Tony Rocky Horror guides you through the cutting-edge sounds of noise rock, grunge, hardcore, metal, and alternative from around the world! This week debuting a new single by Metz.

“There are all kinds of ways in which we, as a community, enable the American story,” says Deval Patrick, implying that too often these success stories, even his own, emphasize only the individual.   

A former two-term Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Patrick was and is a different kind of politician with a gift for communicating directly with citizens through stories, remarks and unscripted responses. 

His own American story is a remarkable one, starting in a tough, yet nurturing, South Chicago neighborhood, journeying to a planet called boarding school as a teenager, then onto Harvard, Harvard Law, and a distinguished legal career, before winning the Governorship on his first run for office. 

In our TPP interview, Patrick recounts how then Senator Barack Obama was initially quizzical, but supportive, of his seemingly long shot run for office. Patrick also underscores the unusual nature of politics in the Bay State, which has more unenrolled or independent voters than both parties combined and, in his view, a Democratic legislature that prefers a GOP Governor, at least historically, to enhance their own political power. 

“These are human dynamics,” says Patrick, “not so much partisan dynamics.”

But politics in Massachusetts is changing and polarizing, as throughout the nation. 

Patrick addresses the failure of language to adequately describe these changes, where once-centrist figures like former MA GOP Senator Ed Brooke now seem like liberals, outright radicals claim to be conservatives, and behavior once deemed anti-social is rewarded online and at the polls.

Listen in for a wide-ranging, clear-eyed, all-American discussion of politics state and national with Deval Patrick, former Governor and 2020 White House aspirant, now teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the first in our two-part series on Massachusetts politics.

Most of us think it’s obvious that we have a self, but famously, both Buddhism and British philosopher David Hume are skeptical that such a thing exists. What in the world could it mean to deny that the self exists? Could ‘the self’ just refer to a series of perceptions and feelings we have over time? If so, then whose perceptions and feelings are they? Is there any way Buddhism could have influenced Hume’s thinking on the illusory nature of the self? The philosophers question their selves with Alison Gopnik from UC Berkeley, author of The Philosophical Baby and "How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis."