April Schedule

Getting ready for this year's hurricane season we start the month with a conversation with John McQuaid, co-author of Path of Destruction (Little, Brown, 2006), an excellent overview of hurricane Katrina and the chronically failed responses to it from all levels of government. That's this Friday, the 6th. The following Friday, the 13th (and let's not be superstitious about it), I talk with Dr. David Himmelstein, a Harvard professor of medicine and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Care Program. David is an expert on why we should have a universal single-payer health care system here in the U.S., but don't. I've wanted to do a program on health care for a very long time and this conversation fulfilled all my hopes and more. I highly recommend it! The Friday after that, the 20th, I talk with Shashi Tharoor, who at the beginning of April left his position as United Nations Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information, after a 28 year career at the UN. Shashi was India's candidate to succeed Kofi Annan late last year, coming a close second out of seven in the vote. I'm not sure how much new news there is here, but I did nudge Shashi enough so that you get a fairly good sense of how senior UN officials think about things. (Conservatively.) I'll have more to say about this one later. And finally, on the 27th, and this is scheduled but the only one not yet recorded, I'll talk with Dr. Christopher Howard, who writes about how the American political system provides socialism for the rich. An excellent line-up and I hope you find these conversations interesting and thought-provoking. As always, if you do, please pass the links to your friends.