Most people know Israel through headlines. In Almost True: Stories From Jerusalem, Tal Shalev invites readers to discover it through stories.

Set in Jerusalem and across Israel, these twenty-two stories introduce unforgettable characters navigating friendship, marriage, family, love, loss, and the quiet absurdities of everyday life. A wedding guest faces an impossible social dilemma. A husband struggles to save his marriage. Neighbors misunderstand one another, while parents and children search for common ground.

With humor, compassion, and keen observation, Shalev captures the moments that reveal who we are-not only as Israelis, but as human beings. Beyond the headlines are ordinary people confronting extraordinary choices, finding grace in unexpected places, and discovering that life's deepest truths often arrive disguised as its smallest moments.

Warm, witty, and deeply humane, Almost True: Stories from Jerusalem offers a rarely seen portrait of Israel while celebrating the complexity, resilience, and quiet beauty of everyday life.

Host: Renee Garfinkel

Guest: Tal Shalev

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite the abundance of retirement communities in the US, none compare to The Villages in Central Florida. Home to nearly 150,000 residents and spanning an area larger than Manhattan, it is the world's largest retirement community and the only one that can be considered a city for older adults. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 residents and two months of participant observations, this captivating and insightful book Seniorland: Aging In A Retirement Metropolis (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the aging experience in The Villages. It explores why people move there, their perceptions of its rapid growth, changes in their daily activities upon moving and over time, social involvement and leisure constraints, and their sense of identity and community. In doing so, this book unveils how The Villages' unique characteristics profoundly impact residents' well-being and offers a glance into the future of old age.

Host: Renee Garfinkel

Guest: Galit Nimrod

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most of us use Wikipedia without thinking very much about it. A name comes up in conversation, an argument breaks out, or we suddenly need to know what happened in, for example, 1948—and within seconds, Wikipedia offers us a clean, confident answer.

But who decided what that answer would be?

Who chose which facts belonged in the opening paragraph and which could wait until paragraph fifteen? Who determined which sources were authoritative?

My guest on this podcast is Dr. Shlomit Lir, a researcher at the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University who specializes in the politics of knowledge—the often invisible ways power influences what a society accepts as fact.

Dr. Lir’s research began with questions about gender and participation on Wikipedia. She found that although the platform presents itself as open to everyone, not everyone feels equally welcome—or possesses equal influence—inside its editorial culture.

Her latest project, WikiBiases, turns to English Wikipedia’s treatment of Israel, Zionism, Jewish history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By examining revision histories, changes in terminology, patterns of sourcing, article structure, and the experiences of volunteer editors, she argues that bias rarely arrives as one spectacularly false statement. It develops gradually: a sentence disappears, a source is dismissed, a disputed interpretation moves into the opening paragraph, and a different account of history begins to look settled.

The stakes extend far beyond Wikipedia. Its articles shape search results and influence journalists. They supply information to artificial-intelligence systems. If distorted information passes from Wikipedia into AI-generated material, and that material eventually returns as a source, we may be creating a hall of mirrors in which repetition gradually acquires the authority of truth.

Who gets to write history? Who gets to challenge it? And when thousands of small edits accumulate, at what point does editing become a quiet rewriting of the past?

Host: Renee Garfinkel

Guest: Shlomit Lir

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.