In this episode you will hear my conversations with two guests.
One is Joanna Ciapka-Sangster, a Polish Canadian violinist from Edmonton, Alberta, who appeared on the previous episode of POLcast, Episode 78. We talked about Polish Christmas music and announced that we were going to continue and in this episode you will hear part two.
My second guest is special to me – for years I tried to convince him to agree to an interview and every time I heard: “No, 
you are my Mom”. I’ve wanted to speak to Bart Bonikowski not because he is my son, but because he is an American sociologist specializing in what really matters these days – nationalism, populism, and radical right movements in the US and Europe. Educated in Canada and the US, with a PhD from Princeton, Bart was a sociology professor at Harvard University until 2020, when he moved to NYU (New York University), where he is an associate professor. We talked – the day after the presidential inauguration – about Amanda Gorman, the charismatic 22-year-old poet, who the whole world is talking about. Bart’s personal website.
Why Bart Bonikowski? He was Amanda’s teacher and advisor at Harvard and got to know her quite well.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s interview with Amanda Gorman: