1A

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What's 1A about?

1A is home to the national conversation. Joshua Johnson hosts with great guests and frames the best debate in ways to make you think, share and engage.

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The News Roundup for Octobe...

10.22.2021

The Freedom to Vote Act failed in the Senate this week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the bill was an overreach by Democrats in an attempt to federalize elections. Members of the Trump administration clashed with the congressional committee ...

1A episodes:

10.22.2021 The News Roundup for October 22, 2021 The Freedom to Vote Act failed in the Senate this week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the bill was an overreach by Democrats in an attempt to federalize elections. Members of the Trump administration clashed with the congressional committee ...
10.21.2021 How Whistleblowers Have Put Big Tech On The Back Foot As the power of Silicon Valley's tech companies has grown, so too has the number of people willing to air their dirty laundry. Facebook is the latest in the line of fire after whistleblower Francis Haugen's congressional testimony in early ...
10.20.2021 The Future of The Child Tax Credit Since the the Child Tax Credit went into effect in July, millions of children have been lifted out of poverty according to one study done by Columbia University. The program is set to end in a few weeks if Congress ...
10.19.2021 The History And Impact Of Non-Unanimous Jury Decisions Non-unanimous jury convictions are no longer constitutional according to a 2020 Supreme Court ruling. But earlier this year, the court decided the decision does not automatically apply retroactively to old cases. That's why more than 1,500 people in Louisiana are ...
10.18.2021 What We Lose When We Lose Local News A new investigation by The Atlantic looks into Alden Global Capital, the secretive hedge fund that's gutted newsroom staff and owns more than 200 papers across the country including The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and the New York Daily ...
10.17.2021 Dave Grohl On Punk Rock, Nirvana, and Fatherhood Dave Grohl's shadow looms large over the music industry. He's the founder of the Grammy-winning rock group Foo Fighters. And he was the drummer for the groundbreaking grunge band Nirvana. His musical footprint is matched only by the life he's ...
10.16.2021 The News Roundup for October 15, 2021 The Biden Administration's investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection is heating up. Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen appeared before the committee to give testimony. Four other persons of interest have been subpoenaed this week and all have yet to ...
10.14.2021 Allegations Of Harassment, Institutional Failures, And The NWSL A major investigation by The Athletic has brought accusations of sexual and verbal harassment by coaches in the National Women's Soccer League to light. It prompted a weekend of game cancellations and calls for change. And when players returned to ...
10.13.2021 Vaccines, Misinformation, And Pregnancy The CDC is amping up its plea for pregnant people to get vaccinated. Vaccination rates for pregnant people are far lower than those of the general public – fewer than one-third were vaccinated before or during their pregnancy despite pregnancy ...
10.12.2021 What Villains With Facial Differences Mean For People With Facial Differences In the newest James Bond movie, "No Time to Die", the main villain in the film, Safin, has scars covering his face. This has been the case for many past Bond villains. But the trope isn't just limited to the ...
10.11.2021 Facebook Under Fire: The Whistleblower, The Outage, And The Future Last week, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress about Facebook's problems. A leaked trove of documents revealed that the company purposely hid research about its platform's negative effects on mental health in teenagers. Haugen also claimed that the company stoked ...
10.08.2021 The News Roundup for October 08, 2021 A whistleblower has come forward to detail how Facebook's products "harm children, stoke division, and weaken democracy." Then, a worldwide outage of Facebook's products, including Instagram and WhatsApp, disrupted communication and business in multiple countries. A federal judge has placed ...
10.07.2021 The Indian Child Welfare Act Faces Its Biggest Challenge Yet The Indian Child Welfare Act was signed into law following decades of U.S. policies aimed at forcibly assimilating Native children — including sending them to boarding schools. Now, it's facing its most significant challenge yet: Brackeen v. Haaland. The case ...
10.06.2021 Why The Debt Limit Is Looming Over The Infrastructure Bill And Social Policy Package The four-month-long stalemate over the fate of two big bills in Congress continues. Progressives refuse to budge on infrastructure until there's movement on a social policy package. Party leaders say Oct. 31 is the new deadline to act on these ...
10.05.2021 From Panama To Pandora: How The Ultra-Rich Hide Their Wealth The "Pandora Papers" investigation involves a massive leak of 12 million documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and examined by news organizations worldwide. These documents include private emails, spreadsheets, and other financial records. An analysis of the ...
