Viewpoints Radio
Award-winning reporting on current issues featuring America's leading experts.
Leading up to each Viewpoints Radio program, every story is carefully selected and thoroughly researched to provide candid insight from the nation’s foremost experts. Through skillful copywriting and masterful studio production, the one-of-a-kind show covers timely topics aired to millions of listeners each week.
Sarah Smarsh is a journalist and author who grew up poor on a farm in Kansas. She discusses life in rural America, how our culture treats people living in poverty, and the causes she attributes to America’s wage gap.
Retirement can be bittersweet. On one hand, it’s something you build toward your whole life, but it can also be intimidated to lose your purpose in the workplace. We talk to Helen Wilkes about how she found a new passion in her retirement, and how she’s helping others make their retirements more fulfilling.
There are millions incarcerated in American prisons, even many juveniles who were sentenced to long terms alongside adults. We talk to guests about how and why this happens, whether it should continue, and what life is like for young people behind bars.
Hank Green has a massive internet presence as a podcaster, vlogger, tweeter, and more. Now, he’s become an author. His new book, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, deals with internet fame and our reactionary culture head-on. He joins the show to discuss these issues, and whether is the internet is good.
We know so much about the men of the Civil War, but the women from the war are all but forgotten in our history. Historian Karen Abbott decided to change that. She tells the story of several women who helped their sides during the Civil War.
As technology evolves, more and more of us are relying on credit cards, debit cards and even apps like Venmo or Zelle to make payments. Gone are the days of physically cashing your check, now almost all of us use all direct-deposit. So what is the future of cash? We talk to one expert who lays out some of the nefarious uses of bills and coins.
Frances Stroh grew up in the family that owned America’s third biggest brewer, Stroh Brewing Company. As she aged into adulthood, she watched as both the brewery and her family life fell apart. She talks about the struggles the company faced, how her family dealt with it, and when a legacy can become a burden.
Sexual offenders have to live by a very particular set of rules. They can’t live near playgrounds, they’re on a registry for life. These rules exist to make everyone safer. But they also can limit a reformed criminal’s ability to reintegrate into everyday life and be productive members of society.
There’s a long history of soldiers processing their experiences through poetry. We talk to Adam Gilbert, a war historian and author of A Shadow on Our Hearts: Soldier-poetry, morality, and the American war in Vietnam about the history and future of these soldier poets.
Thanks to online shopping, internet banks and social media, our information has never been more vulnerable to theft. We explore what exactly is in all of those privacy agreements we often agree to without reading, and how we can try to reclaim our privacy in a digital world.
One morning without warning, Giulia Lukach experienced a psychotic break. We talk to her husband Mark about Gulia’s journey, his own experience as a caregiver, and how they overcame three stints in a psych ward.
We have all heard of polygraph machines or ‘lie detectors.’ But are they truly reliable? Their results are inadmissible in court and yet some investigation agencies still use them. We talk to historian and author John Philipp Baesler about the polygraph’s history and its questionable use in our modern world.
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