Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 24, 2012.

David Shirk received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego, and joined the Political Science Department at the University of San Diego in 2003. He serves as the director of the Trans-Border Institute (TBI) and conducts research and publishes on topics related to Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexican relations, and law enforcement and security issues along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Shirk is the principal investigator for TBI’s Justice in Mexico Project, a bi-national research initiative focused on criminal justice and the rule of law in Mexico. He has been a fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Recent publications include Shared Responsibility: U.S.-Mexico Policy Options for Combatting Organized Crime (2010); Police and Public Security in Mexico (2009); Contemporary Mexican Politics (2008); Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico (2007) and Mexico’s New Politics: The PAN and Democratic Change (2005).

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Length: 1:40:26; Size: 48.3 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 18, 2012.

John Sayles, born in upstate New York in 1950, has a storied career as an independent filmmaker, screenwriter, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. He has written and directed many films including Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lone Star, Passion Fish, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan.  Writing scripts for others—he has a long list of credits as screenwriter—has generated the funds to support the production of most of his own films.

Sayles’ first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, was published in 1975 and was followed in 1977 by the novel Union Dues and a story collection, The Anarchist’s Collection, in 1979. Los Gusanos, his sweeping tale of Cuban expatriates in Miami, followed in 1991, and his most recent novel, A Moment in the Sun, was released this year by McSweeney’s and clocks in at 900+ pages. The novel is “a brutal picaresque complete with melancholy whores, militaristic robber barons, desperate cut-throat prospectors, and puppet soldiers…” according to William Vollmann, that looks at the United States discovering its own size and wealth and taking giant first steps at imperialism in the late 19th century.

Besides numerous awards and nominations for his film work and screenwriting including a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Writer’s Guild of America, literary recognition for Sayles has come in the form of an O. Henry Award for his first published story and nominations for both a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award for the novel Union Dues. In 1985 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work in both film and writing.

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Length: 1:19:11; Size: 39 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on December 6, 2011

Norman Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and has written and spoken publicly on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Finkelstein is the author of six books that have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering; Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict; A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn); and The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years. Finkelstein has also published several pamphlets, most recently, Goldstone Recants. He is currently working on a new book entitled Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel is Coming to an End.

Finkelstein currently writes and lectures. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Length: 2:08:14; Size: 61.6 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 16, 2011.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before.  A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and Jane magazine, where he profiled a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur.

His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), won The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. The novel has been translated into numerous other languages. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Lannan Fiction Fellowship in 2007. Mengestu’s second novel, How to Read the Air, was released in October 2010 and earlier that year Mengestu was selected as one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” writers of 2010.

He lives with his wife and two young children in Paris.

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Length: 1:17:42; Size: 37.3 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. Exiled from Pakistan in the 1960s for his activism against the military dictatorship, Ali has gained a reputation as one of today’s most forceful political thinkers, speaking out consistently against imperialism, religious fundamentalism and the Anglo-American “war on terror.” He has written more than 20 books on world history and politics, including Pirates of the Caribbean; Bush in Babylon; The Clash of Fundamentalisms and his latest, The Obama Syndrome—Surrender at Home, War Abroad. He has also authored five novels in his Islam Quintet series and writes scripts for the stage and screen.

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Length: 1:43:42; Size: 47.6 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the literary scene with her remarkable debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, hailed by critics as "one of the best novels to come out of Africa in years" (Baltimore Sun), with "prose as lush as the Nigerian landscape that it powerfully evokes" (The Boston Globe).

Her award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, illuminates a seminal moment in African history: Biafra's struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s.

"We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers. She is fearless, or she would not have taken on the intimidating horror of Nigeria's civil war. Adichie came almost fully made." Chinua Achebe

"An immense achievement. As well as freshly re-creating this nightmarish chapter in her country's history, she writes about the slow process by which love, if strong enough, may overcome."  The Observer (London)

In her most recent book, That Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but America, in 12 stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 and grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where she briefly studied medicine and pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State and later earning Masters degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and in African Studies from Yale University. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and The Iowa Review among other journals.

