A Public Affair

Today, Host Esty Dinur speaks with cultural anthropologist and professor Greta Uehling about her book Decolonizing Ukraine: the Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom.

Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea, made up 90% of the population of Crimea. Their language was the primary language spoken there until 1783, when they were subject to atrocities similar to the indigenous peoples of America; being removed from their land, dissolving their culture, and broken agreements. During World War II, the Third Reich took control of Crimea. When Soviets gained control again in 1944, they executed a previously conceived plan to round up all the tatars and deport them to Siberia and Central Asia. This lasted until 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated and the tatars rejoined Ukraine until the Russian occupation in 2014. 

Crimea’s peninsula sticks out to the black sea, which is more like an island than a peninsula; its isthmus is only a few kilometers wide, making it an isolated area. Crimea was a desirable location for Russia due to its warm ports – in contrast to Russia’s ports, which would often freeze in the Winter –  and it was a strategic location due to its proximity to Turkey, just 144 miles away on the Black sea. In 2019, the bridge to Russia to the east was subjected to multiple attacks, compromising its integrity.

Uehling mentions that modern warfare is hybrid. In addition to conventional military tactics like missiles and tanks, the people of Crimea now face misinformation, election interference and cyber attacks. A final component of warfare is psychological manipulation, which disrupts previously harmonious relationships, creates tension in families, difficulties in romantic relationships, and friendships. This is especially the case in children receiving a Russian “patriotic education,” creating conflicts in families, which Russians are doing to Ukrainian children today. The war is destroying the physical infrastructure in Ukraine in addition to the emotional infrastructure, and the latter is much harder to rebuild.

Recording artist of Crimean Tatar ancestry Jamala won the Eurovision Song contest in 2016 for her song 1944, which mourned Stalin’s deportation of her people. Ukrainians resonated with this feeling of being silenced in history and their struggle under the Soviet Union. Uehling says that The Crimean people redefined their national identity, building on cultural characteristics and incorporating the shared values of democracy, anti-corruption, and transparency. The song helped them come together in solidarity.and exemplifies courage in the face of fear. 

Greta Uehling is a cultural anthropologist who works at the intersection of Indigenous and Eastern European Studies. She is a Teaching Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she teaches for the Program in International and Comparative Studies and is Associate Faculty of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Uehling is the author of three books: Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Return of the Crimean Tatars (Palgrave 2004), Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell University Press 2023), and Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield 2025). Throughout her career, Uehling has served as a consultant to organizations working in the fields of international migration, human rights, and human trafficking, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Journalist Anna Lekas Miller joins Allen Ruff to talk about her recent article in the Progressive “Iced Out” which examines the effects of the new ICE immigration policies, along with her book Love Across Borders, which explores the human stories and the consequences of couples with mixed citizenships falling in love.

Miller criticizes the current ICE raids occurring under the Trump administration, specifically the alliteration in the names of the detainment centers, like Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, Speedway Slammer, located near Indianapolis, and Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The nicknames seem to be attractive to American citizens, and may be part of the mental disconnect that allows people to participate in reporting undocumented immigrants.

Miller highlights the myth that you can easily get married to receive a green card and become an American citizen; in some cases, such as if a person was previously deported, they are ineligible to receive citizenship. She says that immigration laws affect the daily lives of many American families, those with immigrant parents, spouses, or children who fear their family will not be able to come home at the end of the day. There is additional anxiety about suddenly becoming a single parent household, and the economic impact on individual families. Miller’s work centers around humanizing the immigration debate, which boils down to people wanting the ordinary American dream and trying to keep families together.

Anna Lekas Miller is a writer and journalist who covers stories of the ways that conflict and migration shape the lives of people around the world. She is the author of the book Love Across Borders, which tells the stories of couples and families around the world who have stood up to unjust immigration policies to be together and won the 2024 Arab American Book Award. She is currently working on her first novel and you can keep up with her writing on her Substack, which is also called Love Across Borders.

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While you can still get an abortion in Wisconsin, there are just two clinics left in the state, both located in Milwaukee. Susan Rinkunas and Garnet Henderson are co-founders of the independent reproductive rights and justice publication, Autonomy News. They join Ali Mudrow today in a wide-ranging conversation about the changing landscape of abortion rights across the world, including personhood, socioeconomic factors, and access to healthcare.

The guests discuss a 2017 decision under Scott Walker, when Wisconsin did not accept the full expansion of Medicaid, and how Wisconsin and Arkansas are the only two states that have not extended medicaid for the first year post-partum.

The conversation also examines the impacts of race and age on the decision to receive an abortion. Black women in Wisconsin are three times more likely to die during childbirth and experience preterm births. Additionally, they say abortion is a children’s issue that should be paired with age appropriate sex education in school including appropriate contact, boundaries, and consent, starting younger than people think.

