Staying in the Ring with Brad Lander

Faith in the System with Lisa Rubin

---------------------------------------- Lisa Rubin walked away from one of the country's most prestigious corporate law firms at 40 — not toward a plan, but because she'd slowly lost the thread of why she'd become a lawyer in the first place. That reinvention led her directly to the stories that implicate everything she'd spent a decade serving. She's now MSNOW's senior legal reporter, covering the Trump trials, the erosion of DOJ independence, and the Epstein files. She has read thousands of pages of documents. She has wept on the phone with survivors. She still believes in the rule of law with the fervor of a religion. We talk about what it cost her to leave a career she'd built her identity around, what she has seen in the Epstein files that most people aren't fully reckoning with, and what it looks like to keep faith in a system that keeps letting you down.

Staying in the Ring with Brad Lander

This episode was recorded at NYU Law and sponsored by the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy and the NYU Chapter of the American Constitution Society. Brad Lander keeps showing up when most people would walk away. He cross-endorsed Zohran Mamdani in the middle of a mayoral race he was still running. He went back to 26 Federal Plaza three times to accompany asylum seekers out of the building—until ICE grabbed him too. He said publicly what many Jewish leaders won't about Gaza, knowing the cost. He came in third—and he's not done. We talk about what his parents taught him about being in community, why the job of neighbor now asks more than it ever has, and what it means to stay in the ring—with your coalition, your community, your conscience—when every instinct says protect yourself.

Walking the Grief with Sah D'Simone

When Sah D'Simone's mother Patricia died, he did what most of us do: he went back to work. But the grief didn't go anywhere. It froze. So he and his father walked the Camino de Santiago for 32 days — 500 miles of crying, laughing, and falling apart without anyone trying to fix them. Sah is a spiritual teacher, bestselling author, and founder of the Somatic Dance Institute. His work is built on a simple premise: emotions get stuck in the body without motion. In this episode, he shares the raw story of losing his mother, the moment in 2018 when he finally learned to feel instead of think, and a practice for softening your heart toward the people who turn you inside out.

The Work of Being Known with Andre Holland

Andre Holland has spent his career granting characters what Shakespeare denied Othello: a visible inner life. In this conversation, he traces that commitment back to Bessemer, Alabama, describes acting as an act of radical empathy — finding the piece of every character that lives in him too — and reflects on what it cost his father to be different selves in different rooms. Now he's learning to do that same work on himself: integrating all his parts, and letting people actually know him.

The Sacred Act of Changing Your Mind with Ciarra Jones

We're taught that changing our minds about God — or the beliefs we were raised with — is dangerous, even sinful. But what if it's actually holy? Theologian Ciarra Jones joins Kendall and Alessandra to reframe deconstruction not as losing your faith, but as a sacred act of growth. Ciarra shares her journey from Assemblies of God fundamentalism to queer-affirming spirituality, why she encourages a "slow pruning" rather than dramatic transformation, and how reimagining who God is — including as a Black woman — can reconnect us to the parts of ourselves we were taught to reject. For anyone who's left religious community but still feels spiritually hungry, this one's for you.