To remind us what has to heal to put MAGA behind us, here’s my 2020 conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning husband-wife team, NICHOLAS KRISTOF & SHERYL WuDUNN. Their book, TIGHTROPE, tells how Nick’s childhood home - Yamhill, Oregon - was devastated by the loss of well-paying jobs and policy failures in education, healthcare, and justice that led to his childhood friends’ deaths of despair - and how we can end this crisis. We recorded this episode in the final year of Trump’s first term, a few weeks before the pandemic exploded.

I talk with TROY BRENNAN, professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and former Chief Medical Officer at CVS Health about his latest book, WONDERFUL AND BROKEN: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the US. The US accounts for roughly half of total global health care spending, even though it's only 4% of world population. The World Health Organization ranks US healthcare 37th overall compared to other Western countries. Primary care physicians play a pivotal role in both preventing disease and lowering healthcare costs but they are overworked, underpaid, and incentivized to move into higher-paying specialties while patients face provider shortages.

For Oscar week, two half hour film-linked episodes from the archives. First my 2006 conversation with ROGER EBERT, following that year’s Oscars, where CRASH beat BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN for Best Picture. The vote was controversial in the film world and the fact that a gay cowboy movie came close riled the homophobic hearts of the Christian Right. So lots to talk about. In the second half, my 2007 episode with television trailblazer, PHIL DONAHUE, who died in 2024 at the age of 88. We talk about some of his courageous choices over the years and about Body of War, the documentary he co-directed about a severely disabled Iraq War veteran. His condemnations of the Iraq War and its beginnings are sadly and infuriatingly ripped from today’s news.

FF_Roger Ebert_Transcript