Susan Rinkunas is an independent journalist covering abortion, reproductive health, and politics. She is a co-founder of Autonomy News, a contributing writer at Jezebel, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. Her reporting has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, The Nation, Mother Jones, and more.

Garnet Henderson is an award-winning investigative reporter specializing in abortion access, anti-rights disinformation, and other intersections of health, policy, and culture. She is the co-founder of Autonomy News, the first worker-owned reproductive justice news outlet in the U.S. Her work has been published in The Nation, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Scientific American, Marie Claire, Guardian US, WIRED, and more. She is also the creator of ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, and a four-time grantee and fellow of the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Photo by Chicago Business through Creative Commons

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To mark Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Host Dana Pellebon spoke with novelist Helen Winslow Black about her novel ‘Seven Blackbirds.’ Black discusses how each person’s experience of domestic violence is unique, and how factors like community support, independent funds, and anonymous hotlines can make a huge difference in outcomes. The show also touches on how the legal system can act as an extension of abuse, giving perpetrators an opportunity to re-insert themselves in survivor’s lives and usually fail to provide actual justice.

Helen Winslow Black is novelist based out of Illinois. Her debut novel ‘Seven Blackbirds’ is available through independent booksellers, and has a sequel ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me.’ Her books focus on the familial relationships between women, and the path toward healing.

Image courtesy of Helen Winslow Black

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Today we were joined by two guests, Dexter Patterson and Scott Spoolman who discussed the books they will present at the Wisconsin Book Festival. In the first half of the show, Bird expert and science communicator Dexter Patterson discussed his new field guide Birds of the Great Lakes. The field guide is a small companion book which features just over 150 birds found in Wisconsin throughout the year.

Patterson is known as the Wisco Birder on social media where he shares his passion for birds and the natural world with people all over the state and beyond. Patterson emphasized that the birding community should be just as diverse as the birds they find. He hopes that sharing his bird joy with others will make birding more accessible to everyone, and just paying attention to the natural world will “open windows to wonder” for more people. Dexter will be presenting his book at the Madison Central Library on Oct 26 at 10:30am.

Scott Spoolman will be presenting his book Wisconsin State Parks: Extraordinary Stories of Geology and Natural History at the Wisconsin Historical Society on October 25th, celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Wisconsin State Park system at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Wisconsin State Parks combines historical and geographical information with concrete goals for hiking for state park enthusiasts. The book introduces each of its over 120 state parks with a story of its formation and ends with practical trail guides at each location.

On today’s show, Spoolman detailed the geological formation of Wisconsin, the rifts, catastrophic glacial flooding along with the basalt carving and erosion that formed the canyons, like the St Croix River Valley. He also highlighted Wisconsin’s driftless area (which was once an ocean) formed by the erosion of wind and flowing water. The driftless area erosion can be seen at Governor Dodge state park, the western half of Devils Lake and Tower Hill State Park among others.

Dexter Patterson: Known on social media as the Wisco Birder, Dexter Patterson is dedicated to making birdwatching welcoming for all. His energetic “You Ready? Let’s Go!” videos, featuring him finding various bird species, have amassed millions of views and captivated Instagram followers. As an educator, science communicator, and co-founder of the BIPOC Birding Club of Wisconsin, Dexter aims to prove that birding is for everyone, promoting inclusivity and connecting people with the beauty of nature. 

Scott Spoolman is a science writer who has focused on the environmental sciences,

Photo by Joshua Mayer

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On the show today, long time-host Esty Dinur celebrates 30 years on A Public Affair. We flip the script and instead of Esty sitting in the host chair, she sits in the guest’s seat to be interviewed about her time on the air by Norman Stockwell. She says her driving motivation has always been to focus on issues that aren’t covered by mainstream media and to cover issues from the perspective of the folks most impacted. 

In 1984, Dinur arrived in Madison with a love of short-wave radio having listened to Radio Moscow, Radio Havana Cuba, FMLN, the BBC as well as Australian and German stations. She would transcribe these news shows and publish them in a newsletter that she distributed in Madison. And Esty got her start at WORT by calling in to share what she heard on other radio programs with WORT listeners. She had her first feature during the Gulf War, and WORT would tape her shows and send them through the mail to Radio for Peace International in San Jose, Costa Rica.

In 1995, Esty hosted her first show on A Public Affair, a show with Joel Beinin on the assassination of P.M. Rabin. In the years since she’s spoken with such esteemed guests as Kathy Kelly of Voices in the Wilderness, Earth First! and IWW activist Judi Bari on her bombing and trial, novelist Richard Powers, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News, Vojislav Stojkovic on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, Noam Chomsky, and so many more!

You can listen to Esty’s shows on our website and listen to a roundup of her first 25 years at the station here. 

