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Read Beat (...and repeat)

Steve Tarter

247 episodes

2 weeks ago

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.” The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalle...

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Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.” The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalle...

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Episodes (20/247)

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"Marutas of Unit 731" by Jenny Chan

Writing in the Sept. 20, 2025 issue of the Korea Times, Park Jin-hai noted that “Jenny Chan grew up in America caught between clashing versions of history — her school textbooks skipped over the cruelties of World War II in Hong Kong, while her grandmother's stories painted a harrowing picture of life in Hong Kong under Japanese occupation.” The co-founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco dedicated to recalling WWII history in Asia, Chan recalle...

1 week ago

23 minutes

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"Rewiring Democracy" by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders

AI will change democracy. The only question is how, say the authors of a new book described as "surprisingly optimistic" when it comes to regarding how artificial intelligence will impact the world. Bruce Schneier, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and data scientist Nathan Sanders see AI enabling positive change when it comes to politics. Their book, Rewiring Democracy, challenges readers reeling from AI overload to pay attention to the good that AI can do when it comes to governing....

1 week ago

23 minutes

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"American Oasis" by Kyle Paoletta

Kyle Paoletta’s American Oasis comes with a subtitle: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. Born in Santa Fe, Paoletta grew up in Albuquerque. The native Southwesterner said he had to leave the region, to live in Boston and New York to find an appreciation for his old stomping grounds. After more than 10 years in the East, he discovered not only general ignorance about the Southwest but an indifferent attitude about a part of the country that he feels has an important story...

2 weeks ago

30 minutes

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"Crossings--How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet" by Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb’s new book, Crossings—How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, is a reminder that we need to consider the impact of a highway network--not just on the drivers--but on the animals that share the planet. We tend to take that impact for granted, he said. Drivers don’t realize the barrier effect, the noise pollution (“hugely disruptive to migratory songbirds”), or chemical pollution that our roads can create. But Goldfarb charts what he calls a movement: states across th...

2 weeks ago

27 minutes

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"The Accord" by Mark Peres

“AI is technology that lets computers do things that normally require human intelligence—like understanding language, recognizing pictures, solving problems, or making decisions. It’s like teaching a computer to ‘think’ in specific ways by giving it patterns to learn from.” That’s one of the responses you get when you ask AI to describe AI. The whole world is either talking about AI, using AI, worrying about AI, celebrating AI, or trying to ignore AI. It’s kind of a big deal, as they say.&nbs...

3 weeks ago

27 minutes

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In the Japanese Ballpark by Robert Fitts

You don’t have to worry that U.S. baseball fans could be overlooking Japanese baseball. Not after the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series for the second year in a row, led by Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki. Rob Fitts offers a glimpse into the Japanese game that developed these stars in his 11th book on Japanese baseball, In the Japanese Ballpark. Fitts dissects the Japanese game from every angle, from the perspective of players, umpires, owners, fans, a...

4 weeks ago

29 minutes

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"That October" by Keith Roysdon

Keith Roysdon is a media marvel. He spent 40 years as a newspaperman in Muncie, Ind., not just writing about what went on in Muncie but absorbing the movies, TV shows, and critical articles on the arts. Now living in Tennessee, Roysdon had a big year in 2025, publishing That October, his first book, a high-school crime novel set in 1984. But Roysdon has done plenty of writing besides that--and not just for the Muncie press. He has more than 70 stories on the CrimeReads website covering ...

1 month ago

19 minutes

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"Small Farms Are Real Farms" by John Ikerd

John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, has a message regarding the present state of agriculture in this country: it's not sustainable. Ikerd doesn't see a future for industrial agriculture with its emphasis on monocrops, fertilizer, and pesticides. It's a system that's expanded since the 1960s when a shift in national policy promoted increased productivity over all else. Ikerd preaches sustainable agriculture, calling for policy changes to make...

1 month ago

33 minutes

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"When Can We Go Back to America?" by Susan Kamei

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country. Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. “Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving,...

1 month ago

25 minutes

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"Hollywood's Spies" by Laura Rosenzweig

The debate lingers: why didn’t Hollywood’s studios produce anti-Nazi pictures before war was all but imminent in the 1930s? Plenty has been written about the lack of films that might have alerted the American public to what was happening in Europe at the time. But Laura Rosenzweig, the author of Hollywood’s Spies, says attention also needs to be focused on the political activity going on around Hollywood in Southern California in the 1930s, activity that was being orchestrated from Berlin.&nb...

