Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon

Stephan Faris, FORECAST & Leonard Nimoy

rheannon05@gmail.com — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:07:37 +0000

We talk with journalist Stephan Faris about his book, FORECAST, THE CONSEQUENCES OF CLIMATE CHANGE. We also air excerpts from an archived interview with actor Leonard Nimoy about his work as a photographer.

On June 26, the United States Congress passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES, for short. It’s the first attempt by Congress to tackle climate change, but many scientists (like climate scientist James Hansen) say its current targets fall far short of what’s necessary to prevent what Stephan Faris predicts in his new book, FORECAST: The Consequences of Climate Change. (Read an Op-Ed by Paul Krugman making the same point.)

Faris traveled far and wide to report on how climate change is — and will — impact our world, even if we manage to keep global temperature rise to “only” 3 to 4 degrees Farenheit. (If we continue on the path of “business as usual”, the rise will be more like 6 to 9 degrees, or more.) He went to Darfur, the Arctic Circle, the Napa Valley, Kashmir and other places to talk to people who are already feeling the heat from global warming. Faris connects the dots between a lot of hot button issues, including immigration, ethnic cleansing, the rise of xenophobic political parties, the spread of tropical diseases, and even the rise of insurance rates and problems in wine-growing regions in Europe and California.

In addition to writing FORECAST, Stephan Faris has written for Time Magazine, Fortune, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com about a range international crises. He lives in Rome, where he might be facing creeping desertification from climate change.

Leonard Nimoy talks to us about his photography book, THE FULL BODY PROJECT, as well as photography as part of his creative process, acting, and being (and not being) Mr. Spock in this archived interview from October, 2007.

In addition to being a star on stage and film, Nimoy has also been a musician and as a photographer. He’s been interested in photography since he was given a Brownie instamatic camera as a youngster. I spoke with him in 2007 about THE FULL BODY PROJECT. The book aims to liberate the image of the female body from the advertising industry’s gaunt stereotypes. The women in it are portrayed in all their full-figured glory.

Welsh Poet Gwyneth Lewis and Marshall Jon Fisher’s A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR

rheannon05@gmail.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:25:07 +0000

Guest host Christian McEwen talks with Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis and Francesca Rheannon talks with Marshall Jon Fisher about one of the greatest tennis matches ever played: the 1937 Davis Cup final at Wimbledon. His book is A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR. The movement to preserve Welsh culture and language in Britain has been a bitterly contested one by the British government. (The week this show was produced, Welsh folksinger Arfon Gwilym was denied a visa to enter the USA to represent Wales at the Smithsonian Institute’s Folk Life festival in Washington, D.C. because he has a “criminal record”: he was jailed three times years ago by the British government for his campaigns on behalf of the Welsh Language, including demanding bilingual road signs and the creation of a Welsh television channel.)

Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis has been part of that movement. Appointed Wales’s first National Poet from 2005, Lewis writes in both English and Welsh. She’s published six books of poetry in Welsh and English, three libretti for Welsh National Opera, as well as a memoir about her battle with depression, Sunbathing in the Rain.

WV guest host Christian McEwen spoke with Lewis in February 2009, when she came to read at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. This interview is part of an ongoing series she’s producing with the Poetry Center at Smith and Writers Voice. It’s called Sparks from the Anvil.

This week, the Wimbledon tennis championships are happening. As of today, the news is that Rafael Nadal has withdrawn from the games. That means no rematch of last year’s epic Wimbledon final with Roger Federer, which some have called the greatest tennis match ever played. My guest, Marshall Jon Fisher, disagrees. His book, A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR tells the fascinating story of an earlier match, which he thinks deserves the title of the greatest–one that took place as the world was tilting toward the cliff edge of World War II. It was the 1937 Davis Cup match between Don Budge, playing for the Americans, and Baron Gottfried von Cramm on the German team. Fisher takes the reader on a gripping play by play of the match. But he also places it within the context of the geopolitics and sexual mores of that time.

