Filmmaker Dan Reed joins us to discuss the trial of the “Liberty City Seven,” accused of conspiring with al Qaeda to blow up U.S. buildings despite the fact that they didn’t have weapons or communicate with the organization.
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The Inmates Sentenced To Die From Covid
Lisa Armstrong is a professor at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and she joins us to talk specifically about incarcerated people over the age of 55 who could’ve been paroled early to reduce overcrowding but instead remained in prison.
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Quarantines Aren’t Going Anywhere
Journalist Nicola Twilley joins us to talk about how and why quarantines have been used throughout history – and about how the technique has been updated to fight modern threats.
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Do We Really Need More Freeway Lanes?
Texas Observer executive editor Megan Kimble joins us to talk about alternatives to building more roads to suit the state’s ever-growing population.
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Are Our Pandemic Pets Here To Stay?
New Yorker staff writer Nick Paumgarten joins us to talk about the animals we acquired to comfort us and why leaving them at home alone is now going to be a big problem.
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How The U.S. Broke Central America
Aviva Chomsky, professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University, joins us to talk about hundreds of years of colonization and displacement, and why stabilizing the region will take more than just economic aid.
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The Black Roots Of Beer Culture
James Bennett II joins us to talk about why beer is often conflated today with a rich, white world and why something as simple as the backyard BBQ is essential to understanding how America chooses to drink.
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Rights Shouldn’t Be A Zero-Sum Game
Columbia Law professor Jamal Greene joins us to talk about why courts have an outsized role in determining what Americans fight for and against, a method he says is out of line with what the framers of the Constitution envisioned.
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The Rich Skip The Line While The Rest Of Us Wait
New York Times business reporter Nelson Schwartz joins us to talk about how easy for some it is to buy convenience – and about how corporations have shifted strategies to cater to the wealthy in order to increase the bottom line.
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How Amazon Is Reshaping America’s Cities And Economy
Alec MacGillis, senior reporter for ProPublica, joins us to discuss how Amazon and other digital retailers are affecting the larger economy as they drive some cities to either boom or bust.
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The Tension Between Public Health and Individual Liberty
Ed Yong received a Pulitzer Prize for his Covid coverage in The Atlantic, and he joins us to talk about how the pandemic is forcing the CDC to rethink its mission as it struggles to protect the greater good in an era of unchecked individualism.
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How More Policing Leads To Greater Unrest
Elizabeth Hinton joins us to discuss why the word “riot” is a racist trope and masks a long arm of history of over policing and neighborhood crackdowns.
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