As a sociology graduate student at Harvard University, Peter Moskos thought the best way to see the inner workings of a police unit in a high-crime area was to join the force himself. So he did. The result is his first book, “Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District,” which was published this summer to rave reviews. Now an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Prof. Moskos discusses his year patrolling the area of Baltimore made famous by the hit HBO series “The Wire” and why he is in favor of legalizing drugs. “I prefer to say I want to regulate drugs,” explains Prof. Moskos. “The fact that anybody can go to a corner and buy any drug, is what leads to violence and overdose deaths. We cannot regulate what we prohibit.”
Listen Now 
Time travel, invisibility and teleportation may seem like fantasies, but to world-renowned theoretical physicist and City College Prof. Michio Kaku, they’re well within the realm of possibility. Co-founder of string field theory, Prof. Kaku claims that “many of these technologies will, in fact, be available in the coming decades, to maybe a few centuries.†Prof. Kaku, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at City College, where he has taught for 25 years, discusses his New York Times best-seller “Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into The World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel,†in which he defines “where physics ends and science fiction begins.â€
Listen Now
Almost from the beginning, John Matteson felt a special kinship with his subjects, Amos Bronson Alcott and his celebrated daughter, Louisa May, author of Little Women. “They say all biography is autobiography and that’s true where my book is concerned,” says Matteson, associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.” Says Matteson: “Very early on, I felt that I knew them and could tell their story with a sensitivity and balance that previous biographers hadn’t achieved.”
Listen Now
As a teenager, Gregory Pardlo witnessed his father, the president of Newark Airport’s Professional Air Traffic Controllers union, lead his members on an unpopular and illegal labor strike. That spirit of dogged opposition inspired him to pursue his passion–poetry–and guided him to produce a wide range of work that defies simple categorization. Pardlo, an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College, reads and discusses selections from his book “Totem,” winner of the American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize.
Listen Now
