A Public Affair Patty Peltekos, Carousel Bayrd, Ali Muldrow, Allen Ruff, & Esty Dinur

On today’s Birthday Boost show we speak with daughter of Daniel C. Dennett, America’s first master spy in the Middle East. Charlotte Dennett is the author of the recently published  Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.

The book is her investigation of the plane crash that killed her father after a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia. In it she discovers the role of “protecting the oil at all costs” in the Middle East wars, including the post 911 wars, the war in Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war.

Charlotte joins host Esty Dinur to talk about the book, focusing largely on the ongoing violence in the Israel-Hamas war.

Charlotte Dennett is an investigative journalist, author and attorney. She is a former reporter in the Middle East.  She is the co-author of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.  You can learn more about Following the Pipelines at followthepipelines.com

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

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As the temporary truce between Israel and Hamas continues, we welcome Mouin Rabbani back on the program. In a recent analysis titled “Thoughts on Truce,” Rabbani writes, “Israel’s military failures notwithstanding it is also the case that if it resumes operations, its most difficult challenges lie ahead rather than behind it.” Rabbani joins host Allen Ruff to discuss explains what he means. He also goes into the the events of the truce and the role of world governments in the ceasefire and war.



Mouin Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and widely published commentator on Palestinian affairs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He has previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East with Crisis Management Initiative/Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation, and Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and Contributing Editor of Middle East Report.

Photo by Huzaifah Patel on Unsplash

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In his new book Unbottled:  The Fight Against Plastic Water and for Water Justice, Daniel Jaffee digs into the $300 billion market of packaged water. He tells A Public Affair host Nate Carlin that “one in five people in the US–20% of the population–now gets all of its plain drinking water from a bottle. They shun the tap completely for drinking.” He says that number is up from 13% less than a decade ago. He joins the program to talk about the inequity in clean water access, the pollution caused by single use plastic bottles, and the privatization of public water systems around the world.



Daniel Jaffee is an environmental and rural sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at Portland State University. His research examines conflicts over water privatization and commodification; the social, environmental, and economic impacts of bottled and packaged water; and social movements around bottled water and water justice in both the global North and South. His previous book is Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival.

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In the September 2023 issue of American Journal of Public Health, Dr. Patrick L. Remington’s piece “Trends in US Life Expectancy: Falling Behind and Failing to Act,”  points to a disparity in life expectancy in a single Wisconsin county. In Whitefish Bay, located in Milwaukee County, life expectancy is 89 years old. In South Milwaukee, it’s only 65.9 years old.

Preeminent epidemiologist, Dr. Patrick Remington joins host David Ahrens to discuss the role public health policy should play in expanding life expectancy and what his career has taught him about the way people live and die in Wisconsin.





Photo by Ronni Kurtz on Unsplash

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In a piece titled “After 25 years at the Journal Sentinel, here’s what I can tell you about our future,” Executive editor Greg Borowski writes, “we’re as fast and tenacious as the old Sentinel on breaking news and we’re as deep and thoughtful as the Journal when it comes to features and stories that provide a detailed look at what’s happening. The main difference today: It’s often the same reporter doing both.”



Greg joins A Public Affair host Douglas Haynes to talk about his 25 years with the Journal Sentinel, the changing role of journalism, the importance of local media, and the many initiatives, partnerships, and projects that are part of the paper’s future.





Greg Borowski is executive editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and is editor of PolitiFact Wisconsin, which began in 2010. He also oversees the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Appleton Post-Crescent.

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We’ve all experienced a request from a Facebook account that seems real but isn’t, or an opinionated tweet that has no human behind it. Often fake accounts appear on your feed echoing the opinion you already have. Maybe you feel foolish for believing the fake account if you realize the fraud at all, but what’s the actual harm?

In a recent perspective by Rand Corporation, the authors make the case that “the emergence of ubiquitous, powerful generative AI poses a potential national security threat in terms of the risk of misuse by U.S. adversaries (in particular, for social media manipulation) that the U.S. government and broader technology and policy community should proactively address now.”

Senior behavioral scientist William Marcellino joins A Public Affair host Esty Dinur to help explain how social media manipulation is currently playing out and what might be done about it.



William Marcellino is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, professor of text analytics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University. He was trained as a sociolinguist and corpus linguist, and at RAND he develops AI applications, including RAND-Lex, RAND’s proprietary text analytics suite. Marcellino teaches text analytics & natural langauge processing (NLP), as well as qualitative research methods. His research focuses on information as a warfighting function, AI technology application & acqusition for DoD, military resilience, and misinformation/disinformation & conspiracy theories over social media.

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