Thecuriousmanspodcast

• Dean Van Nguyen Interview Episode 539

  Matt Crawford speaks with author Dean Van Nguyen about his book, Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur. Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. He recorded no fewer than ten platinum albums, starred in major films, and became an activist and political hero known the world over. In this cultural history, journalist Van Nguyen reckons with Tupac’s coming of age, fame, and cultural capital, and how the political machinations that shaped him as a boy have since buoyed his legacy as a revolutionary following the George Floyd uprisings. Words for My Comrades engages—crucially—with the influence of Tupac’s mother, Afeni, whose role in the Black Panther Party and dedication to dismantling American imperialism and combating police brutality informed Tupac’s art. Tupac’s childhood as a son of the Panthers, coupled with the influence of his stepfather’s Marxist beliefs, informed his own riveting code of ethics that helped audiences grapple with America’s inherent injustices. Using oral histories from conversations with the people who directly witnessed Tupac’s life and career, many of whom were interviewed for the first time here—from Panther elder Aaron Dixon, to music video director Stephen Ashley Blake, to friends and contemporaries of Tupac’s mother—Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics. Van Nguyen reveals how Tupac and Afeni each championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways, and how their mother-son bond charts a narrative of the last fifty years of revolutionary Black American politics. Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.

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• Andrew Holter Interview Episode 538

  Matt Crawford speaks with Andrew Holter about his book, Going Around: Selected Journalism Murray Kempton. A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.'' He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody—Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover. From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton’s concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the “splendors and miseries” of life in New York City.

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• Professor Bill Yousman Interview Episode 537

  Matt Crawford speaks with Professor Bill Yousman the director of the Media Literacy and Digital Culture graduate program at Sacred Heart University. We discuss misinformation, disinformation and the important distinction between them as well as how we can become more literate in our media consumption. If we start there, that will enable us to have more meaningful conversations based in fact and not emotion.

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• Dr. Charles LeBaron Interview Episode 536

  Matt Crawford speaks with former CDC Epidemiologist Dr. Charles LeBaron about his book, Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC's Disastrous War on Opioids: A CDC Physician's Personal Account.  When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that overdose deaths had quadrupled in ten years, hitting a record high of 90,000 in 2020, opioid researchers around the country expressed shock with terms such as “huge” and “unprecedented.” They might have reserved a few adjectives since overdose deaths grew to 100,000 in 2021 and 110,000 in 2022. Each year there are now twice as many deaths from overdoses as from breast cancer or colon cancer and more deaths than from automobiles and firearms combined. In the past two decades, a million Americans have died of overdoses. In the next decade, at the current epidemic rate, a million more are projected to perish. In a series of vividly personal vignettes, this book recounts the untold story of how CDC, the federal organization charged with controlling epidemics, implemented a misguided strategy that helped detonate an opioid overdose explosion. No other book has given a similar frontline, insider glimpse into the world’s premier public health agency. To provide a unique, first-person perspective on the human consequences, the author chronicles his experiences as a physician prescribing opioids in Appalachia and treating gang members in prison attacks, as well as his own near-death ordeal as a patient receiving high-dose opioids for severe pain. Drawing on twenty-eight years as a CDC epidemic control specialist, Dr. LeBaron concludes that we do have the means to emerge from the cruel, lethal paradoxes of this self-inflicted opioid war—which is really a war upon ourselves.  

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• Robert Walker Interview Episode 535

  Matt Crawford speaks with author Robert Walker about his book, Six Moons, Seven Gods: An Arthurian Fantasy Medieval Adventure (The Legends of Baelon Book 1.) The skilled thieves of the Takers Guild plot to overthrow the kingdoms of Baelon, but when their plans are thwarted by a prescient woman and her brooding daughter, they must turn to the League of Assassins for assistance. Meanwhile, retired royal guard Rolft Aerns returns to the palace of King Axil with an old score to settle. When they all cross paths and swords in the dark shadows of Fostead’s south end, nothing is as it seems and the murder count rises quickly. The long fingers of the Guild reach everywhere, and one overly ambitious thief is all it takes to spark a chain of events that will haunt the world of Baelon for many years to come.

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