Stephan Faris, FORECAST & Leonard Nimoy

rheannon05@gmail.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:51:49 +0000

Freedom and Democracy

rheannon05@gmail.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:20:32 +0000

Diane Wei Liang talks about her memoir of Tienanmin Square, LAKE WITH NO NAME. And we talk with Anthony Lake about the First Amendment and FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT WE HATE. The twentieth anniversary of the massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmin Square was marked on June 4th. On that day in 1989, troops opened fire on demonstrators in the square and some 2500 were killed, and 7,000 – 10,000 people wounded, according to the Red Cross. The student movement had lasted only six weeks. But it had its roots in a long past, starting with the May 4th student movement of 1919. And its reverberations can still be heard, though muffled, in China today.

Diane Wei Liang was at Tienanmin. A student at Beijing University, she was part of the student democracy movement, and she was forced to leave China to continue her studies in the US because of her involvement in the students’ revolt. Born in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began, she lived much of her early years in times of terrible conflict and repression. Her memoir of those times, LAKE WITH NO NAME, is a story of political passion. It’s also a story of romantic passion, a love affair never consummated, except in the souls of the two lovers.

We first talked with Anthony Lewis in May of 2008. George Bush was still President and his administration’s assaults on the constitution had already been widely reported. Now Barack Obama the constitutional lawyer is president. But we shouldn’t necessarily breathe a sigh of relief–at least not where the constitution is concerned. There are reports that torture is still going on at Guantanamo and Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan. And Obama has indicated he wants the power to order preventive detention. It would allow indefinite imprisonment not based on proven crimes or past violations of law, but of those deemed generally “dangerous” by the Government for various reason. So, the fight to protect our freedoms goes on.

Our constitutional right to free speech as guaranteed by the first amendment still seems safe. But it’s not without controversy. How free should free expression be? Should it protect hate speech?How about pornography? Or tobacco advertising? And how about those other rights that protect free speech–like the right of journalists to protect the confidentiality of their sources? All these issues have been battlegrounds for the first amendment. The fight has ranged back and forth between more and less freedom since the amendment was passed.

Anthony Lewis has been writing about constitutional rights throughout his long career as a journalist. He won his first Pulitzer reporting on the US government loyalty program and the firing of an employee because of it. His book, FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT WE HATE is a pithy and thought-provoking essay (he calls it a biography) of the First Amendment.

Poet Paul Muldoon and drama Voices in Conflict

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:25:32 +0000

Guest host Christian McEwen interviews Paul Muldoon, poet and poetry editor of The New Yorker. And Francesca Rheannon talks with the director and cast members of a new production of the documentary play Voices in Conflict. It’s being presented by the New Century Theatre in western Massachusetts.

The Irish poet Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Portadown, County Armagh and studied under Seamus Heaney at Queens College in Dublin. Poetry editor of The New Yorker, he’s author of numerous books, including Wayside Shrines, Plan B, and When the Pie Was Opened. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel. Guest host Christian McEwen spoke with him in April 2009, when he came to read at Smith College, in Northampton, MA. The interview is part of Sparks from the Anvil, a series of conversations with poets Christian is doing in collaboration with the Poetry Center at Smith College.

Listen to Paul Muldoon reading his poetry.

In March of 2007 students at Wilton High School in Connecticut tried to stage a play they had created for their drama class–but the play was banned by their principal. The subject was war–the experience of American soldiers in Iraq, as told through their own writings and letters. The highschool’s drama teacher, Bonnie Dickinson, thought the students might make an emotional connection to the soldiers, most of whom are so close to the students in age. They did, especially because one of their own, a student who had graduated just two years before, had been killed in Iraq. But one of the students in the drama class, whose brother was stationed in Iraq, objected to the play. She got her mother to go to the principal with a complaint. Voices in Conflict did go on, but on the off-broadway stage, not at Wilton highschool.

Now the production is being staged with a new cast by the New Century Theatre based at Smith College in Northampton, MA. I spoke with director. Keith Langsdale and Justin Fuller and Tierra Allen, actors from the new production. This new version expands on the original piece to include the controversy in Wilton.

