoring The Big One? Climate Migration Oct 08, 2020

The 2020 election campaign season is fraught with unrelenting drama – who's infected now, hate-spewing, and the president's latest Tweetstorm – we lose track of the scale of what's really upon us. Beyond masks and death rates, the pandemic, the high court, the economy, democracy, fear of fascism, and all the rest there looms the Big One, our climate, and how the hammer of climate change will dramatically change our lives. Half of the American population will see a decline in their environment conditional. People are already on the move, fleeing fires, rising seas, too many hurricanes, too much heat. In the decades in front of us, climate migration - vast movements of people driven by painful climate change - is on track to explode. Abrahm Lustgarten does soften the blow. His New York Times and ProPublica piece over the summer reveals a world already on the move and forecast what's ahead for the United States...

Are Americans Even Listening To Each Other Anymore? Sep 30, 2020

Is there a better way to do journalism than Americans are seeing, hearing, and reading right now? Heidi and Tom dive in with John Gable who set out almost a decade ago to help news consumers get out of their information bubbles and see the world afresh with his website . But is there a way to cover these times with a straight face when the President doesn't tell the truth? How do journalists cover this moment in a time of social media disinformation and deep polarization?

Longtime GOP Strategist Stuart Stevens Games Out 2020 and Says It Was All A Lie Sep 17, 2020

Republican super-strategist Stuart Stevens knows the home stretch to presidential elections like very few others. He’s been at the heart of Republican campaigns for decades – for big-name governors, senators, Republican presidents, and contenders: George W. Bush, John McCain, Bob Dole, and most recently as the top strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012. In his new book, “It Was All a Lie”, Stevens is tough on himself and he’s brutal on the Republican Party. The GOP has embraced its own dark side, he says. Forget decency. Forget ideals. It’s just a power cartel, says Stevens, wound around race, racism, and institutionalized hate. Stevens is on the team at the Lincoln Project, the squad of ex-GOP campaign hotshots now looking to take Trump down in November. And the party itself? Stuart Stevens doesn’t believe it can be rehabilitated. But he’s sure Trump and his Attorney General William Bar will try anything to hang on to power. The next 50 days, he told us, will be the most dangerous for this country since the Civil War.

The Stakes Are High. Letters From An American. Sep 08, 2020

It's been quite an August, for the country and host Tom Ashbrook who lost his beloved dad. They promised they'd be back and take us to November 3 and Election Day. The big issues have put our whole country in a "Swing State" – life and death with Covid-19, the life and death of democracy on the table. Our very first Swing State guest was the great American historian and chronicler of our fraught times, Heather Cox Richardson. From her home up in Maine, she's been following and interpreting every twist and turn of this country's election-year journey. We asked her back to kick off what we're calling Season Two. Don't miss this frank look at what you should know before you vote.

Bob Dylan's Art of Conversation: Should We Demand More From Dylan and Boomers Right Now? Jun 24, 2020

Bob Dylan was the protest icon of a generation. “The times they are a-changing,” sang Bob Dylan and “a hard rains’ gonna fall.” Now, those 1960s protests are deep in the rearview mirror. A new generation is in the streets, with demands for a racial, cultural, gender, economic and structural accounting that might make Dylan look tame. At 79, with a new studio album, his first in years, we explore Dylan’s music, tenderness and anti-establishment voice with UMass Lowell's American Cultural Historian, Professor Michael Millner, and Yale’s American Religious Studies Professor Kathryn Lofton. Is much more to demand from this Nobel laureate for Literature when change is desperately upon us?

A Watershed Moment: Dr. Andre Perry on How We Make Substantive Structural Changes To End Inequality Jun 14, 2020

Know Your Price, Dr. Andre Perry's dynamic new book, offers concrete policy solutions that lift up Black communities and asks us to invest in Black people as he defines six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. A fellow at the non-partisan Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., Dr. Perry has long studied economic models around housing devaluation which leads to substandard education and substandard infrastructure in Black communities. In this incredibly useful interview, he offers ideas that stop blaming Black people and instead asks Americans to use this watershed moment as an opportunity to change the racial structures that feed and reproduce the inequality in America. A young child brought up in Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh, raised by his adopted mother, Andre Perry's knowledge is deep.

The Risk of The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America Jun 05, 2020

At the same time as protests erupted across American cities and the world demanding racial equity, the cities have become dystopian scenes of military hold. Gen. James Mattis now warns of division from the very top as a threat to American democracy. Many protests began peacefully until the nefarious, often violent, opportunists arrived. Who are they and who is inciting the violence? Are they opportunists, provocateurs of different ideologies, white supremacists, anarchists? University of Chicago Professor Kathleen Belew has tracked the contemporary rise of the White Power Movement from the 1970s in her book "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and describes the people she studies as people interested in exploiting these moments to damage democracy and overthrow the country. Sowing discontent, attracting followers on Facebook and in the darker halls of 4chan and 8chan, haunting statehouses and showing up at George Floyd protests, she says it's time to be hyper-alert and aware of this threat: highly organized cadres made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith.

