Last month, Doug La Follette narrowly won his bid for an unprecedented 12th term as Wisconsin’s Secretary of State. That makes him the longest serving, non-federal, elected official in the US. He was first elected to the position in 1974 and was reelected in 1982. He has held the position ever since.

La Follette joins A Public Affair substitute host Nada Elmikashfi to talk about his career in the capitol.

Doug La Follette is the Wisconsin Secretary of State. He served a term as a state senator from 1972—1974. He was then elected Secretary of State. Doug has deep environmental roots in Wisconsin. He started Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade, now Clean Wisconsin. He helped the late Gaylord Nelson organize the first Earth Day in 1970 and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the Assistant Director to the Mid-American Solar Energy Complex.

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A set of twins born Nha Trang, Việt Nam in 1998 end up raised apart–one adopted by a biological relative in Việt Nam and the second adopted with another little girl from her orphanage by a family in Illinois. Through a sequence of events the twins are reunited but their story is one of complexities and nuances. In her recently published book, Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, journalist Erika Hayasaki tells the story of these three young women.

Throughout the book Erika also contextualizes their experiences with the history of twin studies, intercountry and transracial adoption, and the nature-versus-nurture debate. 

Erika Hayaski is a journalist based out of Southern California and a professor in the literary journalism program at the University of California-Irvine. She is the author of The Death Class stories. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic and other publications.

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Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Congress to continue their support in the war against Russian aggression. That was Zelenskyy’s first trip outside the United States since Russia invaded Ukraine. Ten months after the conflict started, where are we now?

On today’s show, guest host Yuri Rashkin continues his deep dives into the conflict in Russia and Ukraine. He’s joined by Russian music journalist Artemy Troitsky for a special focus on arts and culture in the region, along with insights into the nearly year-long conflict.

Yuri Rashkin is an educator and Rock County Board Supervisor. He is the producer and host of the Rashkin Report, a popular program examining foreign affairs from a Russian point of view.

Artemy Troitsky is a music journalist, author and frequent commentator. A prominent media contributor and educator at Moscow State University in the 90s and 00s, Troitsky left Russia in 2014 due to aesthetic and ideological incompatibility with Putin’s regime. Troitsky is the the author of several books of music criticism,  including Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (Faber and Gaber, 1988), Tusovka: Who’s Who in the New Soviet Rock Culture (Omnibus, 1990) and Subkultura: Stories of Youth and Resistance in Russia (New Social, 2017). He lives now in Estonia, where he hosts a vlog series and lectures at various universities.

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WORT 89.9FM Madison · The state of Mexican journalism with author Katherine Corcoran

Regina Martinez spent two decades breaking stories for for the Mexican magazine Proceso. She uncovered the corruption and abuse underlying Mexican politics. In 2012, shortly after Proceso published an article on corruption in Veracruz, Martinez was found murdered.

Katherine Corcoran, author of the new book In the Mouth of Wolf, joins us to talk about the life and murder of Regina Martinez .

Katherine Corcoran is a former Associated Press bureau chief for Mexico and Central America where she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Her works has appeared in the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, and Univision Online, among others. She is currently codirector of Cronkite Noticias, the bilingual reporting program at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and of MasterLAB, an investigative editor training program in Mexico City.

 

 

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When disaster strikes, who profits? This is the driving question behind Antony Loewenstein’s book Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe (Verso, 2015), and a later documentary of the same name.

Today, a rebroadcast from October 2015, when host Esty Dinur spoke with Loewenstein about how governments and corporations profit from disaster.

Antony Loewenstein is an Australian independent freelance journalist, author, documentarian and blogger. His work has been published in The Guardian, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, and many more.

Since this conversation, he’s continued to author more works. Pills, Powder and Smoke (Scribe, 2019) investigates the individuals, officials, activists, victims, DEA agents, and traffickers caught up in the drug war. And his next book, The Palestine Laboratory, on the technology of occupation, is slated to be released in May 2023. You can find more on his website, antonyloewenstein.com, and follow him @antloewenstein on Twitter.

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In 2018, students called on UW-Madison to remove the name of Fredric March – a UW alum and one of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars in the 1930s and 40s – from a theater in Memorial Union.

That came after a UW-Madison study, commissioned in the wake of the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, examined the history of student organizations in the 1920s.