Watch CPTV’s airing of the original production of Voices in Conflict

Birdsong by the Seasons and more

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:05:42 +0000

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with birdsong expert Donald Kroodsma about his newest book, BIRDSONG BY THE SEASONS. We also talk about a possible new threat to birds, wildlife, and the climate with Chris Matera of Massachussetts Forest Watch.

Donald Kroodsma has been called the “reigning authority on the biology of avian vocal behavior”–birdsong. I first spoke with him in 2005 about his book, THE SINGING LIFE OF BIRDS, which went on to become a bestseller. Now he’s come out with BIRDSONG BY THE SEASONS. The book, along with two accompanying CDs takes the reader through a year of listening to birds, both in the author’s native listening grounds of western Massachusetts, as well as in the jungles of Costa Rica and other places.

Kroodsma is currently a visiting fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He’s been studying birdsong for more than 40 years.

See a sonogram and listen to the song of the lark bunting.

Other books by Donald Kroodsma:

THE BACKYARD BIRDSONG GUIDE: Western North America

THE BACKYARD BIRDSONG GUIDE: Eastern and Central North America

Our second guest, Chris Matera, is with Massachusetts Forest Watch, a citizen watchdog group originally organized to stop clear cutting in Massachusetts forests. The group discovered plans to build five biomass plants in the state, which it says would increase clear cutting 400% over historic levels, of which two thirds would be clearcutting. Matera says the term “biomass plants” is an “eco buzzword” that masks what the plants really are: forest incinerators.

Getting energy from biomass is controversial. Some claim the technology is an important element of renewable energy infrastructure. Others say those claims are overblown and downplay serious environmental threats posed by biomass plants. Eighty biomass plants are operating nation-wide.

For residents of western Massachusetts, a public hearing on the proposed Greenfield plant will take place on June 15. Find out more about the hearing and local efforts to organize against the plant from Greenfield Biomass.

Read a news report about a previous hearing on the Russell plant.

Sustainable Gardening

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:32:53 +0000

We talk with Toby Hemenway about his updated GAIA’S GARDEN: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Carleen Madigan tells us how to turn a lawn into a BACKYARD HOMESTEAD, and Patricia Klindienst (THE EARTH KNOWS MY NAME) talks about three gardens of immigrant Americans in this excerpt from our archived interview with her.

Many gardeners are following the example of our first lady, Michelle Obama–they’re planting organic gardens. They’re doing it because organic vegetables taste better, they’re safer for the gardener to grow–and they’re better for the planet. But author Toby Hemenway says cutting chemical pesticides out of the garden is just the beginning of gardening in harmony with the environment. He calls for ecological gardening, or permaculture: not imposing the will of the gardener on the environment but observing what’s around us and going with the flow with wildlife, the weather, and the ecology of our own backyards. He’s just out with a new edition of his 2001 classic, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture.

Read an excerpt from Gaia’s Garden about the ecological garden.

With as little as a quarter-acre, you can harvest 1,400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2,000 pounds of vegetables, 75 pounds of nuts–and more. That’s a lot of food on the table. You’ve only got a little balcony, you say? No problem–some tomatos, peppers and lettuce grow better in containers. And you can preserve your harvest to enjoy through the winter. It’s all laid out in a great little guide by my guest, Carleen Madigan. Her book is The Backyard Homestead. She’s an editor at Storey Publishing, and has also worked for Horticulture magazine.

We first talked with Patricia Kleindienst about her book, “The Earth Knows My Name”, back in 2006. It’s about how gardens created by immigrants have enabled them to preserve their culture, deal with the traumas they have suffered and create spiritual as well as physicial sustenance. Here she talked with us about three gardens in western Massachusetts where we produce the show: the Italian garden of architect Tulio Inglese, the garden of Cambodian refugees from the Pol Pot genocide, and Nuestras Raices in Holyoke’s Latino community. In the interests of full disclosure, host Francesca Rheannon was one of the founders of Nuestras Raices.

