Delving In with Stuart Kelter

• #151. The Successful Struggle to Organize the First Union at Starbucks

  Jaz Brisack is a experienced union organizer, starting with the United Autoworkers campaign at the Nissan factory in Canton, MS and volunteering as a Pinkhouse Defender at the state’s last abortion clinic. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping to organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United in upstate New York and Vermont, Jaz subsequently worked with organizing committees that successfully formed a workers’ union at a Ben & Jerry’s store in Burlington, VT and less successfully at a Tesla facility in Buffalo, NY.​In 2018, Jaz co-founded the Inside Organizer School and is currently developing it further as a Practitioner in Residence at the Labor Center of the University of California at Berkeley. The school teaches non-union workers and activists how to organize their workplaces from within. It also brings together organizers, activists, and workers from a variety of industries, unions, and campaigns, with the aim of creating a community that builds a vibrant, diverse, and democratic labor movement. Jaz is the author of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 4/22/25.

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• #150. Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom

  James Danckert is a cognitive scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, focusing on the neuroscience of attention and the consequences of strokes. He has written numerous journal articles on the psychology of boredom and is the co-author, with John Eastwood, of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom, published in 2020, which is the subject of today’s interview.Recorded 4/17/25.

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• #149. A Mother and Five Children, Upwardly Striving and Homeless

  Jeff Hobbs is the author of five books, including a novel, The Tourists, and four books that apply a novelist writing style to the struggles of individuals striving to overcome racial, class, and social disadvantages. These include The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man who Left Newark for the Ivy League, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Show Them You’re Good: Four Boys and the Quest for College; Children of the State: Stories of Survival and Hope in the Juvenile Justice System; and most recently and the subject of today’s interview, Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America.Recorded 4/3/25.

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• #148. Nearly Dying While Giving Birth, Followed by Seven Years of Recovery

  Samina Ali teaches fiction writing at Stanford University and is an award-winning author, whose debut novel, Madras on Rainy Days, published in 2004, won several literary awards, including Poets & Writers Magazine’s Top Debut of the Year. She has been a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and other publications and has been interviewed by national media.Samina has been an activist for Muslim women’s rights and has served as a cultural ambassador to several European countries for the U.S. State Department. A founding member of the American Muslim feminist organization, Daughters of Hajar, she curated the acclaimed global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, showcasing work by Muslim women artists, activists, and thought leaders from around the world.​Samina’s just released second book, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, which is the subject of today’s interview, tells the story of her unlikely survival and seven years of recovery, after nearly dying during the birth of her son. The memoir disarmingly invites the reader to relive her harrowing experience with her, as she taps into its medical, psychological, spiritual, cultural, and familial dimensions.Recorded 3/25/24.

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• #147. Fraud in Alzheimer's Research that Underpins the Dominant Model of the Disease

  Charles Piller is an award-winning investigative journalist for Science magazine, reporting on such topics as public health, biological warfare, and infectious disease outbreaks. In addition to articles in major newspapers, he is the co-author, with Keith Yamamoto, of Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies, published in 1988, which examines the U.S. military biotechnology program and discusses the future of genetic arms control. He is the author of The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism, published in 1991, about the opposition by community groups to scientific and technological projects that endanger their communities. This interview focuses on his recently published book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's, the book-length version of his exposé, “Blots on a Field,” that he wrote for Science magazine on July 21, 2022.Recorded 3/18/25.

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