For nearly four decades, Joseph Margulies has stood beside people accused and convicted of some of the most violent crimes imaginable. A criminal defense attorney, civil rights litigator, writer, and Professor of the Practice of Government at Cornell University, Joseph has spent his career confronting some of society’s hardest questions. He was Counsel of Record in the landmark cases Rasul v. Bush 2004, which established the right of Guantánamo detainees to challenge their detention in federal court, and Munaf v. Geren 2008 which affirmed that American citizens detained by the U.S. government could also challenge their detention.

Today, we discuss Joseph’s powerful new book, Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration.

This is not a book that asks us to forget the victims or erase the devastation caused by violent crime. Instead, it challenges us to confront a far more uncomfortable question: What created the person who committed these acts? Through deeply personal conversations with those behind prison walls, Joseph invites us to hear directly from the perpetrators—their childhoods, trauma, choices, regrets, accountability, and the difficult journey of confronting the lives they destroyed.

Cast Out is both a cry for justice and a plea for humanity. It refuses easy answers. It asks whether punishment alone can heal a wounded society, or whether true justice also requires us to recognize the possibility of transformation. Can someone who has done terrible things ever become someone capable of doing good? Today’s conversation won’t ask you what to think. It will ask you to think. Because somewhere between the pain of the victims, the failures of our systems, and the lives of those we’ve cast aside, lies one of the most important conversations our society has yet to have.

JULIET FAITHFULL is a Spanish-British-American writer who grew up in Brazil. She was awarded a fellowship to the Novel Incubator program at Boston’s GrubStreet. Today we discuss her debut novel, Liar’s Dice, winner of the 2024 Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair as well as a semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Juliet is a graduate of Harvard University and Smith College School for Social Work,

Liar’s Dice is far more than a historical fiction. It is an emotional story about identity, disability, immigration, family secrets, belonging, betrayal, and the invisible wounds children carry into adulthood. The story follows Dolores, a young Brazilian girl whose life is shattered after her twin sister’s illness tears their family apart, forcing her into a new country, a new language, and a new world where she struggles to find her voice. Through Dolores’ journey, the novel asks readers whether love can survive betrayal, whether literacy can become liberation, and whether the truth has the power to heal what silence has broken.

Farmer Wayne Swanson Jr. is the owner and operator of Swanson Family Farm, LLC and began the agricultural business in 2008. His interest in farming began as a young child witnessing his grandparent’s work on their farm in New Jersey. He would later gain the experience to run and operate a successful farm. Mr. Swanson graduated from Morris Brown College with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media Arts in 1995. He is a proud member of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. In addition, Farmer Wayne is a co-founder of the Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour – a tour of Black-owned Georgia-based farms and farm-to-table bistros.The Georgia Black-Owned Farms Tour celebrates ownership, and selling, preparing, and eating organic animal and vegetable produce from the land.

The land tells a different story when it’s passed down instead of taken away. For Wayne Swanson Jr., farming is not a trend, it is memory, inheritance, and resistance. From watching his grandparents work the soil in New Jersey to building Swanson Family Farm, LLC from the ground up in 2008, his journey is stitched together with sacrifice, mistakes, hard-earned wisdom, and an unshakable belief that Black farmers deserve not just survival, but ownership, healing, and prosperity. This is a story about mental health under pressure, investing when the odds are stacked against you, its conversations for the future generations that cannot afford to be disconnected from the soil again.