Read an article about Amherst’s Cambodian garden.

Gail Hornstein, AGNES’ JACKET

rheannon05@gmail.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:18:44 +0000

Gail Hornstein talks about AGNES’ JACKET: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. The dominant view of mental disorders is that they are genetic diseases caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. Imbalances for which psychiatric medication is the primary–and often only–treatment. But psychologist Gail Hornstein says that madness is more code than chemistry. There’s meaning in madness — meaning that’s largely overlooked by the mental health profession because patients’ accounts of their own experiences aren’t listened to. After all, why listen to people who are, by definition in the professional’s view, irrational?

Gail Hornstein has been listening to them. She’s teaches psychology at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. In the course of her work, she became fascinated with accounts written by mental patients themselves–personal memoirs, theoretical treatises on mental illness, and documents advocating for the rights of mental patients. One of the most famous is I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, by Hannah Green (pen name of Joanne Greenberg), which was a bestselling book and then a Hollywood movie. Hornstein wrote a biography of the real psychologist behind the book’s thinly veiled fictionalized version, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.

Hornstein found that not all patient accounts are on the printed page. One of the most intriguing is the hand-tailored jacket created by 19th century mental patient Agnes Richter in Austria. Richter embroidered her experience of madness on every centimeter of the garment’s fabric in a kind of code. It struck Hornstein as not only a beautiful work of art, but also a wonderful metaphor for the intense desire of mental patients to make sense of their own experiences.

Gail Hornstein’s Bibliography of First-Person Narratives of Madness in English

Freedom Center

Madness Radio

Hearing Voices Network

College Rip-Off

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 12 May 2009 01:36:16 +0000

Host Francesca Rheannon talks with Alan Michael Collinge about THE STUDENT LOAN SCAM and with April Norhanian about COLLEGE IS FOR SUCKERS.

Is the higher education industry is sacrificing students to the bottom line? We look at the issue from two angles: student debt and whether students are getting what they pay for at four year colleges.

The average college senior graduates with about $20,000 in student loans. And for graduate students and those getting degrees in law, medicine and business, the debt load is much higher. Alan Michael Collinge knows. He’s still paying off his loan twenty years after graduation–and it’s almost doubled in size, due to interest, penalties and fees. Like many others, he was forced into default. And he says that’s the way the system is supposed to work–from the point of view of the lender. The system is rigged against students and parents, reaping huge payoffs for lenders like Sallie Mae and corrupting college financial aid officers. Meanwhile, student loan debt is the only kind without any legal protection at all: debtors can’t declare bankruptcy on their loans and they can have their wages, disability pay and social security income raided by the lenders for payback. Alan Michael Collinge’s book is THE STUDENT LOAN SCAM: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History – and How We Can Fight Back. He’s also the founder of StudentLoanJustice.org.

April Norhanian thinks she got gypped by higher education. After college, she couldn’t get a good job. So she went to graduate school, of course. But that didn’t help much, either. Unable to get a good job as a Web designer (what she studied in grad school), she ended up as a college recruiter.

She says her experiences as a college consumer and recruiter showed her that American colleges are little more than “a commercial product that’s not always relevant or effective for the pursuits of career seekers” –and may not be worth the price of the student loan debt they saddle graduates with. Norhanian says, if you want a good job, there are a lot of other places to get the credentials and training, for a lot less money.

Of course, if you want a four-year vacation at “Club Ed”, you can pay the premium prices for high-end college fitness centers, fancy dining commons, and state of the art dorms. April Norhanian’s book is COLLEGE IS FOR SUCKERS.

Pandemic Flu, Thrity Umrigar, and Jeff Sharlet

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:43:22 +0000

We talk with writer Howard Friel and Dr. Harvey Lederman in this rebroadcast of a 2006 interview about avian flu. Also, Thrity Umrigar on her new novel, THE WEIGHT OF HEAVEN. And Jeff Sharlet talks about the crusade for a Christian military.

