For this "Summer Friday" we've put together some of our favorite conversations this year:

Ali Velshi, MSNBC host and chief correspondent and the author of Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy (Macmillan, 2024), shares the story of his grandfather's work with Gandhi and Mandela and how their influence continues in his generation.

Jack Turban, M.D., director of the Gender Psychiatry Program and assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of Free to Be: Understanding Kids & Gender Identity (Atria, 2024), talks about the science, the medicine and the politics surrounding gender identity in children and teens.

DW Gibson, journalist and the author of One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests (Simon & Schuster, 2024), tells the story of the protests against globalization and their impact on subsequent activism, including today's climate protests.

Every year, 50 teenage girls representing each state in America descend on Alabama to compete for large scholarship checks in the Distinguished Young Women program. Shima Oliaee, host and creator of "The Competition," creator of Pink Card, co-creator of Dolly Parton's America and founder of Shirazad Productions, discusses her new podcast, "The Competition", which follows these young women on their two-week journey and offers a peak into what it's like to be a teenage girl in America today.

These interviews were polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:

A Family Heritage of Social Justice (May 17, 2024)

Kids & Gender Identity (Jun 12, 2024)

Kids & Gender Identity, Part Two (Jun 24, 2024)

The Protests that Set the Stage (Jun 21, 2024)

What "The Competition" Says About Teenage Girlhood (May 3, 2024)