Meg Kissinger is an investigative journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who spent more than two decades reporting on the failures of the American mental health system. She has won more than a dozen national honors, including two George Polk Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy National Journalism Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She had her first big break as a journalist when she broke the story about the whereabouts of fugitive, Abbie Hoffman. Her recently published memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, was named an Outstanding Work of Literature winner and an editors’ choice by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Goodreads and Independent Booksellers Association. Audible chose it as the Best of the Year. The book tacks the intertwined topics of mental illness and family dysfunction so ably and so eloquently that she has surely taken out several bricks, at least, in the twin walls of shame and aversion that keep these problems from being effectively addressed.

Recorded 6/25/25.

David Pengelley is a retired math professor from New Mexico State University (NMSU). We'll be talking about math education, math history, and learning math from primary source material. Dr. Pengelley, who also does original theoretical as well as historical mathematical research, rediscovered the work of the first known female research mathematician, Sophie Germain.

Recorded 7/21/20.

Mariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The New Republic. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University. Blake is the author of the recently published, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The book investigates the chemical industry's decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, the courageous individuals who sued these corporations, and the precautions each of us can take to protect ourselves in a polluted world.

Recorded 6/4/25.

Jessy Randall is curator of special collections at Colorado College and the author of several poetry collections, including: Suicide Hotline Hold Music, (which includes her own accompanying comics), There Was an Old Woman, Injecting Dreams into Cows, and A Day in Boyland, which was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She has also written a young adult novel, The Wandora Unit, about poetry nerds in high school, and a collection of collaborative poems, Interruptions, written with Daniel M. Shapiro. In a previous appearance on Delving In, on 11/13/22, she shared her poems from Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science. Today's interview returns to this subject with new poems from her latest book, The Path of Most Resistance.

Recorded 5/27/25.

Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist who has held research positions at M.I.T., Berkeley, the University College London, and the A.I. company, DeepMind, focusing on biological information processing and agency. In 2014 she was awarded the Regeneron Prize for creative innovation in biomedicine. Her writing has appeared in several major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and The New Yorker. She is the author of the recently published book, Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World.

Recorded 5/21/25.

Jaz Brisack is a experienced union organizer, starting with the United Autoworkers campaign at the Nissan factory in Canton, MS and volunteering as a Pinkhouse Defender at the state’s last abortion clinic. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping to organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United in upstate New York and Vermont, Jaz subsequently worked with organizing committees that successfully formed a workers’ union at a Ben & Jerry’s store in Burlington, VT and less successfully at a Tesla facility in Buffalo, NY.

​In 2018, Jaz co-founded the Inside Organizer School and is currently developing it further as a Practitioner in Residence at the Labor Center of the University of California at Berkeley. The school teaches non-union workers and activists how to organize their workplaces from within. It also brings together organizers, activists, and workers from a variety of industries, unions, and campaigns, with the aim of creating a community that builds a vibrant, diverse, and democratic labor movement. Jaz is the author of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, which is the subject of today’s interview.

Recorded 4/22/25.

James Danckert is a cognitive scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, focusing on the neuroscience of attention and the consequences of strokes. He has written numerous journal articles on the psychology of boredom and is the co-author, with John Eastwood, of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, published in 2020, which is the subject of today’s interview.

Recorded 4/17/25.

Jeff Hobbs is the author of five books, including a novel, The Tourists, and four books that apply a novelist writing style to the struggles of individuals striving to overcome racial, class, and social disadvantages. These include The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man who Left Newark for the Ivy League, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Show Them You’re Good: Four Boys and the Quest for College; Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System; and most recently and the subject of today’s interview, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America.

Recorded 4/3/25.