Our Guests

Episode 1. Eric Weiner

Eric Weiner is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and noted public speaker. He is a former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, having been based in New Delhi, Jerusalem and Tokyo, and in total reported from 30 countries. Within the US, he has served as an NPR correspondent in New York, Miami, and Washington. He is a former reporter for the New York Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. His commentary and reporting also have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate, the New Republic and The Washington Post. The Best American Travel Writing anthology also has carried his work. And he has published now five books, the latest of which is Ben and Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula For a Long and Useful Life, which is the primary subject of this podcast.

 Episode 2. Jessica Anthony

Jessica Anthony is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel The Most, which was long-listed for the National Book Award. Her novel Enter the Aardvark was a finalist for the New England Book Award in fiction. Prior to that were the novels Chopsticks and The Convalescent. She has received literary fellowships form the Creative Capital Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Bridge Guard Foundation in Slovakia, and the Maine Arts Commission, and she recently spent a month in residence at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. Her story “The Death of Mustango Salvaje,” originally published in McSweeney’s, is in development with A24 for a limited TV series, filmed in Spain. Jessica teaches at Bates College.

Episode 3. Chris Stuck

Chris Stuck is a writer and editor who lives in Portland, Oregon, and he is the author of the short story collection Give My Love to the Savages. He is a winner of a Pushcart Prize and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass; the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop; and the Oregon Literary Fellowship. His work has appeared in American Literary Review, Bennington Review, Cagibi, Callaloo, Merdian, StoryQuarterly, and Natural Bridge. He earned his bachelor’s and MFA degrees from George Mason University.

Episode 4. Dr. Joseph M. Thompson

Dr. Joseph M. Thompson is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Mississippi State University, focusing on 20th-century U.S. history and the American South. His first book, Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism, explores the economic and cultural connections between the U.S. military and the country music industry during the Cold War. Thompson’s research, supported by grants from institutions like the Mellon/ACLS and Virginia Humanities, addresses intersections of popular culture, military history, and regional identity. He has contributed to public history projects, including the BackStory podcast by Virginia Humanities, and is known for his engaging teaching style, often incorporating music into his lectures to enhance student engagement.

Episode 5. Dr. Charan Ranganath 

Dr. Charan Ranganath is Director of the Memory and Plasticity Program and a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Davis. He has been a pioneer in the use of brain imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, also known as “episodic memory.” Dr. Ranganath’s lab is investigating how memory is affected by emotion, stress, and curiosity, how memory changes with healthy aging, and how memory is affected by disorders such as epilepsy, stroke, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, his lab is using their basic science advances to develop innovative new approaches to improve artificial intelligence, education, and to enhance episodic memory in healthy people and in those suffering from memory disorders.

Episode 6. Nicholas Delbanco

Nicholas Delbanco has published thirty-one books of fiction and nonfiction, including his recently published memoir, Still Life at Eighty. He retired from the University of Michigan, where he was the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor in English and directed the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and, for 25 years, also directed the Hopwood Awards. He was founding director of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops and, he also created Bennington’s low-residency creative writing program. He was twice awarded National Endowment for the Arts grants in prose fiction, and also was awarded the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He has chaired the fiction panel for the National Book Awards and served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize. He served as one of the inaugural members of the advisory board of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, where he was instrumental in getting that organization engaged in its important work. With his wife, Elena, he divides his time these days between Manhattan and Cape Cod.

Episode 7. Katherine E. Young 

Katherine E. Young is a poet and translator, the author of two poetry collections, Woman Drinking Absinthe, and Day of the Border Guards; plus she edits “Written in Arlington” and curates “Spoken in Arlington.” She was the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, VA. She has translated work by Anna Starobinets, Akram Aylisli and numerous Russophone poets from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Her writing and translation have earned both national and international awards, including the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, the Pushkin House Translation Residency in the UK, an Arlington County Individual Artist Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. She has taught poetry and literature at the University of Maryland-College Park and the Catholic University of America, and spoken on translation, translation theory and the ethics of translation at the University of Oxford in the UK, Columbia University, and the Institut Perevoda in Russia. She serves on the PEN-America Translation Committee and is a founding member, former co-director and advisory board member emerita for the DC-Area Literary Translators Network. 

Episode 8. Chelsea Henderson

Chelsea Henderson is the author of GLACIAL: THE INSIDE STORY OF CLIMATE POLITICS, the first of its kind lookback at the six decades since climate change was first elevated to a president’s attention as a global catastrophe in the making. With more than twenty-five years of experience striking bipartisan compromise on federal energy and environmental policy, Chelsea has worked on and off Capitol Hill with lawmakers, administration officials, and a broad array of stakeholders from the regulated community to environmentalists. She currently hosts the podcast the EcoRight Speaks and serves as the Director of Editorial Content for republicEn.org, a project of the GMU Center for Climate Change Communication.

Prior to her current gig, Chelsea was executive vice president at McBee Strategic Consulting, where she provided advocacy services to a diverse portfolio of Fortune 500 companies, innovative start-ups, non-profits and investors advancing new energy technologies. Previously she was a partner and senior associate for Vela Environmental where she advised clients on federal legislative and administrative efforts pertaining to energy policy and climate change.

Chelsea served as senior policy advisor for the late Senator John Warner during his effort to enact climate change legislation and served as professional staff to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, her tenure spanning the chairmanships of the esteemed late Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) and former Senator Bob Smith (R-NH). In her free time, she serves on board of the Cheverly Community Market, a bimonthly seasonal farmer’s market; seeks out trails to take her new gravel bike on; and travels in pursuit of identifying her favorite wine region.

A graduate of Boston University’s College of Liberal Arts (B.A.) and School of Education (M.Ed.), she hails from Maine and resides with her two cats in Maryland, where she occasionally still feeds and gets visits from her two adult sons.