The H1N1 flu is sweeping the globe. Although fears about its virulence have eased somewhat, we almost certainly will face a serious pandemic flu sometime: if not now, then in the future. In the current pandemic there has so far been only one fatality outside Mexico—where originally more than 100 deaths were attributed to the virus, but the toll is now down considerably. The last time flu was much in the news was in 2006, with the avian, or H5N1 virus. More people died, but it didn’t become a pandemic. That’s because the H5N1 avian flu is hard to transmit between people–at least so far. But the New York Times reports that might be changing–and cases of avian flu continue tare surging–and the fatality rate is high.

In 2006 I interviewed Howard Friel and primary care doctor Dr. Harvey Lederman about H5N1. Friel has written several closely researched books on international affairs, including THE RECORD OF THE PAPER. In 2006, he wanted to find a way to protect his family in the case of a pandemic flu. So he turned his prodigious research talents to developing a formula for an herbal supplement designed to boost resistance to the virus. Then he teamed up with Dr. Lederman to write a medical paper about it, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Medical Hypotheses.

In her work, novelist Thrity Umrigar examines the chasms that can divide humans, like culture, class, and gender. Umrigar grew up in India and came to the U.S. when she was 21, so she knows intimately the experience of straddling cultures and divides. Her latest novel is THE WEIGHT OF HEAVEN. It’s the story of a liberal American couple, Frank and Ellie Benton, who are struggling to deal with the death of their seven year old son. The tragedy came on them suddenly: they boy was well one day, and dead from a galloping infection the next. They move from their home in the U.S. to Girbaug, a town in India, as a way to try and put the past behind them. But it doesn’t work because the couple bring not only their personal grief along as baggage, but also their cultural assumptions, as well.

Thrity Umrigar is also the author of the novels BOMBAT TIME, THE SPACE BETWEEN US, and IF TODAY BE SWEET and the memoir, FIRST DARLING OF THE MORNING.

Jeff Sharlet’s journalistic beat is the inroads the Christian Right is making into the established instititions that govern our society. We’ve talked to him several times on Writers Voice–first about his book, THE FAMILY, which is about the elite Christian fundamentalists who have penetrated deeply into the highest levels of government. His latest article is about how Christian extremists are embedding firmly into the highest ranks of the military. It’s called “Jesus Killed Mohammed: the Crusade for a Christian military”. It’s just out in the May issue of Harper’s. Listen to the extended interview with Sharlet. Watch video of US soldiers being exhorted to proselytize Christianity among Afghanistan’s predominantly Muslim population.

Natalie Goldberg and Ann Armbrecht

rheannon05@gmail.com — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:37:27 +0000

We talk with Natalie Goldberg about how to write memoir. Her new book on the topic is Old Friend from Far Away. And anthropologist Ann Armbrecht tells us about her memoir of Nepal, THIN PLACES. Poet, writer and teacher Christian McEwen is guest co-host. To write memoir, we must first know how to remember. That’s what Natalie Goldberg says in her new book, OLD FRIEND FORM FAR AWAY: The Practice of Writing Memoir. It’s not her first book on how to write– Writing Down the Bones, published 20 years ago, has become a classic how-to book on writing. In her new book on writing memoir, Goldberg uses her experience as a long-practicing meditator to guide us to the living presence of memory within. Her book alternates exercises to tone your writing muscle and deepen your memory with contemplations of the art of memoir.

When Ann Armbrecht went to a small village in Nepal to research her dissertation in anthropology, she thought she would find answers to her questions about Nepalese land rights. But she also found answers to questions in her own life–questions about community, relationships, and trust. Through her friendships with women in the village, including an old grandmother and a young woman who dreamed of a different life, Armbrecht learned to see beyond the narrow confines of cultural expectations to the common bonds between human beings. She worked in the fields beside the women, talked to the shamans about the spirit world, and went on a grueling pilgrimage to a cave high in the Himalayan mountains. But her real pilgrimage was toward the center of the human heart. Her memoir is THIN PLACES: A Pilgrimage Home. Armbrecht is an anthropologist and herbalist, as well as a writer. She co-produced the film Numen: The Nature of Plants.

