Minnesota Now featuring four Westminster Town Hall Forum lectures

This week on Minnesota Now, the program will play recordings of lectures at the Westminster Town Hall Forum.

Wesley Lowery

Each year, the Arc Toward Justice marks the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that followed with a talk by a national voice on racial justice. This year we welcome Wesley Lowery a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and one of the nation’s leading reporters on issues of race and justice.

Lowery is the author of “American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress.”

It tells the story of how the election of the nation’s first Black president fanned long-burning embers of white supremacy, igniting a new and frightening phase in a historical American cycle of racial progress and white backlash.

Airing May 27, 2024; Recorded on May 23, 2024.

Michele Norris

The prompt is simple: Race. Your Story. Six Words. Please Send. In her latest book, “Our Hidden Conversations,” Peabody Award-winning journalist and Minneapolis native Michele Norris offers a transformative dialogue on race and identity in America, unearthed through her decade-long work at The Race Card Project. More than half a million stories were submitted. The results, collected in this new book, are shocking in their depth and candor, spanning the full spectrum of race, ethnicity, identity, and class.

Ms. Norris discusses how even during times of great division, honesty, grace, and a willing ear can provide a bridge toward empathy and maybe even understanding.

Airing May 28, 2024; Recorded on Feb 1, 2024.

Kara Swisher

From A.I. to social media ownership, big tech and the people behind it are having deep impacts on our economy, democracy and world. Few people understand that better than legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher. While tech titans bragged they would “move fast and break things,” she was moving faster and breaking news. Covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the truth of this new world order.

Kara Swisher’s newest work is “Burn Book; a Tech Love Story.” It’s part memoir, part history and, most of all, a necessary recounting of tech’s power players and influence. She spoke Forum about tech’s complex history of striving, success, and failure. She explained how the commercial internet came to be at the center of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity.

Airing May 29, 2024; Recorded on March 19, 2024.

Keyu Jin 

Born in China and educated in the U.S., Keyu Jin is a world-renowned economist at the London School of Economics. Fluent in both Eastern and Western cultures, she is uniquely poised to explain China’s past and to explore what its future might be. 

Keyu Jin's most recent book is “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism.” She explains how China became the most successful economic story of our time as it has shifted from primarily state-owned enterprise to an economy that is thriving in entrepreneurship, and participation in the global economy.

She believes that by understanding the Chinese model, the people, the culture and history in its true perspective, one can reconcile what may appear to be contradictions to the Western eye. She shares her expert view on China and how it may engage the U.S. as a superpower in the future. 

Airing May 30, 2024; Recorded on April 18, 2024.