10.04.2021 Gone For Good: How A Species Is Declared Extinct More than 20 animals and one plant were declared extinct by the Fish and Wildlife Service last week — one of the longer extinction announcements in the history of the agency. Declaring extinction is not as straightforward as you might ...
10.03.2021 Seeing Silence: One Photographer's Mission To Find The World's Quietest Places When you think of Mt. Everest, you might picture towering, snow-covered peaks. But what do you hear? What does a snowstorm atop the world's highest peak actually sound like? Photographer and filmmaker Pete McBride has been photographing these wild places ...
10.01.2021 The News Roundup for October 01, 2021 The Senate is expected to vote on a revamped spending bill that would forestall a government shutdown at the end of the week. In the face of Republican resistance, Democrats have left action on the debt limit out of the ...
09.30.2021 Facebook Paused The Development Of Instagram For Kids. Now What? On Monday, Facebook announced it was pausing the development of Instagram Kids — a service designed for children 13 and under. The move comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed Facebook's own internal research about how its platforms are ...
09.29.2021 The Dire Need For Day Care Everyone is talking about the Great Resignation—employees leaving their jobs en masse due to burnout amplified by the pandemic. When it comes to childcare, those employee exits are causing a domino effect for all American workers. According to the Department ...
09.28.2021 The Current State Of Surveillance It's been nearly 20 years since the Patriot Act was passed. How has surveillance changed over the years? And why, exactly, are we so watched now? We discuss changes in privacy, surveillance and so much more. Want to support 1A? ...
09.27.2021 How America Can Reliably Resist Ransomware The Biden Administration is attempting to curtail an uptick in ransomware attacks on American businesses. In June, the world's largest meat processing company was hit by a ransomware group and paid $11 million dollars to resume its operations. And in ...
09.24.2021 The News Roundup for September 24, 2021 The FDA authorized a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine for people aged 65 and older. The company is also claiming that its vaccine is safe for children. Dr. Anthony Fauci says it could be available in "weeks," in time ...
09.23.2021 Extremely Online: The Fight Against COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation A now-infamous tweet by rapper Nicki Minaj is the latest example of false messaging about the COVID-19 vaccines. It's reignited a conversation about how to fight vaccine misinformation online — and whether calling it out actually works. And it's not ...
09.22.2021 Hey Hun, Want To Talk About MLMs? You may have been one of the many people recently glued to their screen watching Amazon's "LuLaRich" documentary. The series uncovers the rise and fall of the multi-level marketing clothing business LuLaRoe. The documentary exposed the inner workings of the ...
09.21.2021 Teaching Climate Change in the Classroom What role can schools play in making the country greener and cleaner? Public schools serve nearly one in six Americans, and a new commission concludes the role of schools in the U.S. has yet to be clearly defined. The K12 ...
09.20.2021 The Push For Nursing Home Reform In The Middle Of A Pandemic According to AARP, at least 186,000 nursing home residents and staff have died from COVID-19. For many, the pandemic has exposed cracks in our long-term care system — such as staffing shortages and unenforced rules. Some have seen those cracks ...
09.19.2021 NBA Star Carmelo Anthony On Childhood, Community, And His Legacy Carmelo Anthony has spent his adulthood at the top of the NBA. He was drafted in 2003 after leading Syracuse University to an NCAA championship win his freshman year. Since then, the ten-time NBA all-star has worked his way onto ...
09.17.2021 The News Roundup for September 17, 2021 One in 500 Americans has died of COVID-19. Intensive Care Units in many states, especially in the South, are critically full, causing those without the disease to wait to see a physician or receive treatment. House Democrats prepped a plan ...
09.16.2021 The Skirmish Over School Boards School boards are used to dealing with local grievances. But these days, their meetings are becoming venues for national issues. These often mundane gatherings have become ground zero for heated debates over mask mandates, critical race theory, and gender pronouns. ...
09.15.2021 Taxing The Rich For The Social Safety Net Congress is back in session and one of its most important tasks now is to figure out how to pay for President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion dollar plan to expand the social safety net. Democrats hope to fund it by ...
09.14.2021 You Have Questions About Texas' Abortion Law. We Have Answers. A week after the Supreme Court declined to block Texas' new abortion restrictions, the Justice Department sued the state of Texas. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who announced the lawsuit, says the statute is unconstitutional. We talk about the new lawsuit ...
09.13.2021 What Can the Pandemic Tell Us About State of States' Rights? As the delta variant rages on, President Joe Biden says he will issue an executive order that would require certain businesses to mandate the Covid-19 vaccine for their employees. There's a high likelihood this move will spur legal challenges, and ...