Nepal

The Art of Memoir: Natalie Goldberg and Ann Armbrecht

rheannon05@gmail.com — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:07:22 +0000

We talk with Natalie Goldberg about Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Memoir. And Ann Armbrecht tells us about her memoir of Nepal, THIN PLACES. Click on the play button below to hear Armbrecht read an excerpt from THIN PLACES. Poet, writer and teacher Christian McEwen is guest co-host.

Read an excerpt from OLD FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY

Information on Natalie Goldberg’s upcoming workshop at Kripalu

Amy Seidl and Nikki Giovanni

rheannon05@gmail.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 01:27:44 +0000

We talk with Amy Seidl about EARLY SPRING: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. And poet Nikki Giovanni introduces us to HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN: A Celebration of Poetry With A Beat.

Earth Day is celebrated this week. We wish it were celebrated every day. But in honor of this annual event, we talk with ecologist Amy Seidl. She’s the author of a new book, EARLY SPRING, that transcends the despair many of us feel when we think about the environmental catastrophes threatening the planet. She kindles a new sense of hope, not for avoiding climate change, but for adapting to it with grace and ingenuity–and by relearning some of older, wiser ways of adapting to the environment.

Seidl has taught in the Environmental Programs at University of Vermont and Middlebury College and is currently a Research Scholar at Middlebury. She also is associate director of Living Future.

April is Poetry Month. With the month almost over, it’s about time we honor it! I suppose I could have taken a serious, highbrow approach and scheduled an interview about very serious, highbrow poetry- something that you might find in the pages of the New Yorker or an obscure poetry magazine. But when I found the book, HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN in my mailbox here at 91.1 FM WMUA, my heart lifted right up. The fact that it’s edited by poet Nikki Giovanni just made it even better.

HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat will delight grown-ups and kids, with tracks by Kanye West, Queen Latifah, and the inimitable Nikki Giovanni herself. Early in her career Giovanni was dubbed the “Princess of Black Poetry,” and over the course of more than three decades of publishing and lecturing she has come to be called both a “National Treasure” and, most recently, one of Oprah Winfrey’s twenty-five “Living Legends.” HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN is now a New York Times Bestseller and is in Booklist’s Top Ten art books for youth.

Listen to more tracks from HIP HOP SPEAKS TO CHILDREN

David Grann’s Lost City of Z and David Cay Johnston’s “Fiscal Therapy”

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:56:20 +0000

We talk with journalist David Grann about his fascinating new book about the Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett, THE LOST CITY OF Z.

And David Cay Johnston weighs in on how the tax system is stacked in favor of the very rich–and what to do about it.

Percy Fawcett was one of the last of the great Victorian explorers. Called the “David Livingstone of the Amazon” —he ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose. That’s what my guest, David Grann writes in his fascinating new book, THE LOST CITY OF Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

A staff writer at The New Yorker since July 2003, when Grann began his quest to find out what had happened to Fawcett, little did he imagine that he would find himself in the Amazon jungle himself–engaged in the same mystery that drove Fawcett to the ill-fated 1925 expedition from which he never returned. Like Fawcett, Grann went in search of the lost city of Z, the ruins of an ancient civilization in the Amazon–a place, skeptics said, could never have existed.

