NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report join Judy Woodruff to discuss the latest political news, including reaction from Congress and President Trump after another series of mass shootings, how Democratic and Republican views on gun control policy have evolved since the 1990s and potential implications for the 2020 presidential race.
Tag Archives: Podcasts
Politics Podcasts: Shields & Brooks Discuss National Topics On August 2, 2019
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s political news, including President Trump’s personal attacks on Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and other lawmakers of color, the significance of a wave of Republican congressional retirements and how the 2020 Democrats fared in the two-night debate in Detroit.
Top Political Podcasts: Shields & Brooks Discuss The Latest News In Washington (July 26, 2019)
From PBS Newshour:
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s political news, including the aftermath of Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony, the current legislative landscape around election security, changing dynamics within the 2020 presidential race and the fiscal significance of the bipartisan budget deal.
Political Podcasts: Shields & Brooks Discuss Politics In Washington (PBS Newshour)
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week’s political news, including President Trump’s attack on four congresswomen of color, the Republican response to Trump’s controversial rhetoric, whether race politics is smart election strategy and the battle over health care policy among 2020 Democrats.
Top Political Podcasts: Mark Shields And Ramesh Ponnuru (PBS News Hour)
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and The National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru join Judy Woodruff to discuss the latest in politics, including brewing tensions between progressive and moderate House Democrats, President Trump’s executive action on acquiring citizenship data, the role of money in politics and remembering Ross Perot.
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Boomers Health Podcast: “Human Flourishing And Public Health” (Harvard)
From Harvard School of Public Health website:
What does it mean for someone to flourish? Flourishing is more than just being happy—although that’s a part of it. But the idea of flourishing expands beyond happiness to look at a person’s overall well-being, taking into account things like life satisfaction or someone’s sense of purpose. That’s why studying flourishing is an interdisciplinary science drawing on public health, philosophy, psychology, and more.
In this week’s episode we’re talking to two researchers from Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University who are tackling big questions about flourishing: What does it mean for people to flourish? How do we measure it? And are there things that make people more or less likely to flourish?
Our guests are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program and John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard Chan School, and Matthew Wilson, associate director of the Human Flourishing Program and a research associate at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Website: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/multimedia-article/harvard-chan-this-week-in-health-archive/
Prescription Drugs: BioEthicist Travis Rieder’s Personal Struggle With Opioids (Podcast)
From NPR podcast of Fresh Air with Terry Gross:
Rieder likens his experiences trying to get off prescription pain meds to a game of hot potato. “The patient is the potato,” he says. “Everybody had a reason to send me to somebody else.”
Eventually Rieder was able to wean himself off the drugs, but not before receiving bad advice and going through intense periods of withdrawal. He shares his insights as both a patient and a bioethicist in a new book, In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle With Opioids.
Press play button above to hear interview.

In 2015, Travis Rieder, a medical bioethicist with Johns Hopkins University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics, was involved in a motorcycle accident that crushed his left foot. In the months that followed, he underwent six different surgeries as doctors struggled first to save his foot and then to reconstruct it.
Rieder says that each surgery brought a new wave of pain, sometimes “searing and electrical,” other times “fiery and shocking.” Doctors tried to mitigate the pain by prescribing large doses of opioids, including morphine, fentanyl, Dilaudid, oxycodone and OxyContin. But when it came time to taper off the drugs, Rieder found it nearly impossible to get good advice from any of the clinicians who had treated him.
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