Claudia Cragg speaks here with author, Umberto Nicola Nicoletti, about his fine-art book Asylum. We  discusses the phenomenon of LGBTIQ+ refugees, asylum seekers, and those subject to discrimination in their home countries based on their gender or sexual orientation.

More the 40 percent of the countries in the world today still impose prison sentences or the death penalty just for being LGBTIQ+. Asylum is an international project that arose from a collaboration between five associations around the world and photographer Umberto Nicola Nicoletti.

Through the use of beautiful “glossy images,” such as those used in fashion and advertising, the project seeks to engender empathy for the subjects involved and their stories. Asylum seekers become celebrities, idols, and heroes as they are. Therefore, it is not photographic reportage but, rather, an art project focused on restoring their dignity.

LGBTIQ+ refugees often face double discrimination: in their home country and in their destination, as they are both immigrants and LGBTIQ+. This is especially true in refugee camps, where they are subject to assaults by other migrants. The aim of this project is to give these individuals the identity they are often deprived of when they are reduced to an indistinct mass—and to show the world their true beauty.

Umberto Nicola Nicoletti is an Italian photographer and director. He specializes in portrait photography in the fields of advertising, music, fashion, and publishing. He has created international ad campaigns, commercials, book covers and music videos. 

The introduction in the book, Asylum, is written by Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The 519 TORONTO / 

CIG Arcigay MILAN /  

The DC Center WASHINGTON DC /  

Rainbow Migration LONDON /  

RusaLGBT NEW YORK 

'Trickle Down' does NOT work.

For KGNU 'It's The Economy' host, Claudia Cragg spoke with SteadyState.org's Rob Dietz. He brings a fresh perspective to the discussion of economics and environmental sustainability with a diverse background in economics, environmental science and engineering, and conservation biology (plus his work in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors). His expertise has given him an unusual ability to connect the dots when it comes to the topic of sustainability. 

Rob is the author, with Dan O’Neill, of Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources.

Rob has tried, he says, to align his personal life with the principles of a 'steady state economy'.  He lives with his wife and daughter in a co-housing community striving for development rather than growth.

Rob Dietz is the Program Director at Post Carbon Institute, where he is responsible for guiding projects from conception to completion. With training and experience in ecological economics, environmental science, and conservation biology, he has built a career aimed at moving society in sustainable directions.

Prior to joining Post Carbon Institute, Rob worked as a project manager at Farmland LP, helping to transition conventional farmland to organic. He was also the first executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (steadystate.org), taking it from an unfunded start-up organization to an internationally respected leader on new economic thinking.  He is the lead author of Enough Is Enough, a popular book on steady-state economics that Noam Chomsky called “lucid, informed, and highly constructive.” Rob also has produced dozens of articles and presentations on a variety of topics related to sustainability.

Rob is a former Presidential Management Fellow, with appointments at the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  He was the first person at the Fish and Wildlife Service to serve as a Conservation Goals Coordinator, a position that combined long-range planning and landscape modeling for the National Wildlife Refuge System. He also did time as an economic analyst at two Washington, DC, consulting firms. His educational background includes a master’s degree in environmental science and engineering from Virginia Tech and an undergraduate degree in economics and environmental studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

@claudiacragg (DM Twitter) speaks here with Samuel J Redman @samueljredman about his new book, A Short History of Crisis and Resilience.

The work, Professor Redman says, celebrates as he sees it the resilience of American - and it must be said many worldwide - cultural institutions in the face of nationl crises and challenges.

On one afternoon in January 1865, a roaring fire swept through the Smithsonian Institution. Dazed soldiers and worried citizens could only watch as the flames engulfed the museum’s castle. Rare objects and valuable paintings were destroyed. The flames at the Smithsonian were not the first —and certainly would not be the last—disaster to upend a museum in the United States. Beset by challenges ranging from pandemic and war to fire and economic uncertainty, museums have sought ways to emerge from crisis periods stronger than before, occasionally carving important new paths forward in the process.

Redman explores the concepts of “crisis” as it relates to museums, and how these historic institutions have dealt with challenges ranging from depression and war to pandemic and philosophical uncertainty. Fires, floods, and hurricanes have all upended museum plans and forced people to ask tough questions about American cultural life.

With chapters exploring World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970 Art Strike in New York City, and recent controversies in American museums from the COVID-19 pandemic to race and gender issues, this timely book takes a novel approach to understanding museum history, present challenges, and the future. By diving deeper into the changes that emerged from these key challenges, Samuel J. Redman argues that cultural institutions can—and should—use their history to prepare for challenges and solidify their identity going forward.

