What color would you use to signify our times?

Our guest today, cultural theorist Anna Watkins Fisher, says that the color known as Safety Orange can best be used to describe the cultural present in the United States. In her recent book Safety Orange, she argues that the color (hex code: #FF5F15)  can be used as a lens to see today’s extremes of state oversight and abandonment, excess and dereliction under neoliberal capitalism. 

She argues that Safety Orange is increasingly used as a vague warning of risk — a warning that fails to provide specific information or a solution to an individual.

And, she says, the color has been overused to numb us to a state of emergency. In its urgency, the color deflects attention from the slow violence of systemic crises — from climate change to racial injustice to the breakdown of public infrastructure.

Watkins Fisher joins News Director Chali Pittman for an interview recorded earlier this month. Together, they talk Safety Orange: from traffic cones to COVID maps to prison jumpsuits.

About the guest:

Anna Watkins Fisher is a social and cultural theorist, and associate professor of American culture at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. 

In addition to Safety Orange (U Minnesota Press, Forerunners series, 2021), she’s the author of several books, including The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke University Press, 2020), and coeditor of the second edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2015).

You can find more about her on her website, annawatkinsfisher.com. 

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Last week, Republican state senators fired an Evers-appointed Public Service Commission (PSC) member. Tyler Hueber, who had been serving on the PSC for nearly four years, is just the latest of the governor’s appointees to be fired by way of rejected confirmation. Eight others were fired last year, and that’s after the 2019 firing of Brad Pfaff from the Department of Agriculture. Joining Allen Ruff to explain this new trend at the state capitol is Wisconsin Examiner‘s Erik Gunn.

Erik’s piece “Committee vote sets stage for Senate Republicans to toss utility commissioner Huebner” can be found here.

Erik Gunn is the Deputy Editor for the Wisconsin Examiner. Her reports and writes on work and the economy, health policy and related subjects.

Photo by Karson on Unsplash

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As primary season is in full swing across the country, we invite an organizer who is working beyond and within the country’s two party system. Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell joins host Sara Gabler to talk about the mission behind the organization and the power of lateral organizing.

“There is an untapped multiracial coalition of everyday people, that if we were to find each other, and to insist on being in relationship with each other and struggling with each other, we could transform this world and make it a much safer country and world for everybody.”

Sara and Maurice also speak in depth about his 2022 essay titled Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis.

Maurice Mitchell is a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and the National Director of the Working Families Party.

He will be coming to UW-Madison for an event co-sponsored by Haven Wrights Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers next Tuesday, January 30, 2024 at 2:00 pm. In person and virtual attendance options are available. More information can be found here.

Photo provided by Working Families Party

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Due to an increase in Federal funding available for passenger rail, Madison has been identified as a future home for an Amtrak station. The  an important connection location to expand transportation access across our state. The city is now seeking community input on the proposed locations for an Amtrak station. 

Transportation Planner Liz Callin joins Ali Muldrow on A Public Affair to talk about the station location, go over the logistics of the future train, and answer several callers’ questions. 

Residents can chime in with their opinions at two upcoming meetings. An in-person meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 30th from 5pm to 7pm at Madison Municipal Building, Room 215. A virtual meeting will be on Tuesday, February 6th from 6pm to 7:30pm on zoom: register here.

Photo by Michael Beener on Unsplash

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It’s official–last week Lake Monona and Lake Mendota finally froze. The January 15th date rates 3rd for latest freeze date in the 170 years of record keeping. To celebrate the frozen lakes, host Douglas Haynes talks with limnologist Tyler Butts and Clean Lakes Alliance communications director Adam Sodersten about the late date, the process of monitoring the ice, and the upcoming Frozen Assets Festival on February 3rd and 4th.

The 12th annual family-friendly festival on frozen Lake Mendota and at The Edgewater includes a 5k run and walk, figure skating, dance, speed skating, science, and show kites. Adam says the ice needs to reach at least 8 inches before the festival organizers will consider having events on the ice. “Everything’s on the table at this point, and we just have to wait on on nature to take its course over the next two weeks,” he says.

