Beyond Politics

Alison McCook is a veteran science journalist for Reuters, Scientific American, Discover, Nature, Science, and Retraction Watch, as well as a regular columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  She takes us inside the winding science and public health road that we've taken on Covid in recent months, explains where science and public communication have gotten out of sync, and looks ahead at where we might be going next. 

John Stoehr is the Editor of "The Editorial Board," a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people, democracy and the common good. We talk about some of the fresh takes and insightful analysis that has appeared on its pages recently, especially around authoritarianism, lawlessness, the media, and how political discourse has gone off the rails. John is a former visiting professor of public policy at Wesleyan University; a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; a columnist for Public Seminar; and senior editor at Alternet.

Kathleen Ronayne is a highly respected, veteran Associate Press reporter who covers California and national politics.  So she was the perfect guest to explain some of the wild backstory that got us to tomorrow's California recall, and to preview what national political operatives and experienced analysts will be watching for in the coming days.  Why is this a thing anyway? Could Larry Elder really win with 20% of the vote?  Is Gavin Newsome going to coast to safety? And what would it really mean if the governor is recalled? 

In recent weeks, Afghanistan, the Delta surge, Hurricane Ida, and mixed economic news have changed what’s on voters' minds, and driven new and more negative perceptions of elected leaders and policies in the U.S. Joe Biden is significantly down, as are views of the Democratic Party and the state of the country overall. One of the very best polls in New Hampshire or around the country tracking these views comes from the Saint Anselm College Survey Center. The Executive Director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm is Neil Levesque...he oversees this poll, and he joins us to discuss what it says about the current state of politics in America. 

There's so much in the news these days -- much of it depressing -- that it's hard to pick our heads up and see what else is going on. It turns out that there's a lot, especially if you pick your head all the way up and look out to other worlds and some of the most exciting frontiers in science. Today, we talk about all of these fascinating developments with "The SKYGUY."  John Gianforte is an Astronomer and Director of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Observatory.  He is also a Science Writer, and Adjunct Faculty member at Granite State College, in New Hampshire.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

We’ve all been focused on the news out of Afghanistan in recent weeks, and the story there needs almost no introduction. Today we wanted to talk about the situation, how we got here, and where we’re going in the future. There is no one better to help us understand all of this that Sean Carberry. Sean is an award-winning writer, editor, and foreign policy and national security expert with more than 20 years of experience in government and journalism.  From 2018 through February 2021, Mr. Carberry served in the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General as managing editor of the Lead Inspector General quarterly reports to Congress on overseas contingency operations, which included public and classified reports on operations in Afghanistan. From June 2012 through December 2014, he was NPR’s Kabul Correspondent. He covered the ongoing war, the 2014 Afghan presidential election, and daily life in the country until NPR closed the Kabul bureau in December 2014. 

Photo by Andre Klimke on Unsplash

In recent months, there have been some potentially landmark developments on abortion. It could well be that the middle of 2021 will mark an historic turning point on an issue that has been one of the cultural hot buttons in America for decades. On May 17, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Dobbs. The case deals with Mississippi’s law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. This marks the first time that the Court will rule on the constitutionality of a pre-viability abortion ban since Roe v. Wade.  The case also features a novel conservative legal argument that the writers of the 14th Amendment, which is foundational to the Roe decision, would have considered “persons” to include “unborn children” and that fetuses are “persons” from the time of conception.

The other development is a new Texas law that creates an end run around the federal courts and Supreme Court rulings, by creating an avenue for individuals to sue people connected with providing abortions in civil court…making what one analyst called a market for abortion vigilantism.

That analyst is one of the sharpest-eyed commentators on law and legal history around, and she’s with us today.  Mia Brett has a PhD in history and specializes in American legal history. She’s a freelance writer, educator, and a contributor to The Editorial Board.

The last 10 years have seen a breathtaking pace of technological innovation in every area of our economy and society. These days, anyone on Earth with access to a mobile phone or laptop computer and the connection to the Internet can access almost the entire sum total of human knowledge with the click of a button. American high-tech companies are creating a whole new industries along with millions of jobs and millions of dollars. At the same time, all of this new innovation brings complicated questions about privacy, security, economic balance, and government regulation.

The saga of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in some ways looks like what journalists call a man bites dog story: something that happens so often that it almost escapes our attention. It does seem hardly new that awful behavior and sexual harassment by a male politician comes to light and ends a once-lofty career. But there’s a lot going on under the surface in this story, both in this particular case and in the trajectory of how we deal with issues like this among American politicians. Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered the Cuomo saga in depth. She covers legal affairs, health care and politics for The Editorial Board, and is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a judge for the Sidney Hillman Foundation.  She joins the show to dissect what we can take away from the Cuomo story.

In 2004, the Pew Research Center poll found that Americans opposed same-sex marriage 60% to 31%. But a series of legal rulings, cultural shifts, prominent gay figures in entertainment becoming wildly popular, and growing advocacy changed the entire tenor of the debate. By 2019, Pew polling on that same question of what we now call marriage equality had totally flipped: 61% supported same-sex marriage, while 31% opposed it. 

This represented the most rapid and profound change in American attitudes on any social issue since we had any measurements. So how did it happen?  Our guest today is Sasha Issenberg. He’s one of the most insightful and widely-read journalists in America, especially when it comes to dissecting what’s happening behind the curtain in American politics. He’s the author of The Engagement: America’s Quarter Century Struggle Over Same Sex Marriage, a fascinating look behind the scenes of both sides in the marriage equality fight. He’s here to tell us the inside story of what really happened.