Delving In with Stuart Kelter
Science & Technology News
Knowledge-seeker and psychologist Stuart Kelter shares his joy of learning and “delving in.” Ready? Let’s delve... Join Chris Churchill on the possible reasons why the search for intelligent life in the universe is coming up empty. Let’s hear from Israeli psychiatrist Pesach Lichtenberg about a promising approach to schizophrenia—going mainstream in Israel—that uses minimal drugs and maximal support through the crisis, rejecting the presumption of life-long disability. Find out what Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David Kertzer learned from recently opened Vatican records about Pius XII, the Pope During WWII. We explore the fascinating and intriguing... What did journalist Eve Fairbanks learn about race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa? Did you realize there were dozens and dozens of early women scientists? Let’s find out about them through a sampling of poems with poet Jessy Randall. How shall we grapple with the complexities of the placebo effect in drug development and medical practice? Harvard researcher Kathryn Hall confirms just how complicated it really is! But beware: increasing one’s knowledge leads to more and more questions. If that appeals to you, join us on “Delving In”! The interviews of the Delving In podcast were first broadcast on KTAL-LP, the community radio station of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The full archive of well over 100 interviews can be found at https://www.lccommunityradio.org/archives/category/delving-in. Please send questions and comments to stuartkelter@protonmail.com.
Location:
United States
Description:
Knowledge-seeker and psychologist Stuart Kelter shares his joy of learning and “delving in.” Ready? Let’s delve... Join Chris Churchill on the possible reasons why the search for intelligent life in the universe is coming up empty. Let’s hear from Israeli psychiatrist Pesach Lichtenberg about a promising approach to schizophrenia—going mainstream in Israel—that uses minimal drugs and maximal support through the crisis, rejecting the presumption of life-long disability. Find out what Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David Kertzer learned from recently opened Vatican records about Pius XII, the Pope During WWII. We explore the fascinating and intriguing... What did journalist Eve Fairbanks learn about race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa? Did you realize there were dozens and dozens of early women scientists? Let’s find out about them through a sampling of poems with poet Jessy Randall. How shall we grapple with the complexities of the placebo effect in drug development and medical practice? Harvard researcher Kathryn Hall confirms just how complicated it really is! But beware: increasing one’s knowledge leads to more and more questions. If that appeals to you, join us on “Delving In”! The interviews of the Delving In podcast were first broadcast on KTAL-LP, the community radio station of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The full archive of well over 100 interviews can be found at https://www.lccommunityradio.org/archives/category/delving-in. Please send questions and comments to stuartkelter@protonmail.com.
Language:
English
Website:
https://delving-in.captivate.fm
Episodes
#156. An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
6/29/2025
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.
Duration:00:53:40
#155. Generating a Love for Math and Math History
6/9/2025
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.
Duration:00:56:21
#154. The Hazards and History of Forever Chemicals
6/8/2025
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.
Duration:00:56:01
#153. Jessy Randall's New Poems on Women in Science, The Path of Most Resistance
6/2/2025
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.
Duration:00:55:41
#152. How Games and Game Theory Shape Our Social World
5/25/2025
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.
Duration:00:55:20
#151. The Successful Struggle to Organize the First Union at Starbucks
4/27/2025
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.
Duration:00:56:03
#150. Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom
4/21/2025
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.
Duration:00:55:47
#149. A Mother and Five Children, Upwardly Striving and Homeless
4/7/2025
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.
Duration:00:53:48
#148. Nearly Dying While Giving Birth and Seven Years of Recovery
3/31/2025
Samina Ali teaches fiction writing at Stanford University and is an award-winning author, whose debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, published in 2004, won several literary awards, including Poets & Writers Magazine’s Top Debut of the Year. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and other publications and has been interviewed by national media.
Samina has been an activist for Muslim women’s rights and has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. A founding member of the American Muslim feminist organization, Daughters of Hajar, she curated the acclaimed global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, showcasing work by Muslim women artists, activists, and thought leaders from around the world.
Samina’s just released second book, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, which is the subject of today’s interview, tells the story of her unlikely survival and seven years of recovery, after nearly dying during the birth of her son. The memoir disarmingly invites the reader to relive her harrowing experience with her, as she taps into its medical, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and familial dimensions.
Recorded 3/25/24.
Duration:00:54:20
#147. Fraud in Alzheimer's Research that Underpins the Dominant Model of the Disease
3/24/2025
Charles Piller is an award-winning investigative journalist for Science magazine, reporting on such topics as public health, biological warfare, and infectious disease outbreaks. In addition to articles in major newspapers, he is the co-author, with Keith Yamamoto, of Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies, published in 1988, which examines the U.S. military biotechnology program and discusses the future of genetic arms control. He is the author of The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism, published in 1991, about the opposition by community groups to scientific and technological projects that endanger their communities. This interview focuses on his recently published book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's, the book-length version of his exposé, “Blots on a Field,” that he wrote for Science magazine on July 21, 2022.
Recorded 3/18/25.
Duration:00:59:43
#146. The History of Antisemitism in the Arab World
3/16/2025
Omar Mohammed was the previously anonymous blogger who courageously reported on the atrocities he witnessed that were perpetrated by the Islamic State, also called ISIS, when in 2014 it took over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Currently, he teaches Middle East History, Cultural Heritage Diplomacy, and Counter Terrorism at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and is also the head of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at George Washington University. He’ll be talking with us about ancient and often prominent Jewish communities that, until seventy years ago, had flourished in Arab and Muslim lands, despite facing long-standing discrimination and sometimes violent oppression.