What Do We Tell the Kids? And How – and When – Do We Get Them Back to School? Jun 03, 2020

The country is in crisis. Riots, protest, police brutality, pandemic. What do we tell our kids to help them understand? And how do we get them educated in our time of Covid-19? When and how do they go back to school? We reached out to leading educator Dr. Jennifer Price. She knows the public school world, the private school world, and how children's lives and educations are being pummeled by pandemic and upheaval. Don't duck the issues, she says. Talk about everything. And be ready for almost anything when it comes to the new face of education in Covid time. Jen Price walks us through the dramatic range of options K-12 schools are juggling as they plan for the coming school year with the pandemic unvanquished. Dr. Price is head of school at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a prominent private school. She was formerly principal of Newton North High School, a large public high school, and Superintendent of North Andover Public Schools.

Race in America: Bakari Sellers on My Vanishing Country, his new book May 29, 2020

In a hard week, Bakari Sellers– the youngest-ever member of South Carolina's state legislature, CNN commentator and influential African American attorney–points this nation forward in his new book, My Vanishing Country. Another black man chokes and dies under the knee of a cop in Minnesota, white privilege and a black birdwatcher meet in Central Park and protests erupt across the country. African Americans are dying at a disproportionate rate from COVID-19, online school leaves behind African American children who don’t have access to broadband, let alone clean water, the Payroll Protection Plan didn’t get to many black-owned businesses because they have no bank in their neighborhood. When does this end? More honesty, more action, says Bakari Sellers, for all our sakes.

AI + Robots = Revolution. May 22, 2020

Drawing on real life research and technology, P.W. Singer's new technological thriller, Burn In, shows how AI gets real fast and asks who controls our future. Will Siri, Alexa and smart houses and, above all, AI robots overtake the human grasp on our destiny? Will tech moguls pull the strings? For good or ill? The Wall Street Journal calls Singer "the premier futurist in the national security environment." He is Strategist at the New America Foundation and New York Times bestselling author of "Ghost Fleet" and "Wired for War." Damon Lindelof, writer/creator of Lost, Star Trek and Watchmen calls "Burn-In" a "rollercoaster ride of science fiction blended with science fact." P.W. Singer and co-author August Cole raise the question: when AI supercharges robots, who controls the off switch? Is there one?

Inside the Trump White House Now – The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker May 19, 2020

The scenes at the White House press briefings have been wild for years. Crazy talk about injecting bleach and light are the latest. Ashley Parker covered Mitt Romney in 2012 and Jeb Bush and then President Trump's run for the Presidency in 2016 when she was with The New York Times and she now covers the Trump White House for The Washington Post. From her earliest years as a journalist, and she is still very young, she has held major leaders accountable with the power of her reporting. We wanted to know what it’s like to cover the Trump White House right now. In the briefing room. In the Rose Garden. In the hallways. As the Covid death toll mounts, the economy tanks, and the November election looms up on the horizon, how will she approach this unusual Presidency full of misinformation, exaggerations and untruths who casts journalists themselves in opposition to him as we head into election season?

Where Is The Vaccine? Omar Khan, PhD Lays It Out May 15, 2020

The world is desperate for a vaccine. It’s a life or death race with massive geo political implications. A game of exposure, time and risk as more mutations of COVID-19 increases the monumental task for the scientists. The need for speed and scale is enormous. Omar Khan is part of the biotech revolution for nucleic acid vaccines based on an RNA delivery technology he created while at MIT. It is changing the way we make vaccines! He says we need all scientists on deck with both traditional vaccine development that takes 6-8 months and gene therapy solutions that can take 7 days. ....He urges that we fire on all cylinders to get it right. But can we produce it fast enough?

Will Big Tech save us or enslave us in the Covid-19 meltdown? Dipayan Ghosh says: YES. May 12, 2020

Dipayan Ghosh’s new book, Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design calls for a Digital Bill of Rights, anti-trust action on Big Tech and new rules to ensure the tech titans have American democracy in mind. But in this interview, he surprised us! He says YES to Google digitizing NYC with Governor Cuomo, YES to Big Tech running coronavirus Track and Trace if done carefully... and he goes deep with us on privacy, consumer rights, and using tech in a crisis.

American Economist Robert Reich On How We Get Out of This May 07, 2020

Robert Reich, American economist, professor, and author who served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton cares deeply about this country. You can hear it in his voice as he walks us through the shortcomings that are failing the American people, a society deeply cracked under the strain of COVID, the lost American Dream and unrelenting rise of unemployment. His new book is The System: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It. In this riveting interview, Reich lays out why and how this moment calls us to reclaim our personal power and create countervailing winds to take our power back as a society.

Is A Criminal Syndicate Taking Over Our Democracy? Sarah Kendzior Rings the Bell. Apr 30, 2020

Sarah Kendzior, author of The View From Flyover Country in 2016 and her new book Hiding in Plain Sight, studied autocrats in Central Asia then came home to find one, she says, elected in her own country, the USA. She's a bare-knuckled critic of the Trump administration and she has been ringing the bell that this is a "transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government." Says he'll try to cancel the November election is he thinks he's going to lose – and that Mitch McConnell's judges may support him. Says the Trump family is out to establish a dynasty, with Ivanka next in line. The host of Gaslit Nation has done her homework with over 30 pages of footnotes. We dive in with the fierce Sarah Kendzior.

