The 7th Avenue Project

Fady Joudah is a doctor, a poet and the son of Palestinian refugees. And in so labeling him, I run the risk of doing exactly the sort of categorizing he and his writing resist. Fady is deeply suspicious of the way linguistic habits, packaged narratives and institutional norms buttress social inequities and occasional iniquity. So what’s a practicing doctor and serious poet to do? We discussed how Fady responds to the challenge in both of his vocations. Including readings from Fady’s books “The Earth in the Attic,” “Alight,” and “Textu.”

Big physics is on a roll. It seems like only yesterday we were applauding the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. And then this week came word that the BICEP2 microwave telescope at the South Pole had found evidence of gravitational waves from the inflationary epoch – a glimpse of the universe at the time of the Big Bang, or maybe even before. "Holy crap!" was my reaction, but I needed something more for a radio show, so I got in touch with Anthony Aguirre. Cosmic inflation is one of his specialties, and I thought he’d be a great person to explain the new findings. He was. And I stand by my initial assessment: holy crap!

Among those popping the champagne when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in July 2012 was Howard Haber. And deservedly so. He’d been studying and theorizing about the Higgs for decades, long before it became headline fodder. Howie wrote about the then-notional particle in his 1978 doctoral dissertation and co-authored a definitive text on how to find it, “The Higgs Hunter’s Guide,” in 1989. Though we’ve touched on the Higgs in previous shows, we’ve never gone into detail on the backstory and theoretical significance. I thought it was high time we did, especially as a new documentary film on the Higgs search – “Particle Fever” – is opening around the country.

Cultural historian John Beckman says America’s tradition of fun-loving isn’t frivolous, it’s fundamental to our democracy. Home-grown American fun, John contends, is one way we express our humanity, push back against elites and would-be autocrats, and make a more perfect union. John traces the history of rebellious fun in America from the Massachusetts colony of Merry Mount in the 1620s to the Merry Pranksters of the 1960s, and from the Sons of Liberty to flappers and jazzmen, b-boys and punks in his new book “American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt.”

Sandra Faber loves telescopes. It’s one of the reasons she became an astronomer. And if ‘scopes could speak, I suspect they’d have some loving words for her. She’s helped bring major new telescopes into being, developed instruments that greatly enhance their power and saved one famous scope from an early demise. And she’s put them to good use, too, participating in major astronomical discoveries and contributing to leading cosmological theories, like the cold dark matter theory of galaxy formation. The thing that pleases her most, though, is being part of the 13.7-billion-year-old cosmic story going back to the big bang. Sandy and I talked about her career and accomplishments, her sense of the universe and our place in space.

Keeping a family together is hard enough. Now try adding a chimp. Over the decades, psychologists exploring the animal-human cognitive divide have launched a number of studies in which humans attempted to raise chimpanzees as children. With their often-sloppy science and often-sorry outcomes (see, for example, the documentary film “Project Nim”), most such experiments have done less to limn the inter-species boundary than to highlight our confusions about it. These studies also trace the larger tale of familial dreams and disappointments in general, a point brought achingly to life in Karen Joy Fowler’s latest novel, “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” It’s the saga of one chimped-up family and its inevitable dissolution. Karen and I talked about the troubled history of chimp cross-fostering experiments, about the splintering of families, of siblings and selves, and storytelling as a source of self-knowledge, real or illusory.

Musical explorer Rick Walker pauses for a moment to retrace some of the ground he’s traversed in the last 35 years, from his early days as a punk/ska/new wave drummer to a serious student of world percussion traditions to electronica and looping to jazz.

