Cascade PBS Ideas Festival

Eric Holder on Trump, the Supreme Court and Voting Rights

The former Attorney General discusses how voting rights laws and Supreme Court term limits could preserve American democracy.

Few people in the United States have more experience at the intersection of the rule of law and the world of politics than Eric Holder. 

As the U.S. Attorney General during the presidency of Barack Obama, Holder was responsible for applying the rule of law to cases that were politically charged, from immigration to counter-terrorism to same-sex marriage. And he landed in the middle of numerous political firestorms. 

Now, nearly a decade after his departure from office, Holder has his attention focused on another place where law and politics intersect: the ballot box. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, Holder sits down with Crosscut managing editor Mark Baumgarten to discuss the numerous threats he sees to American democracy, including the right to vote, the belief that voters should be able to make an informed decision and the expectation that everyone's vote count. And whether he would have brought charges against former president Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case. 

This conversation was recorded on May 6, 2023 at the Crosscut Ideas Festival in Seattle.

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Credits

Host: Paris Jackson

Producer: Seth Halleran

Event producers: Jake Newman, Anne O'Dowd

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Falling Out of Love With the Supreme Court with Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Waldman

Amicus host Dahlia Lithwick and Brennan Center president Michael Waldman discuss SCOTUS's history and coming decisions.

Though its mythology says otherwise, the U.S. Supreme Court is not a static institution. As its justices have slowly turned over, the Court’s ideological makeup and the nature of its decisions have changed. So too has the public’s perception of the Court.

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, we’re listening in on a conversation between Dahlia Lithwick, the host of Slate’s Amicus podcast, and Brennan Center president Michael Waldman about how the Court has transformed in the past century.

Lithwick and Waldman dig into the Court’s past, present and future, connecting the dots from its long history to its current state and examining questions of its legitimacy and popularity, especially when it comes to Americans with more progressive politics.

As author of the forthcoming book The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America, Waldman has no illusions about the Supreme Court’s ability to rise above politics. In fact, he tells Lithwick, “We are in a great fight for the future of American democracy,” in part because of the partisanship he sees on the Court.

This conversation was recorded May 6, 2023.  

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Credits

Host: Paris Jackson

Producer: Seth Halleran

Event producers: Jake Newman, Anne O'Dowd

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Michael Barbaro on the New Era of News

The host of the New York Times podcast discusses the ways modern politics have transformed the media landscape.

For many American news consumers, Michael Barbaro’s voice is a defining element of the modern era. As a host of the New York Times podcast The Daily, Barbaro speaks to an audience of more than 3 million listeners, delivering insights into the biggest national and international stories.

That success wasn’t guaranteed. When Barbaro and the rest of the team behind The Daily started it in 2017, they were introducing a novel way to experience the news: hearing from reporters about their stories and how they reported them, or directly from the people in the middle of the stories. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, Crosscut Now host Paris Jackson talks with Barbaro about the reasons that formula produced one of the most influential and impactful news sources today. 

In this conversation, recorded April 25, 2023 as part of the Crosscut Ideas Festival, Barbaro shares his thoughts on the responsibilities and challenges of this kind of platform during such a tumultuous time, with distrust in the media at an all-time high.

This conversation was recorded April 24, 2023. Watch the video of the interview here. 

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Credits

Host: Paris Jackson

Producer: Seth Halleran

Event producers: Jake Newman, Anne O'Dowd

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Deepak Chopra’s Prescription for Your Mental Health

The author and doctor explains how treating the mind and the body as one can help stop humanity from sleepwalking to extinction.

Deepak Chopra has a lot of thoughts on the state of our mental health, and they start with the idea that mental health is not a singular thing that resides in our heads. It is, rather, a problem of the mind and the body.

Chopra is a prominent figure in the alternative-medicine world who is, by turns, a practicing physician, a philosopher and the author of 93 books. His latest is Living in the Light: Yoga for Self-Realization.

In this, the first episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast’s fifth season, PBS NewsHour co-anchor Amna Nawaz speaks with Chopra about his new book and his prescription for the mental health crisis in America and around the globe. 

Multiple times Chopra returns to the idea that human beings are sleepwalking to our extinction.  But he also offers a tangible prescription for hope, one that he believes every person can incorporate into their daily routine.

This conversation was recorded April 19, 2023. Watch the video of the interview here. 

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Credits

Host: Paris Jackson

Producer: Seth Halleran

Event producers: Jake Newman, Anne O'Dowd

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Understanding Death to Understand Life with Andrew Steele and Carl Zimmer

Science can't fully explain what life is. Three experts try anyway in a conversation about life, death and our desire to push back the expiration date.

Talking about life and death is tricky for anyone, even scientists. Despite considerable research over the course of generations, scientists still don’t fully understand what life is, what death is or even what separates the two. 

But where science lacks understanding, there are theories and questions about what makes something alive and how to keep living things from aging. And there are intriguing thoughts on the ethics of efforts to prolong life.

These are the questions at the heart of this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, featuring Andrew Steele, author of the book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, and Carl Zimmer, who writes the New York Times column Matter and is the author of Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.

Led in conversation by University of Washington doctoral candidate Halli Benasutti, these two experts discuss life, death, aging and consciousness. And while they may not be able to arrive on concrete definitions of these elusive concepts, they certainly have very interesting insight into each.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producers: Sara Bernard, Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

How to Be Happier with Dr. Laurie Santos

Happiness takes work. The host of The Happiness Lab podcast shares what social science says about making that work more manageable.