09.12.2021 It's Wedding Season... In A Pandemic It's wedding season... during a pandemic. Many couples set their eyes on 2021 to host their big day with hopes of a semi-normal summer after a year of uncertainty. That normal summer didn't come, but still, nearly half of couples ...
09.10.2021 The News Roundup for September 10, 2021 As the new school year starts, current cases of Covid-19 have now topped 40 million. A fourth of these cases are children. President Joe Biden warned the nation of a "code red" climate emergency. His administration is laying out a ...
09.09.2021 What It Meant To Be Muslim In America After 9/11 As we near the 20-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, many Americans are reflecting on that moment and its fallout. For Muslim Americans, that fallout included a rise in Islamophobia. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked 500 percent from 2000-2009, ...
09.08.2021 The California Governorship, A Recall Election, And Gavin Newsom's Political Future In less than a week, Californians will head to the polls in a recall election to decide the fate of their governor, Gavin Newsom. It's the second recall of a California governor in the state's history and 46 candidates are ...
09.07.2021 A Former Guantánamo Detainee Shares His Story At the age of 18, a Yemeni man named Mansoor Adayfi says he was traveling in Afghanistan when he was kidnapped and sold to the CIA by Afghan warlords. The U.S. government had distributed flyers across the region offering bounties ...
09.06.2021 Aaron Copland And The Spirit Of Labor Day The world of work has inspired some of our best-known classical music. From Schumann to Shostakovich, to one of the most respected American classical composers of the twentieth century: Aaron Copland. For Labor Day, Copland is our focus. Leonard Bernstein ...
09.03.2021 The News Roundup for September 03, 2021 A million Americans are still without power after Hurricane Ida made landfall in the South. Rescue efforts are underway as the storm makes its way north, flooding the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. A Wall Street Journal report suggests that the ...
09.02.2021 Riz Ahmed On Identity, Music, And Magical Realism In his latest film, Mogul Mowgli, actor and rapper Riz Ahmed stars as Zed, a rapper diagnosed with an autoimmune disease right before he's set to go on a major tour. The film's subject reflects a bit of a trend. ...
09.01.2021 How Hurricanes Are Heating Up And Speeding Up And Texas' New Abortion Law Legislation that bans abortions after about six weeks is now the law of the land in Texas. It effectively ends Roe v. Wade protections in the state. The law, passed in May, bans all abortions in the state after about ...
08.31.2021 Tens Of Thousands Of Refugees Have Left Afghanistan. Now What? The deadline for the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan has arrived. Since the Taliban seized Kabul on Aug. 15, the U.S. has helped evacuate around 116,000 people. Thousands of Afghan refugees have already arrived at military bases in Virginia, Texas, ...
08.30.2021 The State Of Care For Perinatal And Postpartum Depression Nearly one in seven people who give birth experience postpartum depression. Right now, there's only one PPD medication, called brexanolone, currently approved by the FDA. While it's known to be extremely effective, access is very limited. But a revolution in ...
08.29.2021 Daring To Date During The Delta Variant Love is in the air. And unfortunately, so is the Delta variant. Even before the pandemic, getting (and staying) in a relationship had its challenges. Now there's the added task of navigating things like vaccination status, mask mandates, and the ...
08.27.2021 The News Roundup for August 27, 2021 The Food and Drug Administration fully approved the Pfizer Covid vaccine. The endorsement has caused a wave of vaccine mandates from offices, universities, and even the Pentagon. Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths hit pandemic highs in Florida as the Delta variant ...
08.26.2021 OnlyFans And The Future of Sex Work On The Internet It was news that broke the internet. OnlyFans, a website synonymous with porn, would ban.... well, porn. Site officials say the over 2 million creators on OnlyFans have earned over $5 billion dollars on its platform. But even in the ...
08.25.2021 Boosters, Breakthroughs, And The FDA's Blessing The Pfizer Covid vaccine has received full approval from the FDA. This could pave the way for more vaccine mandates as well as reassure some Americans who are vaccine-hesitant. But we're still learning about the Delta variant—including that fully vaccinated ...
08.24.2021 Afghan Women On What's At Stake For Women In Afghanistan The Taliban, now in control of the country of Afghanistan, has promised that women will be treated well under its new government. Advocates working on the ground say those promises are nothing more than a publicity stunt. They point to ...
08.23.2021 The Paralympics Finally Get To Prime Time This week marks the start of the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, where over 4,000 athletes will compete during the ongoing pandemic. And while the audience for the games is large, equal treatment for the athletes has taken time. It took ...