She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

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Length: 1:10:32; Size: 37.5 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 13, 2011.

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School in New York. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in New York City. He has a PhD in economics from Yale University, a history degree from Harvard University, and an economics degree from Stanford University. He has authored or co-authored 10 books, over 50 scholarly articles, and 75 popular articles.

Wolff's recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis. His documentary film on that crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, can be previewed at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. He has also published Capitalism Hits the Fan: the Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.

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Length: 1:36:34; Size: 53.3 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 18, 2011.

Joe Sacco is one of the world's foremost cartoonists and is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, which received the American Book Award, and Safe Area Goražde, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. After completing a degree in journalism at the University of Oregon, Sacco set out to crisscross the globe, producing comics along the way. In the early 1990s he spent two months in Israel and the occupied territories, traveling and taking notes. When he returned to the U.S. he recorded what he had witnessed and heard during his Middle Eastern travels, combining the techniques of eyewitness reportage with the medium of comics storytelling to explore this complex, emotionally weighted situation. Palestine, the resulting book, set new standards for the use of the comic book as a documentary medium, and was the first nonfiction graphic novel to invite serious comparison with Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus. In 2000, Sacco finished Safe Area Goražde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995: a 240-page exploration of a small Muslim enclave in Bosnia called Goražde. Sacco's most recent major work is a book about the southern Gaza Strip, called Footnotes in Gaza, published by Metropolitan Books in early 2010. Joe Sacco is a citizen of Malta and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

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Length: 1:21:22; Size: 28 MB

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Recorded at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 24, 2011.

Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. Both are non-profit human rights litigation organizations. He was part of the small group of lawyers that first took on representation of the Guantánamo detainees in January 2001, a case that resulted in a victory in the Supreme Court in 2004. CCR established a network of over 600 pro-bono lawyers to represent Guantánamo detainees and continues that work.

He has filed criminal complaints in the courts of Germany, France and Spain against former US officials including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld seeking the initiation of criminal prosecutions against them for the Abu Ghraib abuse and torture as well as for their actions at Guantánamo. Recently, CCR and ECCHR prepared papers to file in Switzerland against George W. Bush for torture. As a result Bush canceled his trip. A major area of Mr. Ratner's litigation and writing is the enforcement of the prohibition on torture and murder against various dictators and generals who travel to the United States. He has sued on behalf of victims in Guatemala, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, among other countries. He has also litigated numerous suits to prevent or stop illegal US wars ranging from Central America to Iraq. A constant in his work has been litigation against government spying and surveillance of activists.

Ratner's books, authored or coauthored, include the soon to be published, Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in 21st-Century America (2011) and Killing Che: How the CIA Got Away with Murder (2011). Other books include International Human Rights Litigation in U.S. Courts, Second Edition (2008); Against War with Iraq (2003); Guantánamo: What the World Should Know (2004); and The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book (2008). Ratner has taught human rights litigation at Yale and Columbia Law Schools. A past president of the National Lawyers Guild, Ratner has received many awards including Trial Lawyer of the Year, the Columbia Law School Medal of Honor (2005), the North Star Community Frederick Douglass Award, Honorary Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (2005), and The Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship (2007). In 2006, the National Law Journal named Ratner one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States.

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Length: 1:28:11; Size: 42.4 MB

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Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 17, 2011.

Chris Hedges, who has written, "The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug," is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and publishes a regular column on truthdig.com. Hedges spoke about Sheldon S. Wolin and his latest work, Democracy Incorporated.

Sheldon S. Wolin, born in 1922, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He taught political theory for 40 years at Oberlin College, the Universities of California, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Oxford University. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Democracy and a former regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His newest book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States--including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.

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Length: 1:03:32; Size: 45.8 MB

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