“It starts with education. It starts with accountability. It starts with difficult conversations.”

That’s youth advocate Prenicia Clifton talking about what it takes to reduce child sexual assault. She joins Wednesday host Ali Muldrow on the show today for a candid discussion of the intersections of violence, race, and gender; Title IX and campus sexual assault; and protecting minors through education.

Prenicia Clifton is an internationally renowned opera singer and youth advocate. She currently serves as the Youth Protection and Compliance Administrator at the University of Wisconsin System.

Cover photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

Tonight, the Madison city council is voting on whether to purchase a building on Zeier Road near East Towne Mall to become a permanent homeless men’s shelter.

The vote, which was originally scheduled for late March but delayed by vote of the council, comes at a time when Madison is seeing increased homelessness in the city—and is likely to see more when COVID-related federal eviction moratoriums are lifted.

The search for this site for a new homeless shelter has been long and fraught with community debates, so Tuesday host Carousel Bayrd spends this hour breaking down the issues.

Our guests are newly elected alder Gary Halverson, who has voiced opposition to the proposal, and Linda Ketcham, executive director of JustDane, who supports the project.

Cover photo of former Savers building at 2002 Zeier Road from Google Maps

“Until we start to deal with agriculture and food, we’re going to continue having public health and environmental crises,” says food journalist Mark Bittman. “We haven’t turned the corner on this issue yet, but there’s an opportunity for us to turn the corner.”

Today, Mark Bittman joins us to talk about our relationship to food through the lens of his new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.

Mark Bittman is the author of thirty books, including the How to Cook Everything series. He was a food journalist and columnist, opinion columnist, and the lead magazine food writer at the New York Times, where he started writing in 1984 and stayed for thirty years.

Bittman is currently Special Advisor on Food Policy at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where he teaches and hosts a lecture series called Food, Public Health, and Social Justice. He is also the editor-in-chief of Heated. His latest book is Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).

Today, we turn our focus back to China and specifically the situation of the Uighurs, the Turkic ethnic group native to China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, with Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian is the China reporter at Axios. Before joining Axios, she served as the lead reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ China Cables project, a major leak of classified Chinese government documents revealing the inner workings of mass internment camps in Xinjiang. Previously, Bethany was an editor and contributing reporter at Foreign Policy magazine and a national security reporter at the Daily Beast.

Cover photo by Kuzzat Altay on Unsplash

How do we get beyond the rhetoric of “the one percent” to discuss the ruling class in twenty-first century America?

Thursday host Allen Ruff digs into this and other questions about the American ruling class and “who’s controlling the show” with Doug Henwood through the lens of his latest Jacobin article, “Take Me To Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class.”

Doug Henwood is founder and editor of the Left Business Observer and host of Behind the News on KPFA. His latest book is My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (OR Books, 2016).

Cover photo by Jon Sailer on Unsplash

“I want to make space for people who feel like they don’t fit the mold—and by that I mean all of us, at some point. The good truth is that we get to own all of ourselves.”

These are the words of local poet R.B. Simon, who joins Wednesday host Ali Muldrow for today’s final installment of the National Poetry Month series.

They have an honest conversation about writing at the intersections of identity, growing up in rural Wisconsin, and R.B.’s journey to sobriety, all along the way celebrating the forthcoming release of R.B.’s debut poetry collection, The Good Truth, out July 2.

R.B. Simon is a Madison-based queer artist and writer of African- and European-American descent. Her debut poetry collection, The Good Truth, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Over the past year, cities across the nation have seen increased interest in exploring alternatives to policing. First up today, we hear from city alder Arvina Martin about her work launching phase one of Madison’s own mental health first-responder program.

Then, EMT Daniel Felts with the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Oregon shares the successes and challenges of their local program, which has been running for over thirty years.

Cover photo courtesy of White Bird Clinic’s website

Earlier this month, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

Monday host Patty Peltekos spent her high school years in Brooklyn Center, and she found herself wondering: what’s changed about this place and other inner-ring suburbs in the U.S.?

To trace this history and explore its ramifications, policy researcher Will Stancil joins us for a discussion of the changing status of “left-behind” suburbs like Brooklyn Center, from redlining to present-day segregation.

Will Stancil is a research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on civil rights law and policy in housing and education, with particular emphasis on affordable housing and charter schools.

You can read Will’s op-ed for the Atlantic, “What Daunte Wright’s Killing Foretells for the Suburbs,” here.

Cover photo by Bibin Tom on Unsplash

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at UW–Milwaukee hosted its 42nd Annual Latin American Film Series earlier this week.

For today’s show, Esty spends the hour talking with with professor Nancy Bird-Soto about the films and the range of important issues they raise about Latin American history, culture, and politics.

Nancy Bird-Soto is a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the author of Dissident Spirits: The Post-Insular Imprint in Puerto Rican/Diasporic Literature (Peter Lang, 2018).

Cover image: Film still from Pajaros de verano (Birds of Passage)

What are the contradictory messages being sent to Beijing by the early Biden administration? What are the dangers of an accidental slide into direct confrontation? What could it mean for the climate crisis if the world’s two major polluters remain at odds?

These are some of the questions Allen raises today on the show with guest Michael T. Klare as they discuss the “new cold war” simmering between the U.S. and China.

Michael T. Klare is a professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and defense correspondent at The Nation magazine. He is the author of many books, including Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Petroleum Dependency (Penguin, 2004), The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (Picador, 2012), and All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change (Metropolitan Books, 2019).