Even the most commonplace social interactions can get awfully dicey when race is involved. Enter Jenée Desmond-Harris, who writes the Race Manners advice column at theroot.com, helping readers sort through racially charged situations in everyday life. Jenée and I talked about her own background, the complexities of contemporary race relations and the predicaments we find ourselves in.A small sampling of the topics we discussed: -Identity as a matter of choice -Being biracial in America -Talking to kids about race -Aestheticizing and sexualizing race -The racist uncle at the dinner table

A musical gets a second life as Cabrillo Stage rolls out a new version of “Lunch: A Modern Musical Myth” this week. I spoke to two members of the Emmy/Grammy/Oscar/Golden Globe-nominated creative team: composer Steve Dorff and book writer Rick Hawkins. They told me why they felt the story of 11th-hour redemption was ripe for revival, and how they updated both script and songs. We also listened to some of the original music, recorded in 1994 with an all-star studio cast including Carol Burnett, Michael Rupert, Laurie Beechman and Davis Gaines. Lunch Reimagined premieres Jan 3 at Cabrillo Stage.

I’ve spoken to Paul Bloom previously about the precocious moral awareness of young infants and the ingenious experiments used to demonstrate it. Now Paul has synthesized those findings in a far-reaching exploration of our ethical capacities and limitations. His new book is "Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil" Topics covered in this interview include: -Are we born with a sense of right and wrong? -Gut feelings vs. rational deliberation as a basis for ethical behavior -The roots of racism -Mafia morality -Sitcoms and moral uplift

Up and coming comic Ron Funches is trying to make it in the big time, and so far, so good. He’s moved to LA, has a part in a new TV comedy series and is writing for another. We talked about Ron’s path from open mics to paying gigs, developing his comic chops, his partiality to women comedians, why he still gets confused for a homeless person and what it’s like to be meeting and working with some of his comic role models.

Since winning the Fields Medal (the closest thing in mathematics to the Nobel Prize) in 2010, Cédric Villani has become a roving ambassador for math and science. He’s well-suited to the role: a patient explainer and broad-minded thinker, passionate about education and social engagement, with a seemingly limitless range of interests. We talked about Cédric’s emergence as a math whiz, what it’s like to spend years exploring a single equation, his fascination with statistical mechanics and entropy, whether math is "real" in some more-than-conceptual sense, what mathematicians do that computers can’t, his love of comic books and his signature retro look.

That old 60’s phrase "consciousness raising" may sound quaint and overblown today, but for a generation of progressive intellectuals it wasn’t hyperbole. Feminism, for example, was more than a push for equality and social justice; it was a wholesale re-evaluation of all sorts of unexamined "truths" about the world and the stories we tell. It’s easy to underestimate how much the ground shifted back then, which is why I wanted to talk to Helene Moglen. She was there for, and part of, the whole shebang. In this interview, Helene offered a very interesting look at her life, her times and work as a critic. Topics include: Faculty parties before and after the women's movement, what really happened at those consciousness raisings, and feminist readings of "Frankenstein" and "Robinson Crusoe.

David Harris-Gershon grew up regarding Palestinians as the enemy: “They were just the latest in a long line of people wanting us dead, lined up throughout history: Arabs, Germans, Russians, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians.” So you might think a Hamas-orchestrated bombing in Jerusalem that left two of his friends dead, his wife badly injured and him with a nasty case of PTSD would only harden those feelings. Instead, it led to a re-evaluation, a visit to the bomber’s family and a more complicated view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. David and I talked about his new memoir and his change of heart.

"Filmmaker Michel Wenzer isn’t interested in the lurid fare that typifies popular depictions of prison. He is interested in how some inmates manage to find a way to live and to grow in a place of desolation. For the men profiled in Wenzer’s documentary At Night I Fly: Images from New Folsom, salvation comes in the form of self-examination and artistic engagement, helped along by the remnants of California’s once-thriving Arts In Corrections program. We talked about Michel's experience filming in New Folsom (younger sibling of the original Folsom Prison) and the life lessons we could all learn from some of the lifers he met. I played some clips from At Night I Fly and also some bits of interviews I’ve done over the years with prison artists, including the poet Spoon Jackson, who was the inspiration for Michel’s film.