Cal Flyn is an award winning writer from the highlands of Scotland. In 2022, she was named a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She has been the winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the John Burroughs Medal, and she was a finalist for the Wainwright Prize, the British Academy Book Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Her first book, Thicker Than Water, which explored questions of colonialism and intergenerational guilt, was a Times book of the year. Her second book, Islands of Abandonment, was about the ecology and psychology of abandoned places. Her most recent book, THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: HOW WE MADE THE WILDERNESS, will be published by Viking on July 28, 2026.
She is the current Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University, deputy editor of the literary recommendations site Five Books, and has written for publications including The Guardian, Granta, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal.
Pepper Culpepper is Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy, and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Blavatnik School of Government, and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. His research explores the intersection of capitalism and democracy.
His recent book, co-written with Harvard Professor Taeku Lee, BILLIONAIRE BACKLASH: THE AGE OF CORPORATE SCANDAL AND HOW IT COULD SAVE DEMOCRACY, argues for the positive, and politically popular, role of government regulatory action against large corporations in an era of populism. The work builds on some of the scholarly insights from his five-year Advanced Grant Project funded by the European Research Council, which sought to understand how big banks and the rules that govern them became objects of political contestation after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
His earlier books include the award winning, Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan; and Creating Cooperation. His public commentary has appeared in the Conversation, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The New Republic, Times Higher Education, and The Washington Post.
We spoke with Pepper Culpepper on July 7, 2026 via Zoom.
What if your spouse has severe food allergies? You planned your trip to Disney World to find restaurants that prioritize patrons with such allergies. You asked your waiter several times, if your meal could be prepared without your allergens. Your waiter reassured you each time that it would be. When your food arrived without the labels marking them as safe, you expressed concern and the waiter again tells you that it is fine to eat. So you enjoy your meal. An hour later, your spouse drops to the ground struggling to breathe, and dies. You sue Disney and the company that owns the restaurant for negligence. Disney immediately moves to remove your suit from open court, to the shadows of forced arbitration, a private system of so-called justice that favors corporate defendants. Because you had signed up for the Disney + streaming service 4 years before, and had bought tickets to Disney World, and one of Disney’s lawyers was a former justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Disney had the law on its side.
This is just one scenario our guest, Brendan Ballou, cites in his latest book, WHEN COMPANIES RUN THE COURTS: HOW FORCED ARBITRATION BECAME AMERICA’S SECRET JUSTICE SYSTEM, published by Public Affairs. Perhaps you recall our 2023 interview with Brendan Ballou, when his earlier book, PLUNDER: PRIVATE EQUITY’S PLAN TO PILLAGE AMERICA, came out. https://forthright.media/2023/06/06/brendan-ballou-plunder-private-equitys-plan-to-pillage-america/
He served in the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, and resigned because of Trump’s immigration bans. In the Biden administration, he was a Special Counsel for private equity at the DOJ’s Anti-trust Division, from 2020 – 2025. As a federal prosecutor, he prosecuted rioters, who had attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He also served in the National Security Division of the DOJ. So, he has a thorough knowledge of justice and injustice; how we got to this point; and what can be done.
We spoke with Brendan Ballou on June 22, 2026 via Zoom.
We end this edition of Forthright Radio with an analysis of the appeals prospects for the Texas anti-ICE Prairieland protestors, who were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison.
“A new administration must screen out those who regard Government service as the door to power or wealth, those who cannot distinguish between private gains and public trust, and those who believe that old-fashioned honesty with the public’s money is both old and out of fashion.” John F. Kennedy, 1960
Returning to be our guest again is internationally renowned public intellectual, writer, and cultural and political critic, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, & The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy – Professor Henry Giroux.
He has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited academics working in any area of Humanities research. His books have been translated into many languages.
Henery Giroux is on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous national and international scholarly journals, and he co-edited a series on education and cultural studies with Paulo Freire for a decade. He is on the Board of Directors for Truthout. He is interviewed regularly on a number of different media including Democracy Now! Despite these illustrious credentials, he is never dull in conversation, and he certainly isn’t in this one, which was recorded via Zoom on June 5, 2026.
Liz Helenchild from the 2018 Mendocino Poetry Celebration Photo by Dan Roberts
This edition of Forthright Radio ends with a poem by Mendocino poet and radio colleague, Liz Helenchild‘s, poem: SLICE. Thanks to Dan Roberts for broadcasting it on Rhythm Running River (6-7-26) and for permission to include it. It was recorded at the 2026 Mendocino Poetry Celebration.
