Rebekah Peeples is the Deputy Dean of the College at Princeton University with oversight of the undergraduate curriculum. Previously at Princeton, she taught sociology and writing. She is also the author of two books: Wal-Mart Wars: Moral Populism in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, and Unchanged Trebles: What Boy Choirs Teach Us About Motherhood and Masculinity, published four weeks ago, and which is the subject of today’s interview.

Recorded 11/12/25.

Emma Duval is a self-described member of the “millennial generation,” who include the growing number of women who are childless and as, Emma puts it, “childfree” by choice. Although now married, Duval’s early inspirations were independent, unmarried women, and as a teenager she contemplated becoming a nun in rejection of societal norms surrounding marriage. She is the author-illustrator of the recently published book, Unwed & Unbothered: The Defiant Lives of Single Women, which celebrates the courageous lives and remarkable contributions of such women throughout history, going back thousands of years.

Recorded 11/5/25.

Suzanne Mettler is a senior professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of several books, including The Submerged State and Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, published in 2014, The Government-Citizen Disconnect, published in 2018, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy, co-written with Robert C. Lieberman and published in 2024, and most recently, Rural vs. Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy, co-written with Trevor E. Brown and published just a few weeks ago.

Recorded 10/16/25.

Philip Connors is a National Parks Service fire watcher in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness since 2002. In addition to essays in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, published in 2011; All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, published in 2015; and A Song for the River -- about the threat to the Gila River, one of the last wild rivers in the western U.S., threatened by a proposed dam -- published in 2018. His work has won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for Nonfiction, the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition, a Southwest Book Award, and an n+1 Writer's Fellowship. His fourth book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary, published just a few weeks ago, blends haiku and diary entries that beautifully convey his experience of solitude, his reverence for nature, and his witnessing of devastating forest megafires on an unprecedented scale. He also speaks to our longstanding foolish overconfidence in the ability to indefinitely prevent forest fires.

Recorded 8/8/25.

Ira Chaleff is past President of Executive Coaching & Consulting Associates and award-winning author of several books, including The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders, published in 2009; Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You're Told to Do Is Wrong, published in 2015; Intelligent Disobedience for Children: A Handbook for Parents and Other Caregivers, published in 2018; To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader, published in 2024, and in a completely different genre, a collection of original poems about aging, Falling Apart Into Wholeness, published in 2020. Ira has conducted workshops on Leader-Follower relations for a wide range of organizations, including multinational corporations and governmental agencies. He served as Executive Director, as well as Chair of the Board, of The Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit group that provides management research, training and consulting for the U.S. Congress.

Recorded 9/16/25.

Tim Franks has been a journalist with the BBC since 1990, as a producer, reporter, and presenter. He has covered British politics, including the conflict Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, as well as international issues, as a foreign correspondent on the scene in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, and in war zones, such as Iraq during the war of 2003, and in Gaza during the current war there. Since 2013 he has been a presenter – or in American parlance, an anchor – for Newshour, the BBC World Service flagship radio news program. This interview will focus primarily on his recently published book, The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew, and an Argument About Identity.

Recorded 9/9/25.

Sophie Pavelle is a U.S. born and UK-based science writer and communicator, whose debut book, Forget Me Not: Finding The Forgotten Species of Climate-Change Britain, won The People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction (2023) and was long-listed for the 2023 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing. She worked for conservation charity Beaver Trust for four years, presenting their award-winning documentary Beavers Without Borders (2020), and also sat on the Advisory Committee of the UK based Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Today’s interview will focus on her latest book, published in May of this year, To Have or to Hold: Nature’s Hidden Relationships, a wide-ranging exploration of symbiotic relationships between unrelated species.

Recorded 9/2/25.

Amin Saikal is an emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at the Australian National University, where he was also the Founding Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies. He has won several academic awards and is a member of many national and international academic organizations. In addition to numerous articles in international journals, he has also written feature articles in major international newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times and The Guardian and has been a frequent commentator on radio and television news programs. He has written several books about relations between Islam and the West and on political developments in Iran, Arab countries, and his home country, Afghanistan. This interview will focus on his most recent book, How to Lose a War: The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan, published in 2024.

Recorded 8/26/25.