New RBG Bio, Fighting for a Garden, Myers-Briggs History
Jane Sherron De Hart joins us to discuss her new biography, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. In this comprehensive biography, De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs is her Jewish background and specifically the idea of “tikkun olam,” the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.
Joseph Reiver, executive director of the Elizabeth Street Garden, joins us to discuss the City's plans to demolish the garden to make way for new affordable housing. We'll unpack the city's plan and why some members of the community are opposed to it and fighting to save the garden.
Merve Emre joins us to discuss her new book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results. First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses.