1 month ago

21 minutes

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"Your Money" by Carl Richards

If you want to find a relaxed approach to planning your finances, Carl Richards has it for you, complete with 101 simple sketches: Your Money. It's an approach Richards employed as a financial writer for the New York Times for 10 years: using boxes, circles, and squiggly lines to illustrate basic messages about money. Two circles, one marked "things that matter," the other, "things I can control." The part where they intersect is darkened in with the message: "what I try to focus on." Richard...

1 month ago

26 minutes

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"American Scary" by Jeremy Dauber

The arrival of the nuclear age ushered in yet another chapter in America’s horror history. Jeremy Dauber, the Columbia University professor who previously wrote a history of comics in this country, now digs a little deeper for American Scary. When John Hersey’s Hiroshima filled an entire issue of the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, the public learned what it was like to be incinerated by an atomic bomb. Other horrors were to come. Dauber starts in the American Republic’s early...

1 month ago

25 minutes

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"They're Playing Our Song" by Bruce Pollock

Bruce Pollock has been around. He’s covered a lot of ground. Best known as a rock critic, he's the author of 17 books on popular music, the founding editor of Guitar (for the Practicing Musician), a former record producer, and he’s been published in Playboy, Saturday Review, TV Guide, New York Times, Crawdaddy, and many others. You can find him online at brucepollockthewriter.com. His latest book, They’re Playing My Song, is a collection of articles based on interviews he’s done over the year...

2 months ago

30 minutes

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"We'll Prescribe You Another Cat" by Syou Ishida

The Kokoro Clinic for the Soul is back in business. That's the mental health clinic that appears for those who need it. We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat is a follow-up to We'll Prescribe You a Cat, a bestselling Japanese novel. Both books have been translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda. The clinic--with its unconventional doctor and forceful nurse--uses a prescribed cat to heal the emotional wounds of its patients. The sequel introduces a new cast of healing cats, from Kotetsu, a fou...

2 months ago

18 minutes

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"The Martians" by David Baron

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system. It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements ...

2 months ago

28 minutes

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"Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor" by Samantha Baskind

Moses Jacob Ezekiel may be a 19th-century sculptor who’s been largely forgotten, but his work hasn’t been. A member of the Jewish faith who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, Ezekiel is described as a complex figure. Samantha Baskind, an art historian at Cleveland State University, examines some of that complexity in her book, Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor. As the first Jewish American artist to win international acclaim, Ezekiel (1844-1917) was a pro...

2 months ago

25 minutes

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"Saving Ourselves from Big Car" by David Obst

David Obst wants to end America’s love affair with the car. Saving Ourselves from Big Car defines “Big Car” as that complex of companies in the automobile, oil, insurance, media, and concrete industries that promote and entrench auto dependence. Author David Obst (pronounced “oops-t”), the former literary agent for Woodward and Bernstein, is still on the case. Instead of Watergate, he’s exposing how these companies have pursued profit at the expense of the common good. He details how the indu...

2 months ago

25 minutes

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"Launching Liberty" by Doug Most

When it comes to World War II, you often hear about "the arsenal of democracy," a characterization of U.S. factories that produced all the food, medical supplies, tanks, planes, and tractors that helped win the war. In Launching Liberty, Doug Most writes about the U.S. effort required to build the ships needed to transport those goods overseas. The Liberty Ships were 440-foot cargo ships built to the same exact specifications. Over 2,700 were built between 1941 and 1945. When packed full of c...

3 months ago

28 minutes

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"Wisdom of the Marsh" by Clare Howard (Photographs by David Zalaznik)

If draining the swamp strikes you as a good idea, you're not listening to Clare Howard and David Zalaznik. The pair, former journalists with the Peoria Journal Star, have just written their second book extolling the benefits of wetlands. Their first, In the Spirit of Wetlands (2022), captured the beauty and importance of wetlands in Illinois. This time, Wisdom of the Marsh (Syracuse University Press) focuses on the Montezuma Wetlands Complex in central New York. "Wetlands are much more than s...

3 months ago

27 minutes

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"Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939" by Thomas Doherty

Hollywood came under scrutiny after World War II as the fear of Communism gripped the country. The Cold War came to Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee held a notorious round of hearings over possible Communist infiltration in the movie industry. Films were analyzed for messages that might be interpreted as promoting Communist views, such as Song of Russia, a wartime musical released when the Soviet Union was a U.S. ally. No pre-war congressional investigation ev...

3 months ago

34 minutes