Are Universities Screwed? Will We Reinvent Higher Ed and The American Dream in Coronavirus Time? Apr 26, 2020

When, how and will college students get back on campus? University of California Professor Christopher Newfield wrote The Great Mistake in 2016 on how we wrecked public universities and failed the middle class. Now COVID-19 has knocked schools flat. He calls for refunding and rebuilding public higher ed at the end of neoliberalism. Talk about prescient. We are also joined by Kent Syverud, Chancellor of private Syracuse University. Both say we need a Marshall Plan - and fast - to help American higher ed rise again. With pandemic, dramatic unemployment and a stone cold economy, how do we revive the American university? Time to get creative!

The Great Bill McKibben On How We Use This Wild Moment As a Dramatic Reset To Save The Planet Apr 21, 2020

In 1989, at the age of 29, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, serialized in The New Yorker. Hit with plague, not to mention draught, floods and swinging temperatures, Bill is with us to look at how we seize this moment to restart how we live and mitigate the next tragedy before it is too late.

A Massive Game of Stratego - The Spectator’s Dominic Green on the Eurozone, Boris’ Britain, and America and China as Economic Engines Apr 16, 2020

Rich countries, poor counties, China or America: who funds whom, who allies with whom? Are we heading to a Cold War with China or a new multi-polar world? Will the Eurozone survive and with whom will post-Brexit Britain choose to align? Is Europe’s stability vulnerable as Italy and Spain fall under economic stress? Historian and journalist Dominic Green dives deep with us on what happens when it is every nation for themselves.

November: Will You Get To Vote This November? How? Are We Ready? Apr 15, 2020

Voting rights in America have long been fraught but this 2020 Presidential election risks dramatic turns if people cannot vote. We sit down with journalist Ari Berman who is knee-deep in reporting on voting rights and ballot casting and we arrive at some pretty dramatic and plausible scenarios: Half of voters wanting to vote by mail in states where they need a witness, a printer, a legitimate reason where COVID may not count, a mosh pit of states contesting their elections with the Supreme Court? How nuts could it get? Berman lays out the case for why states must get ready NOW.

How Will We Cope? We Bring In the Therapist Apr 12, 2020

How are we all doing four-weeks in? Tom and Heidi take to the couch with Cambridge psychotherapist Jill Forney to unpack isolation, virtual living, massive uncertainty, job and financial stress and this new normal. How long can this go on? What will tomorrow look like? It’s a mental and physical game of survival and Jill Forney shrinks us through it!

The Bottleneck to Cash and Test and Trace: How We Restart The Economy with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson Apr 08, 2020

Where’s the relief money? Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has been writing brilliantly on how Denmark is moving radically at light speed to save its economy - and America is not. He brings ideas on a better way. Plus we dive into his latest reporting on coronavirus "test and trace" solutions from authoritarian China to less invasive versions in Singapore and Germany. But will skeptical Americans buy in? Derek Thompson says we have to mount a real collective effort from states to business to the federal government and launch fast. If we build a Covid-19 surveillance machine, can we dissolve it once we have a vaccine? Listen in.

How Will This Change Us? Is There Room for Optimism? Apr 05, 2020

Heidi and Tom head into a freewheeling conversation with MIT Futurist and optimist Andy McAfee. As co-founder and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Andy studies how digital technologies are changing the world. Even Andy, sees the gravity of this moment. Heidi pushes hard on the big tech companies responsibility to step up, give back, and help lead in this crisis. Tom thinks it’s going to have to be government – reborn, revitalized, and very differently led than right now if we want a successful recovery. We dive in on how this moment is reshaping us as a society and economy. It’s all for the voters to decide, next.

We Are Under Siege In America and the Generals Are Our Doctors Apr 01, 2020

We turn to doctors on the frontline in two of our nation’s top medical cities, San Francisco and Boston. Dr. Anita Demas gives it to us straight on how to deal with it when you are sick and Dr. Anna Cervantes-Arslanian, one of five critical care directors running Covid-19 response for the Boston Medical's ICU team, asks us all to stay in for the sake of the health care workers. These doctors took an oath to save lives and by doing so today risking their own. We hear it in their voices as mothers, doctors, generals on the frontline.

Swing State Has a Whole New Meaning Mar 30, 2020

Tom Ashbrook and Heidi Legg team up to bring you a new podcast with voices across America in a sudden Swing State of mind. Life and death, a crashing economy, and the way we live has been upended. Our first interview with historian Heather Cox Richardson whose daily Letters From An American has over 500,000 readers each morning, helps us to understand this moment in time and offers us a deep sweeping historical context. Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians, Richardson has authored five books that each chronicle a major movement like the one we are living. We hope you will follow us on Twitter @PodState and on iTunes as we bring you relevant voices that will help us all grasp this new era.

Heidi Legg and Tom Ashbrook Pivot to Bring You Voices Who May Help at This Extraordinary Moment in Time Mar 24, 2020

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