Abigail has a new documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, in which she examines the inequality crisis through the lens of the company her grandfather helped found, The Walt Disney Company. In the film, she asks how it is possible that so many workers at Disneyland, aka “the happiest place on earth,” can’t afford life's basic necessities, even when they work full time. For the fourth season of All Ears, Abigail poses that question to people who are doing the most Disney thing o ...
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Jane Fonda is a towering figure and an American legend. From Barbarella, to Klute, to 9 to 5, to her workout videos, she’s been gracing our screens for more than 50 years. And, though she may be best known for her role as an artist, surprisingly Jane says that’s not how she thinks of herself: “I consider myself, first and foremost, an activist.” An…
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Michael McAfee: There is No Shame in Caring for Everyone
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What if we thought of America’s economic inequality as design flaws of policy, rather than the result of personal failings? And what would our policies look like if we included everyone in the design process? These are the questions that drive the work of Abby’s guest this week, Dr. Michael McAfee, president and CEO of PolicyLink. PolicyLink is a v…
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Jay Coen Gilbert: Rewriting the "Source Code" for Capitalism
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In a recent New York Times op-ed, “America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own”, sociologist Matthew Desmond writes about the shameful amount of poverty in America, and our responsibility for it. He also writes about solutions. He points to B Corp as a beacon of light, a resource for people who want to support corporations that actually respect work…
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Journalist Rick Wartzman on Walmart: Good Intentions Are Not Enough
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This week, Abby talks with business writer Rick Wartzman about what he learned while reporting his latest book: Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism. Rick spent nearly three years documenting how Walmart’s directors worked to significantly improve wages and conditions for employees — and h…
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Labor Leader Mary Kay Henry: Building The Most Inclusive, Racially Diverse, Female Dominated Middle Class the Nation Has Ever Seen
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If you've been paying attention, you've heard how unionization efforts are popping up all over the country, from Starbucks, Amazon and Apple; to airports, nursing homes and college campuses. Indeed, in numbers not seen in generations, American workers are fighting for higher wages, better benefits and, yes, a little more dignity on the job. This we…
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Economist Kate Raworth: The Best Doughnuts are Conceptual
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Picture your favorite doughnut. Whether it’s chocolate glazed with sprinkles, vanilla pastry cream, red velvet, you’re inadvertently invoking one of the most important reimaginings of our economy of the last 20 years: Doughnut Economics. It posits that our economy should remain in balance with our communities and the planet, and visualizes that bal…
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Settle in with Abby and labor organizer Erica Smiley for a free-wheeling conversation about unions, democracy, history, and so much more. Smiley is the Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, a national labor group working to change the meta-narrative about who the economy is for and what it should look like. She is also the author, along with Sar…
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Marlene Engelhorn: Let's Talk About Tax, Baby
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This week, as Congressional Democrats attempt to convince Republicans to impose taxes on the very wealthy, Abby talks “tax positivity” with the delightful Austrian activist Marlene Engelhorn. Engelhorn made headlines around the globe when she announced that she wanted the government to take away–through taxes–most of her multi-million dollar inheri…
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Nick Hanauer: Ending the Protection Racket for the Rich
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A week after President Joe Biden’s fiery State of the Union address focused on re-growing America’s middle class, Abby has a lively conversation with millionaire reformer Nick Hanauer about what Biden is doing and why it’s so important. Hanauer, a venture capitalist and activist, has long been sounding the alarm on our inequality crisis, warning th…
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Heather McGhee: The Disneyfication of American History
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If you’ve seen Abby’s documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, you won’t forget the wisdom imparted by the formidable writer and policy analyst Heather McGee. In the film, Heather reminds us that the economy is not like the weather–it is actually something we can control. And, crucially, she tells a story about American history that’s…
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Robert Reich: Fighting the Bullies (Corporate and Otherwise)
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Kicking off the fourth Season of All Ears, Abby gets on the line with one of her economic heroes, Robert Reich. Reich understands the issues at the heart of The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, Abby’s new documentary, better than almost anyone, because he’s been speaking out about exploitative labor practices and corporate greed for decades. F…
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Abigail is back in front of the microphone! Season 4 of All Ears will kick off on Thursday, February 2, 2023 with a conversation with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Abigail took a podcasting hiatus while out promoting her documentary, The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, in which she examines the inequality crisis through the lens of the…
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Gloria Steinem: Feminists Come In Pairs, Like Nuns
