East Anchorage Book Club with Andrew Gray
The East Anchorage Book Club is an interview podcast where Alaskan leaders discuss politics and community issues.
Episodes
ABC/Fox Your Alaska Link’s evening news anchor Trill Gates began her education as a broadcast journalist as a junior at Bartlett High in the late 1980s. While in high school, she did an internship at the Fox news station on Tudor Road where she still is today. Trill became famous in the early '90s as "Kiddie Fox" on the "Fox 4 Kids Club" TV show. We talk about that experience and how unlikely ...
This month a data breach at Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center allegedly exposed 60,000 patient records to hackers (ANHC has approximately 15,000 patients). Today on the show we talk about that case specifically, but also Alaska’s cybersecurity more generally. Our guest is Leon Jaimes, an Anchorage-based network security professional who has done security consulting in the healthcare, financial services, state and l...
Lisa Alexia is a psychiatric physician assistant in Anchorage specializing in eating disorders. Today we talk about her entrance to the health care field as a community health aide in Nikolai, Alaska, her decision to go back to school to become a physician assistant, and her work with eating disorders. But the last half of our conversation is the reason why she is on the show. Back in May, she authored an editorial in...
Tomorrow, September 16th, 2025, Anchorage will celebrate 50 years as a unified municipality. In honor of that anniversary I am re-releasing an episode from last year with Charter Commissioner, Jane Angvik. This episode is almost exclusively about the charter commission. I have another episode with Jane about her life; here's that link. I have also interviewed the other two living members of the Anchorage Charter ...
Rep. Ted Eischeid is the Alaska state house representative for North Muldoon in Anchorage, and his wife Hedy Eischeid is President of the Anchorage Democrats. Both Ted and Hedy were public school teachers in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where they met. We will hear their stories and how they ended up in Alaska. Much of their episode revolves around union work; Hedy is the current state-wide organizer for NEA-Alaska, which ...
Dermot Cole is a longtime Fairbanks newspaper reporter, columnist and author who began his career at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in the late 70s while he was still a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He stayed with that paper until 2013 when he became a columnist at the Alaska Dispatch, an online news blog funded by Alice Rogoff, the former CFO of US News & World Report. In 2014 Rogoff purchased t...
James Devens is the director of KCHU public radio which serves the communities around Prince William Sound and Wrangell-St Elias National Park. At the time he became director five years ago, he was the youngest director of a public radio station in America. Jimmy was elected to Valdez city council in 2020 and re-elected in 2023. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2024, but he remains an active member on the council a...
Sen. Löki Tobin (D-Anchorage) discusses the resolutions up for a vote today, August 22, 2025, by the Alaska State Medical Board. The first, listed on the agenda as "Board Statement/New Regulation Project: Late Term Abortion," is a statement drafted by board member and Republican candidate for governor Dr. Matt Heilala that would seek to limit access to abortions later in pregnancy. The second makes up the b...
Jeff Landfield is the founder and editor of The Alaska Landmine Blog and podcast. Since the Landmine’s founding in 2017, Jeff, with no formal training in journalism, has written and published investigative new stories often providing close coverage of municipal and state government. He was a state Senate Candidate in 2012 and 2016, and was appointed to the commission on judicial conduct by Governor Bill Walker, but th...
Alaska Public Media Reporter Wesley Early moved to Anchorage in 2008 and began his freshman year at Bartlett High School. He stayed in Anchorage for college earning a degree in journalism and public communications at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He started working in public radio his senior year of college and has never left. In 2019 he became the news director at KOTZ, the public radio in Kotzebue, and spent t...
Today in Anchorage the world’s eyes are on us as President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin meet to discuss the fate of Ukraine. Although President Trump has lowered expectations by referring to the summit as a mere “listening exercise,” there is anxiety that illegitimate concessions might be made to Russia that may affect our state, such as access to our rare earth minerals or to oil in the Bering Sea. On Ma...
Author Dan O'Neill has lived in Fairbanks for 50 years. During that time he has published editorials and op-eds in all of Alaska's major newspapers. From 1998 to 2002, he had a weekly column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. He compiled his best work from his almost half century of newspaper work into his most recent book, The Impertinent Question: the Words & Adventures of a Liberal Columnist at a Cons...
The third part of a legislative audit of the Alaska Office of Children's Services (OCS) was made public on June 30, 2025. In 2018 an omnibus bill was signed into law that completely overhauled the way foster care in Alaska should work. That bill -- House Bill 151 -- passed the Alaska State House and the Alaska State Senate unanimously. The completed audit shows that OCS failed to implement most of the required re...
James Brooks is a reporter for the Alaska Beacon. James is a longtime Alaska journalist, having previously worked at the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Kodiak Mirror and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner -- although as we will learn today initially more as an editor than as a journalist. He has laid down roots in Juneau where he and his wife and young daughter live, and he was content in his role as the ADN's ...
Larry Persily is the Anchorage-based owner and publisher of the weekly newspaper the Wrangell Sentinel. Larry and his wife Leslie Murray first purchased that newspaper in 1976 when they moved to Wrangell from Chicago. After almost 50 years as an on-again off-again journalist at various publications such as the Anchorage Times, the Associated Press, the Juneau Empire, & the Anchorage Daily News, Larry re-purchased ...
President and publisher of the Anchorage Daily News Ryan Binkley is the oldest son of former state Senator John Binkley (R-Bethel). When John ran for governor in 2006, Ryan, at 27, took over the Binkley family tourism business based in Fairbanks. That business includes the Riverboat Discovery, a gold mining tour, a partnership with a flight seeing company in Girdwood & Juneau, and a cruise port in Ketchikan. In 20...
Open Enrollment is an education priority of Gov. Dunleavy that would allow any Alaska student to enroll in any Alaska school. To better understand the consequences of this proposal, Sen. Bill Wielechowski, the rules chair in the Alaska State Senate, and Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, the co-chair of the House Education committee appear in this brief bonus episode.
Nathaniel Herz is a freelance reporter who’s spent over a decade working in Alaska, including stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. A few years ago he started his own newsletter "Northern Journal," where he is supported by individual subscribers and grant funding to do his own projects in collaboration with various media organizations like ProPublica, the ADN, and Alaska Public Media. H...
Sen. Bill Wielechowski (D-Anchorage) is chair of the rules committee in the Alaska State Senate. He discusses the upcoming legislative special session called by Governor Mike Dunleavy to begin at 10 am, on Saturday, August 2. Sen Wielechowski explains the way special sessions generally work, why this one is different, and discusses frankly the political gamesmanship given that overrides of the Governor's vetoes m...
Gabe Rottman is the Vice President of Policy for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. A practicing attorney with a focus on the novel issues at the intersection of press freedom, newsgathering, and technology, Gabe is the perfect person to discuss the media environment in America today and what resources are available to journalists who, through the course of just doing their jobs, could find themselves ...
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