StudioTulsa

On this edition of ST, we speak by phone with Jayson Lusk, who holds the Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the Agricultural Economics Department at Oklahoma State University. Lusk has a new book out called "The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate." Here are a few sentences from the book's opening pages: "A catastrophe is looming. Farmers are raping the land and torturing animals. Food is riddled with deadly pesticides, hormones, and foreign DNA. Corporate farms are wallowing in government subsidies.

On this installment of ST, we welcome Paul Kent, Executive Director of Tulsa Habitat for Humanity. This cherished, local nonprofit will mark its 25th anniversary this year --- the national Habitat organization, by the way, is about a dozen or so years older --- and the Tulsa chapter is also on track to build its 300th house in our community this coming fall.

On this edition of ST, a nuts-and-bolts discussion of a topic that few of us actually want to talk about. Nevertheless, our program covers some important ground today; our guest is Scott Taylor Smith, a venture capitalist and lawyer in California, who talks about his new book, "When Someone Dies: The Practical Guide to the Logistics of Death." This is a useful and readable guidebook that is --- as was noted in the Library Home Journal --- "well-organized, succinct, and detailed without being overwhelming....

Food, glorious food --- it's so much more, of course, than what we eat. Food is memory, food is family, food is love, food is culture, and food is community.

Everyone knows the Internet is affecting if not entirely changing just about every facet of life today, and one area where this is particularly apparent is that of health and medicine. (Have you ever googled your doctor? Or do you know someone who's done so?

(Please note: This interview originally aired in January of this year.) Our guest on ST is Alexandra Horowitz, author of the bestselling "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know." Horowitz, who teaches psychology, animal behavior, and canine cognition at Barnard College, Columbia University, joins us by phone to talk about her fascinating new volume, which is a collection of essays on how we perceive, discover, and experience the world around us.

Our guest on ST is Tony Knowles, the president of the National Energy Policy Institute (or NEPI) and former governor of Alaska. Based here at the University of Tulsa, and created in 2008 with a donation from the George Kaiser Family Foundation (which also donates funds to Public Radio Tulsa), NEPI is a think-tank aiming to provide policymakers with better research and scholarship with which to design and implement energy policy.

On this installment of ST, we're joined by our old friend and colleague, Jeff Martin, a local writer who's also the coordinator and creator of the popular Book Smart Tulsa reading series, the fiction editor at This Land, and an occasional commentator for this program. Jeff's newest book, just out, is an fun-to-read trade-paperback collection that brings together many works of short (make that "very short") fiction exploring "an Oklahoma of the mind," so to speak.