LEONARD LOPATE AT LARGE

Today Leonard and Michael Wildes discusses the book “Safe Haven In America: Battles to Open the Golden Door” and reflect on a career spent fighting to keep good people in the country. In “Safe Haven In America: Battles to Open the Golden Door,” Michael describes representing defecting KGB agents, whistleblowers, disillusioned Saudi diplomats, accused terrorists, professionals and celebrities, such as First Lady Melania Trump and soccer legend Pele. But the book also recounts his efforts help the victims of international child kidnapping cases, families that were all but destroyed by the attack on the World Trade Center, and a DACA recipient who endured a hate crime.  

*****Please note there were recording playback audio problems with some of the music recorded today at WBAI, so some audio selections are missing or wrong…..thank you for your patience****** Today, on Leonard Lopate At Large,  Christian De Luca and Tom Crawford from the Orchestra of the Old Fairfield Academy Join Leonard in conversation. On Thursday’s show, we take a musical journey into the past when Christian De Luca and Tom Crawford from the Orchestra of the Old Fairfield Academy describe what it’s like to perform classical compositions with instruments from the same era in which they were written. Christian and Tom will also share some of the music they’ve made in this discussion on how much of a difference the period an instrument is made has on a performance.

Today Leonard talks with  Adrian Benepe A senior vice president and director of city park development for The Trust for Public Land, Adrian Benepe is one of the nation’s experts on the nexus of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors in public-space development and management. Born and raised in New York, Adrian served as New York City Parks commissioner for 11 years under Mayor Michael Bloomberg prior to joining The Trust for Public Land. During that time he oversaw a major expansion of the city’s park system, including restoring historic parks such as Central Park and Battery Park, adding 730 acres of new parkland including Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the High Line, and laying the groundwork for an additional 2,000 acres of parkland within the city.      

Today Leonard has a conversation with George Pakenham on the dangers of idling vehicles. Idling engines consume more than 6 billion gallons of gasoline annually in the U.S., a significant contributor to local air pollution, respiratory disease and global climate change. In George Pakenham’s documentary “Idle Threat,” the Wall Street banker is shown helping improve local air quality, and gaining worldwide recognition for the anti-idling cause in the process, with articles about his underdog fight featured in the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker magazine and the Financial Times.

Leonard welcomes Richard Manning & Scott Sayare today with a conversation on fires raging across the world today. If it seem to you like the world is on fire, it’s not just your anxiety over the future of democracy and the state of the republic; the world literally is on fire. The August issue of Harper’s Magazine offers two examinations of the causes and the costs of recent wildfires at home and abroad, a package  called AS THE WORLD BURNS. Richard Manning’s examination of the fires that raged across Montana last summer, “Combustion Engines,” blames global warming, a century of fire mismanagement, and the building of homes in fire-prone areas. Scott Sayare, in “There Will Always Be Fires,” describes the conditions in Portugal—notably the heavy planting of eucalyptus—that led to the catastrophic blazes there.

Today, Leonard is joined by James Beard Award-winning baker Jim Lahey . After noticing he couldn’t find bread in New York like the beautiful, crusty loaves he ate in Italy while traveling there as an art student, he took it upon himself to recreate those loaves. In 1994, he opened Sullivan Street Bakery in the West Village, which now has locations in Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea and Miami.

  Leanord’s conversation today with Craig Unger covers Unger’s new book, “House of Trump, House of Putin.” A few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made this very unusual statement: “Dear friends, respected colleagues! …three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.” Nikonov is a leader in the pro-Putin United Russia Party and, incidentally, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov — after whom the ‘Molotov cocktail’ was named. His announcement that day was a clear signal that Trump’s victory was, in fact, a victory for Putin’s Russia. Today, Craig tells Leonard about just how deep President Trump’s Russian connections go.

On Leonard Lopate At Large Today, Leanord has a conversation with Michele Gelfand, author of “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” Michele Gelfand is a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of “The Secret Life of Social Norms” and “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers celebrated cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand takes us on an epic journey through human cultures, offering a startling new view of the world and ourselves. With a mix of brilliantly conceived studies and surprising on-the-ground discoveries, she shows that much of the diversity in the way we think and act derives from a key difference—how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms.