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It’s our final episode of the season, and who better to finish it off with than feminist icon and Abby’s longtime friend, Gloria Steinem. Steinem has been a pioneer and leader in the feminist movement for more than half a century. Her political and cultural impact is truly immeasurable, but it’s undeniable that she, alongside women like Dorothy Pit…
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New York State Senator Jessica Ramos: Food Is The Great Unifier
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This week on All Ears, Abby talks food and food policy with New York State Senator Jessica Ramos. Jessica burst onto the New York political scene in 2018 when she and several other progressive candidates ousted a powerful group of conservative New York Democrats who had been crossing party lines to caucus with Republicans. She represents District 1…
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Varshini Prakash: Young People Will Inherit This Earth (Re-Broadcast)
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With the United Nations’ 26th annual climate change conference–aka COP26–happening in Glasgow, Scotland this week, we thought it was the perfect time to re-air Abby’s conversation with environmental activist Varshini Prakash. Varshini is the executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-centered climate activist group that’s he…
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Imara Jones, Part 2: The Strategy Of Hate
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This week on All Ears it’s the second part of our two-part interview with journalist and activist Imara Jones. Abby and Imara talk in-depth about “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine”, a fantastic 4-part podcast by Imara and Translash Media. It’s an investigative series that looks into the political activities of powerful far-right wing Christians to advoc…
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Imara Jones, Part 1: Masculinity Can Be A Fragile Thing
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Imara Jones. Imara is an activist, journalist and the creator of TransLash Media, a cross-platform journalism, storytelling and narrative project. She’s also the host of the TransLash podcast, a show that centers trans narratives and experience. Imara’s and Abby’s conversation was so rich and varied, we deci…
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Ellen Pao: If I Had a Hundred Billion Dollars, I Could Send Anybody into Space
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Ellen Pao. Pao made headlines in 2012 when she sued venture capital firm Kleiner-Perkins for gender discrimination. In 2015 she lost the lawsuit, but it sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and got people talking about the rampant bro-culture, sexism and bad behaviors that had gone unchallenged there fo…
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by E. Jean Carroll. Carroll is a journalist, memoirist, and the author of America’s longest running advice column. She’s also one of the many, many women who have come forward with sexual assault allegations against former President Donald Trump. When Trump denied the allegation Carroll sued him for defamation,…
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Writer Jia Tolentino: Feminism, Fatalism, and the Ego-Death of Motherhood
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by NYT bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino. Before working at the New Yorker, Jia was a writer and editor at Jezebel and The Hairpin. She’s devoted her career and her unique voice to writing about a wide variety of cultural and social issues, including America’s ever-changing relationsh…
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Labor Leader Sara Nelson: No One Expects Flight Attendants to Be Militant
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. Sara is a force to be reckoned with. As one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country she’s devoted her career as a flight attendant and union member to improving the conditions of working people. At the height of the pandemic, she h…
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Me Too Movement Founder Tarana Burke: Sexual Violence Is A Type Of Death
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Season 3 of All Ears kicks off with a rich and varied conversation with Me Too Movement founder Tarana Burke. Thought you knew the Me Too story? Think again! Burke’s inspiring new memoir Unbound: My Story Of Liberation And The Birth Of The Me Too Movement is out this week. Burke has been in the trenches of movement work for the better part of two d…
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Season 3 of All Ears with Abigail Disney is here!
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As the country struggles to reset from a global pandemic, why does it seem that so many women continue to bear the burden of this ongoing crisis? In Season 3 of All Ears, Abigail Disney interviews a slate of creative and courageous thinkers who are pushing back on old systems and reimagining what “normal” should look like for all people.…
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Climate Activist Varshini Prakash: Young People Will Inherit This Earth
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This week on All Ears, Abby talks to Varshini Prakash, who co-founded the Sunrise Movement, a youth-centered activist organization created in 2017 to end climate change. Sunrise has mobilized two incredibly valuable resources for grassroots organizing: young people and the internet. As the 27 year-old Executive Director of Sunrise, Varshini talks t…
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Tabitha Jackson: How Sundance Sausage Is Made
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This week, as the Sundance Film Festival launches a virtual festival for the first time, Abby talks to the festival's director, Tabitha Jackson. After spending 25 years in non-fiction filmmaking, Tabitha moved from head of the Sundance Documentary Program into the festival chair, beating out 700 applicants and becoming the first woman, and first pe…
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Playwright Heidi Schreck: What The Constitution Means To Us
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What could be more a timely topic for inauguration week than the US Constitution? But this isn’t any old patriarchal take on our country’s founding document. This week on All Ears Abby talks to playwright and actor Heidi Schreck, creator of Tony-nominated Broadway hit, “What The Constitution Means To Me”. In the play, Heidi reflects back on her tee…
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Emily Bazelon: A Full-on Reversal Or An Incremental Hollowing Out For Roe V. Wade?