The work is a captivating examination of crisis moments in U.S. museum history from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day, The Museum offers inspiration in the resilience and longevity of America’s most prized cultural institutions.

Claudia Cragg spoke at length just last May with Jack Devine, @JackDevine_TAG, author of  Spymaster’s Prism.  In this book, Devine the legendary former CIA spymaster details the unending struggle with Russia and its intelligence agencies as it works against our national security. (Jack Devine's blog.)

Devine tells this story through the unique perspective of a seasoned CIA professional who served more than three decades, some at the highest levels of the agency. He uses his gimlet-eyed view to walk us through the fascinating spy cases and covert action activities of Russia, not only through the Cold War past but up to and including its interference in the Trump era. Devine also looks over the horizon to see what lies ahead in this struggle and provides prescriptions for the future.

Based on personal experience and exhaustive research, Devine builds a vivid and complex mosaic that illustrates how Russia’s intelligence activities have continued uninterrupted throughout modern history, using fundamentally identical policies and techniques to undermine our democracy. He shows in stark terms how intelligence has been modernized and weaponized through the power of the cyber world.

Devine presents his analysis using clear-eyed vision and a repertoire of better-than-fiction spy stories, giving us an objective, riveting, and candid take on U.S.-Russia relations. He offers key lessons from our intelligence successes and failures over the past seventy-five years that will help us determine how to address our current strategic shortfall, emerge ahead of the Russians, and be prepared for what’s to come from any adversary.

In view of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics (officially the XXIV Olympic Winter Games and commonly known as Beijing 2022) this interview is a repost. 

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.

Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center.

Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

Hessler, a native of Columbia, Missouri, studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two-year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book. After finishing his Peace Corps stint, Hessler wrote freelance pieces for Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times before returning to China in 1999 as a Beijing-based freelance writer. There he wrote for newspapers like the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and the South China Morning Post before moving on to magazine work for National Geographic and the New Yorker.

What better way to jump into 2022 than with a boost from a rebroadcast of our Maya Angelou interview?

This month the US Mint will start shipping quarters featuring Angelou, the first black woman to ever grace the coin. The program was conceived in 2017 and was officially signed into law in 2020. Potential honorees were nominated by the public last year. A fitting tribute to a remarkable person and a remarkable talent. 

In May of 2013, the then KGNU News Director, Joel Edelstein, generously invited colleague Claudia Cragg Twitter: @claudiacragg to speak by phone with Dr. Maya Angelou for a one on one interview. It turned out to be one of the very last she ever gave to talk about her then latest book. Explored here is the influence the great woman has had on another Maya, Maya Carter. She was then a 19 year old from Denver,(now just finishing her College freshman year) and, listening to the original KGNU interview, young Maya here tries to explain the effect that Dr.Angelou's life, work, poetry and thinking has had on her and in her initiation of the Motivate & Empower Movement she has founded in her honour. 

(That Senator may have made damn sure they'll be NO Child Tax Credits for you coming up, Kiddos!)

The authors, Joanne Samuel Goldblum, (@jgoldblum), founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and journalist Colleen Shaddox argue that the systems that should protect our citizens are broken and that poverty results from flawed policies—compounded by racism, sexism, and other ills—rather than people’s “bad choices.”

Federal programs for the poor often fall far short of their aims: The U.S. has only 36 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income families; roughly 1 in 3 households on Navajo reservations lack plumbing; and inadequate counsel by public defenders can lead to harsher penalties for crimes or time in “debtors’ prisons” for those unable to pay fines or court fees.

An overarching problem is that the U.S. determines eligibility for government benefits with an outdated and “irrationally low” federal poverty level of $21,720 for a family of three, which doesn’t take into account necessities such as child care when women work outside the home.

The authors credibly assert that it makes more sense to define poverty as an inability to afford basic needs in seven areas—“water, food, housing, energy, transportation, hygiene, and health”—each of which gets a chapter that draws on academic or other studies and interviews with people like a Baltimore resident who had to flush his toilet with bottled water after the city shut it off due to an unpaid bill.

This plainspoken primer in the spirit of recent books like Anne Kim’s Abandoned and Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Tightrope, Goldblum and Shaddox interweave macro analyses with examples of micro interventions that might work in any community.

A Head Start teacher in Lytle, Texas, says her program saw benefits just from giving toothbrushes (and a chance to use them at a classroom sink) to children who had none at home: “They come here, and they scrub like there’s no tomorrow.”