Featured image of Esty Dinur and Norm Stockwell via Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined by award winning historian, Greg Grandin to talk about his new book, America, América: A New History of the New World. Grandin’s book tells the story of the Americas plural, and how the creation of concepts like humanity, sovereignty, abolition, and emancipation grew out of European conquest of the Western Hemisphere. 

The book’s thesis is represented in its two word title, America, América. Grandin focuses on the period between Spanish conquest and the Monroe Doctrine and how the US came to understand itself as a nation in relation to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, not just to Europe. Grandin and Ruff discuss the ways that different colonial powers rationalized colonization and how this period gave rise to what Grandin calls the “liberal international order.” 

Grandin describes how he wrote his new book in the time between the two Trump presidencies and how Trump threatens the liberal international order. He says that the problems that the US faces can’t be solved by asserting power over Latin America.

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

Greg Grandin is the author of The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; The Empire of Necessity, which won both the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes in American history; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and a number of other widely acclaimed books. He is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

Featured image of the cover of Greg Grandin’s book, America, América: A New History of the New World  via Penguin Press.

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We’re in week two of the government shutdown and the first week of Planned Parenthood not providing abortion care in Wisconsin, and WORT is no longer broadcasting the BBC. To make sense of the dramatic changes in our nation and in our backyard, host Ali Muldrow is joined by friend of the show, Lisa Graves. They discuss the role that Project 2025 is playing in Trump’s second presidency and how it’s no surprise that the Trump administration has been implementing Project 2025 from day one. 

Graves says that the Trump administration is more than halfway through implementing Project 2025. That includes making good on his campaign promise of “mass deportations” which we’re seeing play out in Chicago this week. These are violent times, and Project 2025 fuels the violence with its perspective on incarceration, detention, deportation, and changes to “consent decrees.”

They also talk about how the destruction of the federal workforce and attacks on the free press are impacting regular people. Nevertheless, Graves says she is heartened by the ways folks are rejecting Trump’s authoritarianism, from the dance parties in Portland, governors who push back, and the ongoing No Kings protests.

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group. She is also the board president of the Center for Media and Democracy.

Featured image of the cover of Project 2025 via Wikipedia.

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On today’s show, host Dana Pellebon speaks with Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the largest free thought organization in the nation. Gaylor and her mother got involved in the fight for women’s rights and abortion rights in the 60s and quickly saw that the organized response to abortion was from religious groups. She says that she realized that religion should not be allowed to influence laws about women or anything else. 

Gaylor’s organization works to keep religion out of the government. They offer free advice and write complaint letters. Their team of legal staff has pursued over 100 lawsuits and are currently taking on laws that force schools to display the 10 Commandments in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. She says it’s been a good year, legally, because they’ve been winning these lawsuits. 

When Gaylor started out, she and her mother were demonized on national television. But there’s a growing number of Americans who do not identify as religious, leading Gaylor to say that it’s a good time to be non-religious. 

They also discuss the history of white Christian nationalism in the US, the psychological harm of rapture theology for young people, the intensification of Christian nationalism within the military, and how to get involved in free thought organizations. Gaylor says she sees too many people putting dogma over humanity. 

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is the Co-President and the Co-Founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Served as the editor of Free Thought Today, and author of multiple books on women and religion.

Featured image of a billboard that says “Imagine No Religion” by the Freedom From Religion Foundation via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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Host Douglas Haynes regularly features ecology and environment stories on this program, stories that you may not hear often in other media. Today we continue that theme, highlighting grassroots climate leaders and the work of independent media organizations like Grist. Our guests are Jess Stahl, the Project Director of the Grist 50 and Deneine Christa Powell, one of the leaders featured on the list working toward community-based climate solutions. 

Grist is a nonprofit independent media company covering the climate. Their work focuses on climate impacts and solutions. The Grist 50 is a reader-nominated list of leaders who are making change in their communities across the US.

Powell says that as words like equity, sustainability, and climate are under attack from the federal government, we have to change how we approach advocating for climate solutions. She likes to remind people what life would look like without sustainability. Our communities would lose not only recycling and composting, but local food systems and green infrastructure. She says that sustainability isn’t a luxury, it’s the quiet infrastructure that makes life possible, sustainable, and equitable. 

They discuss the importance of independent media, the need to keep showing up for city council meetings and talking to your sustainability officers, and how messaging about clean air and clean water resonates with folks in urban and rural areas. 

Note: This pledge drive interview was edited to remove parts of the show dedicated to station fundraising. We thank our listeners for their generous support.

Deneine Christa Powell is the CEO of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, or USDN — a community of professionals working on sustainability at the municipal level across the U.S. and Canada. She also served as the leader of the grassroots nonprofit, Groundwork Milwaukee.

Jessica Stahl is the Executive Editor of Strategic Initiatives at Grist. She is also the Project Director of the Grist 50. 

Featured image of a bioswale for stormwater management in Milwaukee via Aaron Volkening on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

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