Find out more about the ancient civilizations of the Amazon and their descendants with these exciting links:

Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger’s website, with photos

Article in Science Magazine about the ancient Amazonian civilizations

Movie of flyover of Kiukuro village

NPR story on Heckenberg’s discovery, audio with photos

The Senate voted earlier this month to cut taxes on the estates of the wealthiest Americans. Passing by a vote of 51-48 in the Democratic-controlled Senate, the measure went against the plan set forth by President Obama in his proposed budget. Under Obama’s plan, the tax would remain at its 2009 level — meaning estates would have to pay a 45% tax on anything over 3.5 million dollars. The Senate amendment would reduce the estate tax rate to 35 percent and increase the exemption to $5 million. That would affect just one tenth of one percent of estates–exempting the other 99.9 percent. Most Americans are against the estate tax–because most Americans think they’re going to be in that top tenth of one percent some day. But they’re wrong. Real incomes of most Americans have stayed stagnant or fallen in the last 30 years.
So who pays, when the rich don’t? That’s the subject my guest David Cay Johnston has been writing about for years–in such books as FREE LUNCH and, and lately in the lead article for Mother Jones Magazine in January, “Fiscal Therapy”.

David Cay Johnston has been writing about for years–in such books as FREE LUNCH and, and lately in the lead article for Mother Jones Magazine in January, “Fiscal Therapy”.

Balancing the Brain

rheannon05@gmail.com — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:58:19 +0000

We talk with Dr. Robert Melillo about DISCONNECTED KIDS: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children with Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders. And Ned Hallowell tells us how adults with ADD can compensate for their weaknesses and celebrate their strengths in this 2006 archived interview. Learning disabilities, autism, ADD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders are skyrocketing in children, with an estimated 1.5 million more children diagnosed each year. The cause is controversial: some say, these disorders are just getting diagnosed more than in the past; others say diagnosis is being pushed by drug companies wanting to sell more of their products; and still others point to the hectic pace of modern life and understaffed schools to say that society’s out of whack, not kids.

But those who suffer the burdens of these disorders say they’re real–whether they’re parents who see their kids struggling to make friends and make sense of their schoolwork or adults who leave a long trail of lost jobs and failed relationships. All this in spite of often being very bright, creative and open-hearted.

Drugs can help–but they can also have dangerous side effects, including cardiac problems, psychiatric disorders and seizures. There are even emerging signs that some of them can cause the chromosomal damage that is a precursor to cancer. Many parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders–as well as adults who have them–are looking for alternative or complementary treatments.

Dr. Robert Melillo is a chiropractic neurologist who’s developed a system for treating these disorders using exercises to train the brain. He says the problem lies in a failure of both sides of the brain to smoothly communicate with each other–and that his approach can strengthen areas of the brain that are weakest. He lays out his method in a new book, DISCONNECTED KIDS: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children with Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders.

One approach to ADD, Asperger’s and other neurobehavioral conditions like them is to see them as disorders based on the relative strength or weakness of the two sides of the brain. Another way is to look at how different people behave–their symptoms. That’s the approach taken by ADD expert Ned Hallowell. He also thinks ADD isn’t so much a disorder as a difference–a different style of brain functioning, with strengths and weaknesses. Hallowell is the author of several acclaimed books aimed at helping adults with ADD find ways to compensate for their weaknesses and celebrate their strengths. Among other books, he wrote the groundbreaking Driven by Distraction. I spoke with him in 2006 about his book DELIVERED FROM DISTRACTION. His latest, SUPERPARENTING FOR ADD, came out in 2008.
…

Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon

Stephan Faris, FORECAST & Leonard Nimoy

Related posts

Welsh Poet Gwyneth Lewis and Marshall Jon Fisher’s A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR

Related posts

Stephan Faris, FORECAST & Leonard Nimoy

Related posts

Freedom and Democracy

Related posts

Poet Paul Muldoon and drama Voices in Conflict

Related posts

Birdsong by the Seasons and more

Related posts

Sustainable Gardening

Related posts

Gail Hornstein, AGNES’ JACKET

Related posts

College Rip-Off

Related posts

Pandemic Flu, Thrity Umrigar, and Jeff Sharlet

Related posts

Natalie Goldberg and Ann Armbrecht

Related posts

The Art of Memoir: Natalie Goldberg and Ann Armbrecht

Related posts

Amy Seidl and Nikki Giovanni

Related posts

David Grann’s Lost City of Z and David Cay Johnston’s “Fiscal Therapy”

Related posts

Balancing the Brain

Related posts