Gal Beckerman is an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT. Before coming over to The Atlantic, whose books section he also ran, he was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for six years. He also served as the opinion editor at the Forward newspaper and a staff editor and writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has appeared in a number of places over the years, including the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum.
His previous books include The Quiet Before, which was a New York Times Notable pick in 2022, and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone, which won two major book awards and was chosen as a book of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post.
Over the years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, lived in Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and broke his arm almost in half while biking across France.
Our guest today is Amherst College’s Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Lawrence Douglas. He is the author of seven books, including the nonfiction books, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust; and Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020; as well as the novels, The Catastrophist, and The Vices.
The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, he has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
His latest book, THE CRIMINAL STATE: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, was just published by Princeton University Press. It’s a re-interpretation of international law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—and leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. It’s a provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice, which is certainly relevant to the current conflicts around the world and, sadly, increasingly here at home, as well.
Media around the globe reported the death of Ted Turner on May 6, 2026, at the age of 87. Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. He announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. Turner’s Montana properties included the flagship 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch south of Bozeman.
So, we thought it would be good to rebroadcast our interview with Bozeman author, Todd Wilkinson, from 2013 when his book, LAST STAND: TED TURNER’S QUEST TO SAVE A TROUBLED PLANET, was published.
She is a pioneer scientist on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; who conveys complex, technical ideas in ways that are inspiring and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers such as James Cameron’s “Tree of Souls” in Avatar. She has demonstrated that trees interact and communicate using below ground fungal networks, and that forests have elder trees, that she calls Mother Trees, which are large, highly connected trees, who play an important role in the flow of information and resources in a forest.
Her current research investigates how these complex relationships contribute to forest resilience, adaptability and recovery and has far-reaching implications for how to manage and heal forests from human impacts, including climate change.
She writes about this in her latest book, WHEN THE FOREST BREATHES: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, published by Knopf.
We spoke with Suzanne Simard on April 3, 2026 via Zoom.
Elaine Ingham, Who Taught That Soil Is Alive, Dies at 73 A scientist and leader in the organic farming movement, she popularized the “soil food web,” and understanding that soil is a complex realm of microorganisms. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/science/earth/elaine-ingham-dead.html
Our guest today is journalist, Christopher Mathias. His recent book is TO CATCH A FASCIST: THE FIGHT TO EXPOSE THE RADICAL RIGHT, published by Atria. It’s a deep dive into the resurgence of white nationalist and Neo-Nazi movements in the US, that centers on anti-fascist groups working to expose and stop their violence and intimidation.
Demonized as “extremist” by both conservatives and liberals, “antifa” became a bogeyman during Donald Trump’s first term. However, few Americans understood the dangerous work antifa was doing to disrupt and unmask a new generation of white supremacists, or listened when antifa sounded the alarm about these white supremacists taking positions of power. Now this underground network of militant anti-fascists continues in their determination to stop the rising tide of fascism in America.
We spoke with Christopher Mathias on April 7, 2026 via Zoom.
Dr. Charles G. Curtin is the director of Regenerative Conservation Design.
He is the author of The Science of Open Spaces: Theory and Practice for Conserving Large, Complex Systems and the coeditor of Complex Ecology: Foundational Perspectives on Dynamic Approaches to Ecology and Conservation. His latest book is PLACE-BASED SOLUTIONS: THE POWER OF REGENERATIVE THINKING IN THE FACE OF CRISIS, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. His books explore the intersection of ecology and culture and focus on how the word’s messiness leads to uncertainty and unexpected outcomes, and what to do about it.
Not merely a world renowned ecologist with conservation collaborations including cross-cultural conservation exchanges from the Middle East and Africa to the fisheries of Maine. His Two-Cowboys Project involves cross-continent learning networks between Maasai pastoralists in Kenya and US ranchers in the New Mexico/Arizona and Mexico borderlands, as well as Montana’s Blackfoot Challenge. The Crown of the Continent Partnership is a collaboration project on the borders of Montana, Alberta, British Columbia and the Salish and Kootnai Confederation. You can find out more about this ecosystem here: https://www.crownmanagers.org/about-the-crown
We spoke to him via Zoom from his home in Ranchos de Taos, NM on March 23, 2026.
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