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1A

What's 1A about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

1A episodes:

The News Roundup for October 22, 2021

How Whistleblowers Have Put Big Tech On The Back Foot

The Future of The Child Tax Credit

The History And Impact Of Non-Unanimous Jury Decisions

What We Lose When We Lose Local News

Dave Grohl On Punk Rock, Nirvana, and Fatherhood

The News Roundup for October 15, 2021

Allegations Of Harassment, Institutional Failures, And The NWSL

Vaccines, Misinformation, And Pregnancy

What Villains With Facial Differences Mean For People With Facial Differences

Facebook Under Fire: The Whistleblower, The Outage, And The Future

The News Roundup for October 08, 2021

The Indian Child Welfare Act Faces Its Biggest Challenge Yet

Why The Debt Limit Is Looming Over The Infrastructure Bill And Social Policy Package

From Panama To Pandora: How The Ultra-Rich Hide Their Wealth

Gone For Good: How A Species Is Declared Extinct

Seeing Silence: One Photographer's Mission To Find The World's Quietest Places

The News Roundup for October 01, 2021

Facebook Paused The Development Of Instagram For Kids. Now What?

The Dire Need For Day Care

The Current State Of Surveillance

How America Can Reliably Resist Ransomware

The News Roundup for September 24, 2021

Extremely Online: The Fight Against COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation

Hey Hun, Want To Talk About MLMs?

Teaching Climate Change in the Classroom

The Push For Nursing Home Reform In The Middle Of A Pandemic

NBA Star Carmelo Anthony On Childhood, Community, And His Legacy

The News Roundup for September 17, 2021

The Skirmish Over School Boards

Taxing The Rich For The Social Safety Net

You Have Questions About Texas' Abortion Law. We Have Answers.

What Can the Pandemic Tell Us About State of States' Rights?

It's Wedding Season... In A Pandemic

The News Roundup for September 10, 2021

What It Meant To Be Muslim In America After 9/11

The California Governorship, A Recall Election, And Gavin Newsom's Political Future

A Former Guantánamo Detainee Shares His Story

Aaron Copland And The Spirit Of Labor Day

The News Roundup for September 03, 2021

Riz Ahmed On Identity, Music, And Magical Realism

How Hurricanes Are Heating Up And Speeding Up And Texas' New Abortion Law

Tens Of Thousands Of Refugees Have Left Afghanistan. Now What?

The State Of Care For Perinatal And Postpartum Depression

Daring To Date During The Delta Variant

The News Roundup for August 27, 2021

OnlyFans And The Future of Sex Work On The Internet

Boosters, Breakthroughs, And The FDA's Blessing

Afghan Women On What's At Stake For Women In Afghanistan

The Paralympics Finally Get To Prime Time

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