America Trends Podcast

 America’s First Amendment is a model of free speech protection unparalleled across the globe.  Yet, the United States saw the third largest decline in free speech between 2021 and 2024.  And 2024 marked the 19th consecutive year in which civil and political rights declined globally.  While it may seem paradoxical that while the new voices who are speaking out on unregulated platforms seem to proliferate daily so are attempts to monitor, filter and block content. Or at least encouraging people with large platforms to give their audiences over to purveyors to speech which is objectionable to many.  Our guest, Jeff Kosseff, and his...

The host of America Trends, Larry Rifkin, has in the later stages of life taken up keyboards and songwriting.  He is putting out his third album of originals, in collaboration with Alasdair MacKenzie, as part of the music project he calls Rockaway.  The album, titled “Wrong Side of Love”, contains 16 songs that still offer political and social messaging, as in the first two albums, but redirects much of its focus toward love–its textures, complications and quiet endurance.  Jon Krofssik, the technical director behind the podcast, steps out of the shadows to conduct the interview with his long-time friend and broad...

The pardon power that the President has is, as Constitutional prerogatives go, about as absolute as it can be.  Coupled with the friendly majority Donald Trump has on the United States Supreme Court, which gave him immunity from prosecution for many crimes charged in connection with his pardons, and you have what some call a pardon-palooza going on in his second term.  Most egregious to some, like this observer, was the blanket pardon of all those involved in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol (not to mention the ‘stupid on stilts’ weaponization fund.) Remember when his former Attorn...

 Deborah Schwartz, a healthcare attorney, saw how medical insurance companies put profit over patient and the impacts it had.  While inside the health insurance industry, she tried to change the practices she saw which were antithetical to better health outcomes, but since leaving the field, she’s writing about in her new novel, “EmmaCare” and sounding the alarm about what she saw.  By whatever measure, claim denials, coupled with prior authorizations and other practices, are growing and put the onus on the patient to fight for and appeal judgments from the insurers even when their doctor prescribes various drugs and proce...

 Most families require two incomes these days to survive.  Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace.  And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so?  Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments?  And why should they?  Our guest Mason Donovan, along with Mark Kaplan, have written a book titled ” The Parenthood Advantage:  Building Corporate Cultures that Valu...

 Have you ever heard the word gerontocracy?  Well, according to our guest, you’re living in one.  The point may be best illustrated by the last two presidential campaigns where we elected an elderly man, Joe Biden, to be our president in 2020 and when feeling that he was too old to serve another term, we replaced him with another old man, Donald Trump.  It’s not only happening in our politics among the candidates, funders and voters (oh it’s true that older Americans outvote and other demographic groups), but also in business and other endeavors.  Many of them, baby boomer...

 Our guest feels that we are in the midst of the greatest transformation in high education in over a hundred years. The factors at play are the demographic shifts in the country, the economy and technology.  Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University and co-author of the new book, “From Upheaval to Action:  What Works in Changing Higher Ed,” says that we can even look at twenty percent of colleges closing their doors in the period ahead.  COVID was an accelerant in this process, but certainly not the only reason.  The person we think of as a college student–between 18-24 living...

 Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on day one of his second term in 2025. One of those executive orders was the beginning of the end for the agency known as USAID.  It was started in 1961 by President Kennedy in order to advance human survival around the world, stabilize economies in the developing world and make the path to peaceful democracy smoother.  It was, and for all these intervening years remained, a noble cause credited with saving the lives of tens of millions around the world by treating and preventing serious health issues such as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, tub...

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that pushed many institutions, including corporations, to confront racial inequality.  Looking back at 2020 to 2024, companies issued public statements embracing racial justice causes in the hopes of protecting their reputations from claims that their practices perpetuate inequality, particularly in regard to race.  In response to a furious conservative backlash, many began to withdraw those commitments.  The pendulum of retraction has swung quickly.  Our guest, Fordham Law Professor, Atinuke Adediran, author of “Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress,” notes that even when companies pledge to hire and promote people of color or...

Much has been written about the ill effects of our over-reliance on our on-life life with endless content, algorithm-driven polarization and pressure to publicly present oneself.  In this podcast, our guest, Patricia Martin, author of “Will the Future Like You: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention,” argues that the damage goes even deeper.  It is eroding the ability to form and sustain one’s identity.  Are we hyper-focused on presenting a version of ourselves that will get likes and friends in a virtual world or have we done the hard work to figure out who we are at our core?  Wh...