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This week on All Ears Abby talks to New York Times Magazine staff writer, Yale Law School scholar, and Slate Political Gabfest co-host Emily Bazelon on a host of legal and legislative changes on the horizon in the American judicial system. With the looming shift from Republican to Democratic control of the federal government on January 20th, the Su…
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Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee: Truth Is The Only Balm For The Festering Sore Of Racism
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Like the rest of the country, All Ears is reeling from the disturbing events this week at the Capitol Building, so we decided to switch gears away from our planned programming to talk about the impact of this seemingly inevitable burst of political violence. Looking for some perspective from outside U.S. borders, Abby calls her good friend, 2011 No…
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For All Ears this week, Abby hosts a rare and revealing interview with On Being host, Krista Tippett. Krista talks about growing up in Shawnee Oklahoma, and the enduring influence of her grandfather, a Southern Baptist minister, on her life’s work. Krista describes the experience of going from a sheltered, church-centric upbringing, to throwing her…
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Loretta Ross: Fighting Nazis Should Be Fun
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This week on All Ears, Abby goes deep with professor and long time activist Loretta Ross. As an outspoken critic of cancel culture, Loretta’s sharp insights have made her class “White Supremacy in the Age of Donald Trump,” one of Smith College’s most popular. Loretta tells Abby that social media shaming is counterproductive to her long-sought goal …
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Julián Castro: On Moving Past The “Dark Heart” Of The Trump Administration
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This week on All Ears Abby talks about good government and the American Dream with Julián Castro, whose own journey in public service began in San Antonio, first as city councilman at age 26 and then as mayor at 35. In 2014, President Obama put him in charge of HUD: the sprawling federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Last year, he sp…
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Natalie Wynn: The Algorithm is Deeply Mysterious
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This week on All Ears, Abby takes a trip through the underworld of internet culture with YouTuber Natalie Wynn, also known as ContraPoints. An ex-philosopher with a penchant for elaborate sets and costumes, Natalie got her start making response videos to right-wing YouTubers after finding herself alarmed at the increase in hate speech online. Her w…
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David Byrne: All This Pleasure With A Punch In The Stomach
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This week on All Ears Abby invites us all to take a break from ongoing election shenanigans and enjoy a lively interview with musician David Byrne, whose eccentric musical stylings as the former Talking Heads frontman catapulted him into a multi-faceted career as an artist across many modes of expression. He’s written books, designed art installati…
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Stacey Abrams: The Populist Authoritarian Playbook Is Well-Documented
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On the heels of historic voter turnout in Georgia, Abby revisits her interview with Stacey Abrams back in July. In that conversation, Stacey outlined her bold strategy to fight voter suppression and educate communities about voting. And her work bore fruit, with Georgia flipping blue for the first time in a presidential race since 1992. Recounting …
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Post Election Day Therapy with Anand Giridharadas
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Join us this week for an All Ears rapid response to Election Day 2020! Awash in uncertainty the morning after election day, Abby talks with Anand Giridharadas, the journalist whose unsparing criticisms of the liberal establishment have themselves made headlines. Abby and Anand consider Trump’s popularity with voters and why it’s such a bitter pill …
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This week we have a very special episode of All Ears. Breaking from our usual format, we’re reacting in real time to the late night swearing in of the latest Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett. Abby’s guest this week is Reverend Robert Schenck, an evangelical minister and former prominent anti-abortion activist, who for decades was at the cen…
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Journalist Maria Hinojosa: I Take My Civic Duty Ridiculously Seriously
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This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Emmy and Peabody-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, whose work on issues that affect the Latinx community has brought her both acclaim and scrutiny. As an intrepid reporter at places like CNN and PBS, as well as the first Latina correspondent at NPR, Hinojosa has long challenged what she sees as the typicall…
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Comedian Samantha Bee: A Paper Plate With A Slice Of Pizza On It Would Be A Better President
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All Ears is kicking off Season 2 with comedian Samantha Bee. As the host of Full Frontal on TBS since 2016, and as a correspondent on The Daily Show for 12 years prior, Sam has been skewering politicians, culture, and society’s sacred cows for the better part of two decades. And she’s really good at it! Abby talks to Sam about growing up in Canada …
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“ALL EARS with Abigail Disney” is back for Season 2! With the 2020 election season and lame duck session - whatever it may bring - as our backdrop, Abby is excited to talk to people she considers "troublemakers". These are the folks whose work as writers, artists, politicians and activists push back with imagination and courage against the status q…
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Mary Trump: My Grandfather Was A Sociopath
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This week All Ears brings you a special bonus episode: Abby couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk to author Mary Trump about her new book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man”. As like-minded mavericks, Abby and Mary discuss what it’s like to stand up to a wealthy American family empire from the insid…
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Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson: Is Business Ethics An Oxymoron?
