Bedrosian Bookclub Podcast

Octavia Butler's 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, was listed as a New York Times bestseller for the first time in September 2020.

Parable is the story of a 15-year-old Black girl with plans to save civilization. Lauren was brought up in a small walled community in Southern California. America is in the middle of a heated election and facing deep ecological crisis, spreading disease, drug epidemics, sky-rocketing homelessness, and rampant poverty. She sees in these crises possibility for something more dire in her near future.

When it happens, she's prepared with a way forward for herself and anyone willing to join her.

Host Aubrey Hicks is joined by Jeffery A. Jenkins, Donnajean Ward, and Olivia Olson on this discussion of the prescient novel.

For this bonus episode, we're talking with Daniel Flaming & Anthony Orlando on the new report on homelessness in the time of COVID (and after). The Economic Roundtable report uses past pandemic and past recession data to predict how COVID joblessness will translate into homelessness over the coming years. Looking at joblessness as well as the housing market, the authors predict that this recession with see more than double the unhousing that we saw in 2008 (when 10% of the jobless became homeless within the three years following the recession).

These dire predictions also come with concrete policy solutions that will help prevent this unhousing from happening after the pandemic, and hopefully prevent catastrophes after the next recession or pandemic.

Locked Out: Unemployment and Homelessness in the COVID Economy is underwritten by the Economic Roundtable, and is written by Daniel Flaming, Anthony W. Orlando, Patrick Burns, and Seth Pickens.

Download the full report here: https://economicrt.org/publication/locked-out/

In today's bonus episode, we speak with Elizabeth Dragga (Founder of The Book Truck) and Julie Sandor about the work they do to support young book nerds throughout LA County.

"The future is limited for teens with low literacy skills. Underserved teens face tremendous barriers to reading. Fortunately, that's where The Book Truck comes in. We improve literacy by giving free books to foster care and low-income teens in a way that gets even the most reluctant reader to pick up a book."

Check them out, learn how you can help put free books into the hands of underserved teens!

What better way to end a hard year than to visit Grafton, New Hampshire as author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling as he reports on the people who lived there during the Free Town Project? In the new book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, Hongoltz-Hetling follows Graftonites and some "colonizers' who saw it as the perfect place to build a utopian community free of government.

Where does the balance between individual rights and the common good exist in American politics? What can this book tell us about the current controversy on mask wearing during this pandemic? And what kind of governance would suit the bears of New Hampshire the best?

Host Lisa Schweitzer is joined by Anthony Orlando, Aubrey Hicks, and David Sloane.

This episode is a bit different but we decided this was too good to pass up. We aren't discussing a book today, rather we're going to cover another important report out of the USC Price School of Public Policy.

In October we spoke to folks from the Price Center for Social Innovation and the Safe Communities institute about criminal justice. Today ... we're going back to the Price Center to discuss a new report on housing affordability in Los Angeles. The report covers findings from a door-to-door survey done in 2019 to uncover the realities of families living with rent burden.

Aubrey Hicks (our ED) speaks to Gary Painter (Social Innovation), Jovanna Rosen, Sean Angst, and Soledad De Gregorio about the impact of rent burden on two neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

These findings "must be taken into account when creating policy responses to protect renters during the COVID-19 pandemic, underscore the rental precarity that, which, as rental precarity existed prior to the pandemic. Researcher and practitioner efforts must address the impending eviction crisis stemming from the pandemic shut-down as well as the more enduring task of tackling long-term rental affordability."

To learn more about this project, including an overview of the project strategy, as well as key findings from analyses of listening sessions and public safety data, check out the report webpage here.

In Citizen, Claudia Rankine wrote: "Because white men can't / police their imagination / black people are dying."

In her follow-up book, Just Us: An American Conversation, Rankine comes back to her exploration of conversation and the racial imaginary of the United States. Through the practice of making conversation, creating an entangled empathy, the book interrogates Whiteness and the state of relating to others. Rankine provides an example of a process with which all of us can explore our American story.

Host Aubrey Hicks is joined by LaVonna Lewis, Olivia Olson, Sumun Pendakur, and David Sloane.

The Auctioneer was released in 1976 with a campaign that likened it to "The Lottery." That the novel reflects an ongoing fascination with the broken dream of a peaceful rural life.

Set in a farming community in New Hampshire, the Joan Samson creates a town of residents bracing for change, unsure of the future and looking toward an understood past. Farmers know that as city dwellers continue their flight to the interiors … the land they farm is worth more than the history of their town, the generations lived, or all the crops sewn.

The arrival of Perly Dunsmore, an auctioneer, takes that unease to new levels. Yet … he's simply helping the townsfolk to sell off unwanted items. What is wrong with that?

Joan Samson's The Auctioneer is a classic. Her characters live in a very different time, the horror they face remains entirely relatable.

Host Lisa Schweitzer is joined by Aubrey Hicks, Jeff Jenkins, and Stacy Patterson.

This episode is a bit different but we decided this was too good to pass up. We aren't discussing a book today, rather we're going to cover an important report out of the USC Price School of Public Policy.

Given recent events, the findings of this report can help us understand why and how the dialogue between communities and law enforcement is so fraught. Perhaps the two stakeholders are thinking about public safety in very different ways. This project can help us understand both the conflict and where to go from here.

"The past decade has elevated the urgent need for police reform, brought to the forefront by high-profile police killings and movements like #BlackLivesMatter. To better understand conceptions of public safety and support the growing public interest in criminal justice reform, the USC Price Center for Social Innovation partnered with Microsoft and the USC Price Safe Communities Institute to launch the NDSC Criminal Justice Data Initiative in the spring of 2019."

Today, Aubrey Hicks (our ED) speaks to Gary Painter (Social Innovation) and Erroll Southers (Safe Communities Institute) about the impetus behind the collaboration, the process of understanding community needs, the impact they hope to see, and thoughts on the next stages of research.

For links to some of the things we talk about, please see the showpage.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, focuses on an outbreak of cholera in central London in 1854. John Snow, a doctor who theorized that cholera was waterborne, used the opportunity to collect data to prove his theory. Meanwhile the neighborhood vicar, Henry Whitehead, wanted to prove him wrong. Johnson argues that the work of these two men ushered in the modern city. Did cholera change the world?

"The history books tend to orient themselves around nationalist story lines: overthrowing the king, electing the presidents, fighting the battles. But the history book of recent Homo sapiens as a species should begin and end with one narrative line: We became city dwellers." (Ch 9, page 232)

🎧 Host Aubrey Hicks is joined by Jeff Jenkins and David Sloane from USC Price.

For links to some of the things we talk about, see the showpage.

An interview with author of The Affordable City by Shane Phillips. (Follow Phillips on Twitter: @ShaneDPhillips) Shane Phillips believes that effectively tackling the housing crisis requires that cities support both tenant protections and housing abundance. There is no single solution to the housing crisis—it will require a comprehensive approach backed by strong, diverse coalitions.

Read along with us! For September, we're reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. Join the conversation about each episode on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Or email us at [email protected].