That report found that as a student, March was associated with a campus student group that had no connections to white supremacy, but shared the same name as the Ku Klux Klan.

And while March’s involvement was not necessarily new information to some (other journalists and historians had reported March’s involvement over the decades), it galvanized the UW’s decision to rename the space.

In a letter published in the New York Times, then-Chancellor Rebecca Blank defended the decision, writing, “There are some things in our country’s history that are so toxic that you can never erase the stain, let alone merit a named space in our student union. Membership in a group with a name like that of the K.K.K. is one of them.”

But a growing number of scholars, actors, and civil rights advocates – including the NAACP – argue that decision was hasty, and should be reconsidered.

On today’s show — was UW-Madison’s decision too hasty? Our guests say yes. And, what to make of the findings from that 2018 report? Plus, how should we deal with complicated public history?

We’re joined by George Gonis, a freelance journalist, historian and UW-Madison alum who has been meticulously documenting March’s involvement in civil rights. Gonis has found that March, among other things, strategized with Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a keynote address to the NAACP, and advocated for singer Marian Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial.

We’re also joined by journalist Bill Lueders, author of a recent piece in The Progressive magazine that calls for greater “sifting and winnowing” through the debacle.

Photo credit: artwork and photos courtesy Chali Pittman/WORT; publicity still of Fredric March in the film “The Road to Glory” used under public domain.

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On today’s show, guest host Karma Chávez is joined by Yasmin Nair to talk about the exploitation of trauma in feminist spaces and publishing. Yasmin’s recent Current Affairs piece dives deep in to problematic nature of forcing trauma narratives on women of color.

Yasmin Nair is a writer, activist, and academic.  She is the co-founder of the radical queer editorial collective Against Equality, and the Policy Director of the Chicago queer radical collective Gender JUST.

Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, In These Times, Vox, and Electronic Intifada. She also has work in anthologies including Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Detention, Deportation, and Illegalization. You can find more about her at yasminnair.com, or on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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Two weeks ago, voters in Georgia went back to the polls for a run election. With less than a 100 thousand votes incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock beat his challenger Herschel Walker for the U.S. Senate seat.

The youth vote in Georgia skyrocketed during the 2022 election season. Joining us to talk about the runoff election and organizing the young vote is Alex Ames.

Alex Ames is a Georgia Tech student who is studying social justice, public policy, and law. They are the co-founder and Organizing Director of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. The coalition spans 28 counties, thousands of students, and is responsible for countless victories. Alex and her peers have fought against racial gerrymandering attacks on school boards. They have worked to securing the best budget for Georgia Public schools in two decades. And they successfully stopped Georgia’s Don’t Say Gay bill. Recently Alex and the team at Georgia Youth Justice Coalition organized the Gen Z vote during Georgia’s recent runoff election.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

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As we come to the end of 2022, we are joined by co-owner of A Room on One’s Own, Gretchen Treu to look back at some of our favorite books. We talk about the store’s first full year in the new location and what it is like to run an independent book store.

Books mentioned in today’s show:

* How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures By Sabrina Imbler

* An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

* A Frog in the Fall by Linnea Sterte

* The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On by Franny Choi

* Disorientation: A Novel by Elaine Hsieh Chou

* Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes by Travis Baldree

* I Love You Because I Love You by Muon Thi Van, Jessica Love

* Time Is a Mother By Ocean Vuong

* Braiding Sweetgrass: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults adapted by Monique Gray Smith

* A Is for Bee: An Alphabet Book in Translation by Ellen Heck

* Still True by Maggie Ginsberg

* Small Game: A Novel by Blair Braverman

* The Vermilion Emporium by Jamie Pacton

* American Crusade by Andrew Seidel

* Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan.

The holiday gift guide by A Room of One’s Own can be found here.

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On December 7, Peru’s president Pedro Castillo announced that he had dissolved congress by presidential decree. Almost immediately, Congress declared this a coup and deposed him. He was then arrested, and his first vice president Dina Boluarte was declared president. Protests have erupted in many parts of the country with at least seven dead and many injured. Boluarte has now declared a month-long state of emergency.

Jo-Marie Burt joins us once again to explain what happened with Castillo and what is going on with the protests.

Jo-Marie Burt is associate professor of political science and Latin American Studies at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. At Mason, she has served as Director of Latin American Studies, Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies, and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies.

Photo by Carlos Ruiz Huaman on Unsplash

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