Summer Friday: Right's Women; West's Mistake; Culture Wars; Post-Literate; Wildflowers

On this Summer Friday, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:

• Katie Gaddini, sociologist, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, an associate professor of sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg department of sociology, and the author of Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (WW Norton, 2026), talks about her research into the activism of right-wing Christian women and their leadership of the political evangelical movement.
• Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, 2026), traces the breakdown in democratic institutions to missteps by Western leaders following the fall of the Soviet Union.
• Isaac Butler, culture historian, critic, podcaster and the author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, 2026), revisits the late 1980s start of the culture wars as the religious right took on the contemporary art world.
• As the number of adults who report reading books has declined, Rose Horowitch, staff writer for The Atlantic, argues that we're living in a "post-literate world" and talks about what that means for society.
• As part of the yearlong series "Wild NYC," Marielle Anzelone, urban botanist and ecologist and the founder of NYC Wildflower Week,  and Clara Holmes, plant ecologist at New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, talk about the challenges facing local wildflowers and native plants and how to preserve them.

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

The Political Power of Christian Right Women (July 22)

Where Western Leaders Went Wrong (May 8)

Where the Culture Wars Began (June 23)

Our 'Post-Literate World' (July 8)

Wild NYC - Wildflowers (June 10)

Photo: Narrow-leaved Blue-eyed Grass -  native wildflower with grasslike leaves and small blue-violet flowers. Grows in open sandy meadows in low wet spots. Uncommon in NYC and locally rare. {Marielle Anzelone)