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This week on All Ears Abby welcomes Professor Rebecca Henderson, who teaches about innovation, corporate culture change, and ethics at Harvard Business School. Her class, “Reimagining Capitalism”, is one of HBS’s most popular classes, and she says that the majority of her students tend to believe that capitalism is broken. But Professor Henderson t…
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Heather McGhee: The Hierarchy Of Human Value
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This week on All Ears Abby talks to author and commentator Heather McGhee. Heather is a distinguished senior fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, where she also served as president for four years. Heather argues that the economic, intellectual, and societal costs of racism affect not only its victims but also its perpetrators. She tells Abby…
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Stacey Abrams: Make Way For (Civically Engaged) Ducklings
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In this week’s episode, Abby talks to one of Joe Biden’s shortlisted VP candidates, Stacey Abrams. Recounting her upbringing in Mississippi, the former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader describes the powerful example her parents set for their children as activists and citizens, even as they had struggled their whole lives for fair ac…
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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The Woman at the Intersection of Intersectionality
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This week is a deep dive into how we can shed ingrained ideologies, question our identities, and form our intellectual selves. Abby is joined by UCLA and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw for a lively conversation about critical race theory, the pitfalls of meritocracy, and how Kimberlé’s created the theoretical framework we call inte…
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This week on All Ears Abby welcomes CNN host and New York Times’ best-selling author Van Jones. Van talks about being a young civil rights lawyer in Oakland at the time of the Rodney King trial, and how it directly influenced his progressive activism of the last 30 years. Van says that having children made him come around to the belief that fixing …
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Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II: Before George Floyd Was Ever Killed By This Cop, The Systems Were Suffocating Him
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Continuing our focus on activism around the murder of George Floyd by police on May 25th, Abby welcomes Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, Co-Chair of The Poor People’s Campaign, and President of Repairers of the Breach. Both organizations focus on organizing and uplifting communities across the country using a moral framework of public concerns su…
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Rajasvini Bhansali: The Time To Challenge The Insidious Calculus Of White Supremacy Is Now
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All Ears is stepping back this week from our COVID-19 focus to turn our attention to the national anguish resulting from the murder of George Floyd by police on May 25th. At the forefront of Abby’s mind is sharing her platform with movement leaders, both as an opportunity to listen and learn. This week Abby talks to Rajasvini Bhansali, the Executiv…
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Cecile Richards: The Resilience Of Women Is Profound, And It's Happening Right Now
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This week on All Ears Abby is joined by Supermajority co-founder and former President of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards. Cecile and Abby discuss their shared experiences of having a famous parent, and how being middle school activists landed them in the principal’s office. Cecile also talks to Abby about why she’s never run for political offic…
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Senator Elizabeth Warren: The Political Is Very, Very Personal
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This week on All Ears, Abby talks to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren about the loss of her eldest brother to COVID-19, one of over 93,000 loved ones lost to the pandemic in this country (as of this episode’s release). As they dig deeper into the origins of the political divide raging between blue and red states, Senator Warren talks about her conserv…
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Ford Foundation President Darren Walker: Is Everything That Matters Metric-able?
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Join Abby and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker (@darrenwalker), as they discuss modern philanthropy: how it has evolved, how its success is measured, and who it benefits, on both sides of the ledger. Links from this episode's conversation: Darren Walker’s book, From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel Of Wealth The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew…
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