Category: Society

Minibabble: Enid Ryce Casts Spells

Enid Baxter Ryce has just published a book that explores spells and incantations across time and cultures. In this short version of the full episode, Enid reads and explains some of her favorite spells. Please visit BABBLERY.com to listen to the full interview, in which we discuss magic and spells, but she also addresses the importance of nature and education in the age of artificial intelligence.

A Spell to Keep Us Human: In conversation with Enid Baxter Ryce

Enid Baxter Ryce is an artist who is a writer, she’s a professor who tells her students to put the computers away, she’s a mom who asks her kids to go dig a hole. In this wide-ranging conversation, we learn how Enid moved from a “feral” childhood to a life of the mind, never forgetting to keep her hands in the dirt and her self open to possibility.

Living Within the Questions with Merle Hoffman

To call Merle Hoffman the owner of an abortion clinic is only to scratch the surface of her complexity. She’s a pianist, a philosopher, an activist, a mother, and an adventurer in the world of spirituality. This is a conversation about courage, conviction, and what happens when we decide to trust ourselves.

Fighting for a Better Online World with Cindy Cohn

Cindy Cohn’s new book, Privacy’s Defender, focuses on three legal cases that formed the basis for privacy and freedom of speech on the Internet. But it’s also a memoir, framing the issues raised by legal battles through personal choices and life events both mundane and momentous. In this unusual conversation, we leave the big legal questions behind and focus instead on our modern lives on the internet. What do women get from privacy and freedom of speech when men so often use their own privacy and freedom of speech to restrict women’s online behavior? How does the internet mirror the real world when it comes to harassment and bullying of women? How would proposed fixes to the internet’s free speech woes restrict women’s speech even further?

Rooted in Service with Human Rights Commissioner Denise Miranda

Denise Miranda is New York State’s top civil rights official, the head of an agency that is charged with monitoring and promoting civil rights in the state. She’s also a proud native of the Bronx, daughter of Puerto Rican-born parents, and a mother. On the Babblery, we discuss the passion for justice and rights for all that drives her work.

Minibabble: #MeToo meets due process

What happens when women’s fight for long-delayed justice collides with our legal tenet of due process? In this Minibabble, host Suki Wessling speaks with retired judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell about the #MeToo movement and how she reacted when she heard some women insist that we should “believe all women.”

Minibabble: When we open the door for others

This month’s guest on the Babblery podcast is retired judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell. I first interviewed LaDoris about her work with the African American Composer Initiative. In both interviews, she gives a passionate defense of what she calls today’s “dirty word”—DEI. In this Minibabble, producer Suki Wessling reflects on what it means to hold the door open for others.

Read the full text on Babblery.Substack.com.