Gaurav Suri is a computational neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at San Francisco State University, where he is the director of the Readiness, Activation, and Decision-Making Laboratory. He is also a visiting professor at Stanford’s Center for Affective Science. He is the coauthor of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel, which was published in 2007 and won the American Publishers Award. Gaurav is the coauthor and a protégé of Jay McClelland, a leader in the conceptualization of neural networks to explain cognitive phenomena, such as recognition of both written and spoken words. This interview will focus on their recently published book, The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines.

Recorded 7/8

Jacqueline Saper is an award-winning writer, public speaker, commentator, and translator, with columns and essays in national and international publications and interviews in mainstream media in both English and Farsi. We’ll be talking about her memoir, published in 2019, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran, which chronicles her life from childhood to early adulthood in Iran, which spans the last 16 years of the rule of the Shah, as well as the first ten years following the Islamic Revolution. The book ends, at age 26, with her emigration to the United States with her husband and two children. The memoir provides a highly personalized account of what it was like to grow up in Iran in tumultuous times, a multifaceted story informed by multiple ethnic identities.

Recorded 6/23/26.

Benjamin Robert Siegel is a history professor at Boston University and former writer for Time Magazine. His writing has appeared in both mainstream media and academic journals, focusing on economic issues that affect everyday life, including food production and drug supplies. His first book, Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India, published in 2018, explores the struggle of newly independent India to overcome famine and malnutrition. His second book, Markets of Pain: Opium, Capitalism, and the Global History of Painkillers, published two months ago, tells the story of opium, its cultivation and trade, both legal and illegal, and its role in the building of empires and the fomenting of international conflicts. Siegel’s next book will be about the the price of protein, i.e., its political and environmental costs. This interview will focus primary on his most recent book, Markets of Pain.

Recorded 5/26/26.