Kathleen Hill and Steven Gaines join Leonard in-studio for a discussion about what makes a great memoir. Beginning with a “Best American” award-winning narrative, Kathleen Hill’s memoir “She Read To Us in the Late Afternoons” explores defining moments of a life illuminated by novels, read in Nigeria and France and at home in New York.         “One of These Things First” by Steven Gaines is a wry and poignant reminiscence of a 15-year-old gay Jewish boy in Brooklyn in the early sixties and his unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmother’s bra and girdle store, to Manhattan’s fabled Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a fashionable Charenton for wealthy neurotics and Ivy League alcoholics.

Today Leonard interviews Maxine Rosaler, Author: Queen for a Day.” The reader knows by page one of “Queen for a Day” that Mimi Slavitt’s three-year-old son is autistic, but if anyone told her, she wouldn’t listen, because she doesn’t want to know—until at last Danny’s behavior becomes so strange even she can’t ignore it. After her son’s diagnosis Mimi finds herself in a world nearly as isolating as her son’s.  It is a world she shares only with mothers like herself, women chosen against their will for lives of sacrifice and martyrdom. Searching for miracles, begging for the help of heartless bureaucracies while arranging every minute of every day for children who can never be left alone, they exist in a state of perpetual crisis, normal life always just out of reach. In chapters told from Mimi’s point of view and theirs, we meet these women, each a conflicted, complex character totally unsuited for sainthood and dreaming of the day she can j

Prize-winning concert pianist and exceptional raconteur James Irsay makes music exciting! On today’s show Leonard interviews WBAI show host James Irsay! James specializes in historical recordings, with an emphasis on piano music. Yet he is just as likely to throw in music of any kind that has sparked his interest during the preceding week. He is not a radio wallflower, so be prepared for extended, unfiltered, free-flowing shpiels on any subject at all. When the subject is music and the recordings he airs, James takes an analytical path that runs through groves of highly personal opinion, gardens of historical and technical elucidation, and – wait for it – sandboxes of embarrassingly juvenile tomfoolery. He has been a musician since the age of six, and studied with such world-class performers and composers as Jorge Bolet, John Ogdon, Sasha Gorodnitzki, Ernst Krenek, Peter “PDQ Bach” Schickele and Jacob Druckman. He has performed with Itzak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Raymond Lewenthal, Alan Titus, and many more musical luminaries. His work at WBAI has brought much recognition to his beloved station, including The Major Armstrong Award, several Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards, and for National Public Radio, The Ohio State Award.

Today, Leonard will discuss the new book “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” with Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael D’Antonio and Emmy-nominated journalist Peter Eisner, who follow the path Pence followed from Catholic Democrat to conservative evangelical Republican. They reveal how he used his time as right-wing radio star to build connections with powerful donors; how he was a lackluster lawmaker in Congress but a prodigious fundraiser from the GOP’s billionaire benefactors; and how, once he locked in his views on the issues—anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro big-business – he became laser-focused on his own pursuit of power.

On today’s Leonard Lopate at Large,  the two co-directors of will join Leonard to talk about this new front in the battle for international supremacy. Why have potential adversaries such as Russia have been so successful at engaging in asymmetric warfare by exploiting our weaknesses? What challenges do emerging technologies present, not just to military and security organizations, but to democratic principles and institutions?

Today, on Leonard Lopate At Large, Leonard and Brian will discuss Brian Abrams’s new book “OBAMA: An Oral History 2009-2017,” the first comprehensive look into President Barack Obama’s White House. Featuring on-the-record conversations with over 100 West Wing staffers, administration insiders, legislators, political opponents and rival campaign managers, the book offers what Kirkus Review called “an entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.”

Today on Leonard Lopate At Large, author Ann Beattie joins Leonard for the second installment in Leonard’s Underread Book Club, the short stories of Jean Stafford. Though her first novel, “Boston Adventure” was a national best seller, earning her national acclaim, it was Stafford’s short stories—first published in The New Yorker and various literary magazines—that earned her a Pulitzer Prize.  Today,  Leonard and Ann will focus on this revered body of work that often doesn’t receive the level of attention it deserves in the modern era.