Adam Sodersten is Marketing & Communications Director at Clean Lakes Alliance, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving the water quality of the lakes, streams, and wetlands of the Yahara River Watershed.

Tyler Butts is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Limnology. Tyler a limnologist and ecosystem scientist who uses food webs to better understand how things like invasive species and human lake management decisions impact aquatic ecosystems.

Cover photo and SoundCloud image by WORT’s Chali Pittman

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Who is spying on us and why is the US government letting them? These are the questions that today’s guest asks in his most recent book Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence. James Bamford is one of the country’s leading writers on intelligence, especially the National Security Agency. He joins host Esty Dinur to talk about Spyfall and threat of espionage conducted by  foreign countries within the US.

James Bamford is a bestselling author, journalist and documentary filmmaker. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.  In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his writing on the war in Iraq published in Rolling Stone. He currently writes for The Nation magazine.

He is also an Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker for PBS and spent a decade as the Washington investigative producer for ABC’s World News Tonight.  He is the author of a trilogy of New York Times bestselling books, The Puzzle Palace (1982) and Body of Secrets (2001), and The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

James joined the show back on May 15th, 2002 to talk about Body of Secrets. As a special treat, we offer you the freshly digitized recording of that show:

Special thank you to Douglas Ranney and WORT’s Archiving Project.

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Cheese heads. America’s Dairyland.

When you think of Wisconsin, you think of milk and cheese, but have you spent time to think about the people behind the dairy aisle? Host Bert Zipperer has. He grew up in a cheese factory that closed 40 years ago and he’s talking about it on WORT airways. Joining him is Norman Patterson, a 5th generation farmer from Green County, and Pete Hardin, editor and publisher of The Milkweed.

Photo by Andra C Taylor Jr on Unsplash

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Citing the January 6th, 2021 insurrection, Trump’s candidacy for president challenged in at least 35 states. The argument points to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which says that a person cannot be elected to the office of president if they, as an officer of the United States, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”

Joining us to help us understand the argument is Professor Mark Graber and Attorney Amira Mattar. Together they help us understand the unprecedented situation we are in and what might happen at the supreme court.

Mark Graber is Jacob A. France Professor of Constitutionalism at University of Maryland School of Law. He is the author of Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War among other titles. Graber is considered a leading scholars in the country on constitutional law and politics.

Amira Mattar is the Counsel for Free Speech For People, an organization behind the The 14Point3 Campaign. Previously was Staff Attorney for Manhattan Legal Services, where she challenged displacement of low-income communities and advocated for safe housing conditions. She sat as the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal prior to Legal Services, where she challenged surveillance and suppression of Palestine human rights advocates.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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In Wisconsin, 28% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats are not exposed to opposing views at all–be that in news or personal relationships. Remarkably, 39% of Wisconsinites aren’t looking at news at all. That is according to a report from Center for Communication and Civic Renewal. In light of these numbers, how do we understand balanced coverage and the role of local journalism. 

Joining host Ali Muldrow, just 5 weeks away from the Wisconsin spring election, is Professor of Journalism Sue Robinson. They speak on the role of listening, trust, and representation as we embark on the 2024 election season. 

Sue Robinson is a Professor of Journalism. She is the author of How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities, and Care and News After Trump: Journalism’s Crisis of Relevance in a Changed Media Culture among other titles. Her expertise is in engagement journalism, solutions journalism, and building journalist-audience relationships.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

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“Hamas itself is a consequence of something else. The question is, what is that something else? The something else is the Israeli occupation, the Israeli siege, the Israeli apartheid, the oppression, the social inequality, the torment that the Palestinian people have been experiencing for all of these decades, resulting in Hamas,” journalist Ramzy Baroud tells Esty Dinur. “In other words, if you remove Hamas from the equation in right now, nothing will change in the fundamental relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians… Hamas is the outcome of the problem.”

We speak first with Baroud about the current state of Israel’s war on Gaza. Then National Lawyers Guild President, Suzanne Adely joins us to discuss the South African case accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Ramzy Baroud is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle.

Suzanne Adely is National Lawyers Guild International Committee president. She is a founder of the Middle East, North Africa Labor Solidarity Network in the U.S.

Photo by Ash Hayes on Unsplash

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