Happiness can feel fleeting in even the best of times. In the midst of a pandemic shot through with personal and social upheaval, maintaining a sense of joy or contentment can be especially challenging. 

As if that weren’t difficult enough, human intuition often fails at identifying what, exactly, will bring happiness. But according to professor Laurie Santos, the social sciences can help. 

As a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at Yale University who launched the popular class Psychology and the Good Life and  hosts the podcast The Happiness Lab, Santos has a firm grasp on the science of feeling good.

In this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast she discusses how scientific study has helped shed common misconceptions about what makes people happy and identifies practices that can lead to happier lives, including daily behavioral changes, larger structural changes in our lives and mindfully balancing happiness with our negative emotions. 

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producers: Sara Bernard, Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

How Billionaires Are Changing the Space Race with Tim Fernholz and Christian Davenport

A decade of advancement by private companies run by billionaires has transformed how humanity is approaching the final frontier. 

Some of the biggest news in recent space exploration has revolved around billionaires. Last year, for instance, both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson actually traveled into space. Those very high-profile – and very brief – journeys were a result of the relatively recent push by private companies to join Earth’s more technologically advanced nations in reaching toward the heavens. 

Blue Origin, SpaceX and Boeing have all played a major role in recent developments in space technology and even NASA’s Artemis mission, which is aimed at putting a woman and person of color on the moon, is outsourcing aspects of the mission to private companies.

The story of space exploration is a long, methodical and somewhat slow-moving one – in relation to the news cycle at least. But recent developments from private companies and nations have been coming relatively fast.

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, two authors who have been keeping an eye on the skies over the last decade discuss how these relatively new players are approaching the space race and how the nations who have been in the race for decades are responding.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producers: Sara Bernard, Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Keeping Arts Alive in an Expensive City During a Persistent Pandemic

The city’s arts industry is returning to some semblance of normalcy. During a live Civic Cocktail event, four leaders survey the damage done and chart a path forward.

In the spring of 2020, many artists and arts organizations were already struggling to maintain a place for themselves in Seattle. The future of creative expression in the city was uncertain, but the challenges were well-defined. Then the pandemic hit and scrambled everything.

Audiences shifted to experiencing their arts and entertainment through screens as artists pivoted to a new digital reality. Many arts organizations, meanwhile, had to rely on philanthropy, government assistance and their own creativity to survive. 

Now, as a vaccinated and exhausted world presses on through year three of the pandemic, the arts are in the midst of a slow return to venues across the city. But the world that artists and arts organizations are encountering is very different from the one they faced when the arts shut down two years ago. 

For this episode of the Civic Cocktail podcast, we speak with four community arts leaders – Arté Noir founder and president Vivian Philips, Museum of Museums founder and director Greg Lundgren, Artist Home founder and owner Kevin Sur, and Northwest Folklife managing director Reese Tanimura – about the state of the arts now. They share their experiences leading organizations and businesses through the pandemic, outline new challenges of this late-pandemic era and offer prescriptions to keep the arts alive in Seattle. 

This conversation was recorded on July 13, 2022.

Civic Cocktail is a production of Seattle City Club and Crosscut.

To receive future conversations like this one in your podcast feed earlier, subscribe to the Civic Cocktail podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Podbean, or wherever you listen.

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Credits

Host/podcast production: Mark Baumgarten

Event production: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Video production: Stephen Hegg

How the Internet Changed Us with Pamela Paul

Author Pamela Paul recalls what the world was like before it was connected — and how privacy and personal memory have transformed since.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the internet was there to help much of humanity keep going while maintaining a social distance. The transition was not seamless, but the interconnected world that had been taking shape in the decades prior made it possible for many people’s work and social lives to continue, if in a radically altered manner.

But while the internet has made this new normal possible, it has come at a cost. For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, author Pamela Paul tallies those costs, not just since the pandemic but in the decades before. 

In this interview from the 2022 Crosscut Festival, Paul discusses her book 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet, in which she documents a history that younger generations may barely remember – if they recall it at all. Baby Boomers, meanwhile, will find in Paul’s work a nostalgia trip through a time when privacy and individual memory remained more intact.  

As a member of Gen X, Paul delivers a perspective from somewhere in between. While there was no internet during her childhood, she witnessed its transformative powers as it became central to her life.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producers: Sara Bernard, Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Carl Bernstein on the Past and Future of News

The legendary journalist, who helped change the industry with his reporting on Watergate, talks about how journalism changed his life.

Carl Bernstein is best known as one half of the investigative team that broke the Watergate scandal, which eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Fifty years later, it is still regarded with reverence by both those who practice journalism and those who consume it.

That is partially because the story of that reporting is dramatic, enough to fuel a bestselling book and hit film. But mostly the reporting on Watergate continues to resonate because it so clearly changed the course of American history. In the parlance of newsrooms, what Bernstein and his reporting partner, Bob Woodward, did at the Washington Post in the early ’70s was high impact journalism. 

None of that is news to anyone. But that isn’t the story Bernstein shares in this episode of the Crosscut Talk podcast. Instead, he tells the story that came before the story, of his earliest days in a newsroom, at the Washington Star, in the early ’60s. 

It’s the subject of his recent memoir, Chasing  History: A Kid in the Newsroom, and it’s a jumping-off point here — in this interview with University of Washington professor Matthew Powers — to talk about the evolution of the journalism industry, the public’s regard for the news and what it means to search for the truth. 

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph

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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to funding our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.