The Jim Motavalli Interview Podcast

Stevie Holland, Personalizing the Songbook

Stevie Holland is an American jazz vocalist, writer and lyricist who's played major concert halls, jazz clubs and cabaret rooms, in addition to performing in theater. The youngest of seven children, Stevie grew up in a music-filled, Norwegian-Italian household in Westchester County, New York. Her father was a tenor sax-playing commercial artist and avid jazz record collector, and her mother was a church soloist who performed in recitals and operas. Holland's most recent album is Talk to Your Tomatoes, released in late 2025. The album combines pop, jazz and Great American Songbook classics, as well as original songs. Arrangements are by Gary William Friedman, and if it sounds like Ben Monder on guitar, that's because it is. Also on the album are Matthew Sheens, piano; Matt Aranoff, bass; Jeff Davis, drums and Chet Doxas, alto saxophone. Mike Fahie plays trombone, and Sam Hoyt, trumpet and flugelhorn.

Ocean Warrior David Helvarg Wants to Save Our Imperiled Kelp Forests

David Helvarg, a longtime environmental activist and journalist, is the founder and president of the marine conservation group Blue Frontier Campaign. He is the author most recently of Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp (Island Press). In a matter of decades, a spectacular cold-water paradise thirty million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wondrous and underappreciated marine habitats.

Dr. Kira Ganga-Keiffer on Religious Vaccine Resistance

Why do people cite religious objections to getting vaccinated? Where do these passionate beliefs, with no foundation in science, come from? Dr. Kira Ganga-Keiffer, a professor at Fairfield University, is a scholar of health and society, American religion, and history with a Ph.D. from Boston University). Her first book is Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton University Press, May 2026).

Gabriel Cohen on the Coming Tech Apocalypse

At this very moment, a tiny number of Silicon Valley leaders are making risky decisions that will have a huge impact on the rest of the eight billion people on this planet. They don't mean to cause harm, but their new creations often bring dire unintended consequences: destructive psychological, social, economic, and political results. We call these "side effects," but they're often more powerful than the intended ones. That's the premise of the new book, The Frankenstein Fix: Why Big Tech Goes Astray and What We Can Do About It. Cohen is a writing professor at Pratt Institute and the author of a plethora of crime novels. He was also a WPKN programmer in the 1980s!

The Lives of a Cell: Roxanne Khamsi's New Book Spotlights Pioneering Research That Can Fight Cancer and Help Us Live Longer

Roxanne Khamsi talks to Jim Motavalli about the profound implications of recent cell research. She is an author, speaker and contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her first book, Beyond Inheritance https://roxannekhamsi.com/beyond-inheritance(Riverhead Books, 2026), reveals how we mutate genetically every day of our lives and how the DNA changes that accumulate within us can profoundly affect our health. She has reported extensively on the intersection of genetics and medicine for more than two decades. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Economist, Popular Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Slate, Nature, New York magazine, WIRED magazine and National Geographic. She has appeared on television programs such as CBS News and has guest-hosted the national radio shows On The Media and Science Friday.