Recorded 3/11/25.
Duration:00:55:33
#145. The Case for Government Supported Housing
3/2/2025
Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, urban planner, and oral historian. He previously served as the chief researcher for Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, as editor in chief of the online magazine Urban Omnibus, and as a real estate project manager with Urban Edge, a Boston-based community development corporation. Currently, he teaches writing and argumentation at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in Baltimore, Maryland and serves as a senior advisor at the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins. He is also sits on the board of Shelterforce, an online publication that reports on issues related to affordable housing. In addition to dozens of essays on housing issues, he recently published his first book: Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons.
Recorded 2/25/25.
Duration:00:52:33
#144. Native Alaskan Resistance to Russian Expansion into North America
2/9/2025
Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees are co-authors of two books, The Tsarina's Lost Treasure: Catherine the Great, a Golden Age Masterpiece, and a Legendary Shipwreck, published in 2020 and The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance, and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent, which was just published a few months ago and is the subject of today’s interview. Gerald Easter is a political science professor at Boston College, focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the State, published in 2000, examines the personal networks and informal sources of power than contributed to the expansion of the Soviet control over its multi-ethnic satellite states, as well as to the empire’s later disintegration. His award-winning book, Capital Coercion, and Post-Communist States, published in 2012, explores the disparate outcomes, democratic vs. authoritarian, of post-Soviet satellite states. Mara Vorhees is a travel writer and photographer who has contributed to over forty guidebooks published by Lonely Planet, about such diverse destinations as New England, Central America, and Russia. She also the creator and writer of the blog, Have Twins, Will Travel: Adventures & Misadventures in Family Travel.
Recorded 2/4/25.
Duration:00:51:21
#143. How American Capitalists Harnessed the American Work Ethic
2/3/2025
Erik Baker is a historian, writer, and teacher based in Boston, a lecturer in the History of Science department at Harvard University and associate editor of The Drift, a magazine about culture and politics. In addition to articles about labor, politics, and American history, he recently published his first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, which explores how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of twentieth century U.S. capitalism.
Recorded 1/28//25.
Duration:00:51:50
#142. The South's Long War on Black Literacy
1/27/2025
Derek W. Black is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the Constitutional Law Center. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts in education law and policy, on such topics as school funding and ensuring equal opportunities for disadvantaged students. His research is often cited in court opinions and briefs, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. He has served as an expert witness and consultant in school funding, voucher, and federal policy litigation. His essays have appeared in major newspapers, and he has been frequent guest on national, regional, and local radio and television programs. He is the author of Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, which warns of educational trends that retreat from foundational commitments to democracy and public education. His new book, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy, which is the subject of today’s interview, documents the South’s repression of black education and freedom literature before and after the Civil War, providing historical context for the hostility often faced by public school teachers, curricula, and libraries.
Recorded 1/21/24.
Duration:00:57:04
#141, Whether Dictatorship, Democracy, or Corporation: What It Takes to Stay in Power
1/20/2025
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political science professor at New York University and past president of the International Studies Association, who has served as an adviser to the U.S. government on national security and to numerous corporations on business negotiations. In addition to many articles in the professional literature and major newspapers, he is the author of 23 books. Perhaps his best known, as well as most accessible, is The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, co-authored with Alistair Smith, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Recorded 1/14/25.
Duration:00:56:56
#140. Malcolm Before X: Family Background, Childhood, and Incarceration
1/6/2025
Patrick Parr is an historian and biographer of writers and civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Ellison, and Kato Shidzue. Teaching in Japan since 2018, he currently writes a history column for Japan Today, about historical figures or businesses coming to Japan for the first time. His new book, Malcolm Before X, provides an in-depth accounting of Malcolm X’s family history, childhood, and transformative experiences during his six year incarceration in his early 20s. The book was published this past December and was named A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2024.
Recorded 12/17/24.
Duration:00:55:43
#139. The Amazing New Science of Smell
12/31/2024
Jonas Olofsson is a professor at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he directs the Sensory Cognitive Interaction Lab, with a particular focus on the sense of smell, as well as its loss, as it interacts with memory, emotion, language, and information processing. He is the author of the recent book, The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell and the Extraordinary Power of the Nose, which is the subject of today’s interview.
Recorded 12/18/24.
Duration:00:55:42
#138. The History and Enduring Effects of the 2022 Uprising in Iran
12/30/2024
Farhad Khosrokhavar is a retired professor and former Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, whose work focuses on the social movements in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the uprisings during the Arab Spring of 2010-12, the Jihadist movements in France and the rest of Europe, and the philosophical foundations of the social sciences. He has published more than 30 books, eight of which were either translated or directly written in English, some translated into several languages, and has also written around 100 articles in French and English, which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian. His latest book, Revolt Against Theocracy: The Mahsa Movement and the Feminist Uprising in Iran, is the focus of today's interview.
Recorded 12/24/24.
Duration:00:55:02
#137. Science, Pseudoscience, and the Co-opting of Quantum Physics by the New Age Movement
12/15/2024
Sadri Hassani is a professor emeritus of Physics at Illinois State University, who continues to teach courses in thermal and quantum physics as the University of Illinois. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Princeton University, has authored several books on mathematical physics for undergraduate and graduate students, and in addition has a strong, ongoing interest in raising the scientific awareness of the general public. We’ll be talking about his latest book, Quanta in Distress: How New Age Gurus Kidnapped Quantum Physics.
Recorded 12/11/24.
Duration:00:54:02