Friday, April 25 – Friday, May 2
 Ralph Nader  Daudi Abe  Katherine Newman  Dan Tynan  Elaine Richardson |
 Kathryn Edin  Leyla McCalla  Jonathan Holloway  George Johnson |
Ralph Nader has never been shy about his distaste for corporate politics. His views and his Green Party presidential campaigns have earned him a reputation in some quarters as an extreme leftist. But in his new book, “Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State”, Nader argues that Americans all along the political spectrum are disillusioned and that cooperation between left and right to stem corporate influence is growing.
An article in “Mother Jones” magazine tells the story of Kathryn Edin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who moved, along with her husband and daughter, to Camden, NJ for an up-close-and-personal study of low-income fathers. Edin joins us to share her research, which resulted in a book, “Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City”. Schools have imposed harsher disciplinary measures against students of color than their White counterparts for years, and now African American students are being suspended or expelled from school at a rate three times greater than their White peers. Daudi Abe, a professor of humanities at Seattle Central College and the author of a recent article for BK Nation on the topic, joins us to discuss what has become known as “the discipline gap”. Leyla McCalla’s music is a reflection of her heritage and diverse life experiences. She was born in New York to Haitian immigrant parents, lived in Ghana for two years and studied cello at New York University. But it was her move to New Orleans, where she played cello on the streets of the French Quarter, that inspired her brand of folk music. She joins us to share her debut album, “Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes”. This weekend, South Africa celebrates Freedom Day, its annual commemoration of the historic April 27, 1994 election that brought Nelson Mandela to power and ended apartheid. But how has South Africa fared in the 20 years since it became a multiracial democracy? Johns Hopkins sociologist Katherine Newman joins us to discuss the question and her new book, with co-author Ariane De Lannoy, “After Freedom: The Rise of the Post-Apartheid Generation in Democratic South Africa”. The leaders of 15 Caribbean nations are moving forward with a plan to seek reparations for centuries of slavery and brutal colonial rule. Jonathan Holloway, chair of the African American studies department at Yale University, lays out the demands in an article in “Foreign Affairs” magazine and joins us with the details. A growing number of viewers are accessing TV shows and movies by streaming video from the Internet directly to their televisions, using set-top boxes from brands including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and Google Chromecast. Dan Tynan, a columnist for Yahoo! Tech, helps us understand how the devices work and the differences between them. In his 3-minute sports drill, commentator George Johnson reflects on college basketball players who leave school after their freshman years in the hopes of being drafted into the NBA. As a young girl growing up in a tough Cleveland neighborhood, Elaine Richardson fell in with the wrong crowd. She started skipping school, drinking and smoking, and eventually ended up leading a life of prostitution, addiction and incarceration. Then she literally got smart – and now she’s a professor at Ohio State University. In her memoir, “PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life”, Richardson chronicles her journey from life on the streets to earning her doctorate in English and applied linguistics. |
