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Timothy Hunter (Baruch MPA ’23 and City Tech ’20) and Djenabou Barry (City College MPA ’22 ’20 and Guttman ’19) join me in discussing how they founded the incredible CUNY-led initiative Strategy for Black Lives as well as how they utilized both their community networks and their studies at CUNY to contribute to the BLM movement--all the while learning more about themselves and the world around them.

Zohra Saed, a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, and Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School alumna, have mounted a high-stakes campaign to help an imperiled Afghan writer and his family flee Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

National Book Award finalist Grace Cho talks about "Tastes Like War," a memoir of her quest to understand her mother's journey from Korean War bride in the Pacific Northwest to her struggle with schizophrenia.

In "Sparring with Smokin' Joe," CUNY journalism professor Glenn Lewis recalls the epic rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali -- one that transcended sports, became a cultural and racial touchstone and ultimately defined Frazier's life inside and outside the ring.

CUNY Student Trustee Juvanie Piquant (City Tech ’22) joins me in discussing mental health, how we’re feeling about the stress and anxiety surrounding this fall semester, and how we care for ourselves during difficult times — uncensored, unedited, uncut.

Jimmy Carter is often thought of as a failed one-term president, but in his new political biography of Carter, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, CUNY's Kai Bird argues that Carter was a much more consequential president than he's given credit for.

Ralph Blumenthal's "The Believer" tells the beguiling story of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winner whose career came to be defined by his study of people who said they'd had encounters with aliens. Mack believed them, and his life was never the same.

As he prepares to retire after a prodigious career spanning nearly 50 years, a conversation with the founding father of many of CUNY's most innovative and consequential programs of this century.

In her latest collection of poems, Donna Masini, a professor of English at Hunter College, moves back and forth in time--and human experience--as she copes with her younger sister's death and celebrates life through the communal act of movie-watching. She talks with Joe Tirella about 4:30 Movie, which is now out in paperback.

Matthew Goodman's "The City Game" tells the dramatic and heart-wrenching story of the 1950 City College basketball team: a moment of glory that collapsed in scandal and forever changed college basketball.

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health offers a frank assessment of the state of the emerging pandemic – and some good advice. (March 12, 2020)