Black Friday 'Best-Of': David Leonhardt; Naomi Klein; Mo Rocca and More
The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2023
⏱️ 109 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this day after Thanksgiving, enjoy some of our favorite recent conversations:
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With the "dream" of an ever-brighter economic future now stymied, David Leonhardt, senior writer for The New York Times who writes The Morning, The Times’s flagship daily newsletter and author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream (Random House, 2023), traces its history and offers a path to reclaiming it for future generations.
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Through the story of three North Philadelphia children and drawing on his research, Nikhil Goyal, sociologist and policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget and the author of Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty (Metropolitan Books, 2023), shows how poverty limits the lives of U.S. children and offers policy solutions.
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Jessica Gould, education reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, recounts one family's year-long battle with New York City's Department of Education to help their child receive the specialized instruction required while growing up with dyslexia.
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Naomi Klein, activist, professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Shock Doctrine, No Logo, and her latest Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023), writes about her identity being confused with Naomi Wolf's and how that reflects larger societal trends.
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Mo Rocca, host of the podcast Mobituaries, a CBS Sunday Morning correspondent and a frequent panelist on NPR’s hit weekly quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, talks about the new season of Mobituaries, the "death" of the mid-Atlantic accent, and things he wishes would go away.
These interviews were lightly edited for time and clarity; the original web versions are available here:
What Happened to the American Dream? (Oct 24, 2023)
Child Poverty and How to End It (Sept 26, 2023)
The Struggle to Get Proper Instruction for Students with Dyslexia in New York City (Oct 23, 2023)
Navigating the 'Mirror World' (Sept 12, 2023)
Mo Rocca's "Mobituaries" (Oct 27, 2023)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Brian Laird show on WNYcke, good |
| 0:10.0 | It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. |
| 0:13.6 | Good morning everyone for this unofficial holiday, |
| 0:17.1 | the day after Thanksgiving. |
| 0:18.5 | We've put together some of our favorite interviews |
| 0:20.7 | from this fall touching on serious to not so serious topics from child |
| 0:25.6 | poverty and learning disabilities to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger to whatever |
| 0:31.3 | happened to that old Catherine Hepburn style movie star accent |
| 0:35.3 | that no one seems to talk like anymore. We start with the Pulitzer Prize winning |
| 0:40.2 | New York Times reporter, columnist, andist, and these days morning newsletter writer, David Lian Hart. |
| 0:45.5 | He has a new book called Hours was The Shining Future, |
| 0:49.1 | the Story of the American Dream. |
| 0:51.8 | As usual with David Lee and Hart, |
| 0:53.5 | this both tells many people's stories, |
| 0:55.7 | and is also very data-rich. |
| 0:57.4 | David was an economics reporter, |
| 0:59.3 | steeped in the numbers, as well as the people. |
| 1:01.8 | And you can see it again in this book. Let's pick it up here. |
| 1:05.9 | David, congratulations on the book. Always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to |
| 1:10.7 | WNYC. Thank you so much, Brian. |
| 1:13.2 | It's great to be on the show. |
| 1:14.6 | How old is the term the American dream? |
... |
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