Code Switch

President Trump and Silicon Valley tech bros are obsessed with IQ, but the history of intelligence testing is full of bunk race science and eugenics. With the rise of AI's "super intelligence," should we still be ranking human intelligence at all? We teamed up with our play cousins from It's Been a Minute to find out who gets to be labeled as smart with Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and Angela Saini, author of Superior: The Return of Race Science.

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Are the men in your life reading? How do you convince people to check out more novels? This week, we turn to our play cousins at It's Been a Minute and their recent conversation with author Jason Reynolds. Reynolds is the acclaimed author of young adult novels, Look Both Ways, Long Way Down, and Ghost and he joins host Brittany Luse to discuss the lessons in empathy, friendship and hope that novels can inspire in all readers.

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In 2020, “defund the police” was everywhere. Now, even politicians like AOC and Zohran Mamdani have turned around on it. But some proposals that fell under the defund umbrella, like unarmed crisis responders and violence prevention programs, actually took hold. Gene talks with Chenjerai Kumanyika, journalism professor and creator of the Empire City podcast about the history of the NYPD. They dig into why politicians will say “abolish ICE” but not “defund the police,” and whether the public is more ready to rethink policing than the people running for office think they are.


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Right-wing ideology has crept into gyms across the country. Is this a new phenomenon, or is the very idea of "fitness" ripe for politicization? Is our idea of fitness inherently fascist? We find out with political commentator Hasan Piker, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and professor Ava Purkiss, author of Fit Citizens.

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Why do Black contestants on reality TV keep getting voted out first? Like a lot of people, B.A. Parker watches reality TV to escape. But seeing contestants of color on the receiving end of microaggressions keeps pulling her back to reality. Parker talks with Xavier Prather, Big Brother’s first Black winner, and sociologist Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, about whether reality TV has an implicit bias problem.

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Zombies have roots most fans have never heard of. In Haitian Vodou, being zombified meant being enslaved even in death. B.A. Parker talks to Maya Annik Bedward, director of the new documentary Black Zombie, about how a spiritual metaphor for slavery was repackaged by Hollywood and sold back to the world, all while Haitian culture keeps getting cast as something to fear.

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Clarksdale, Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, has been losing people, jobs, and businesses for years. Now land there has been rezoned to make room for a hyperscale data center, a process that got underway before anyone even put the words “data center” in writing. Capital B reporter Aallyah Wright walks us through the hard bargain her hometown is weighing over a project nobody will even confirm is happening.

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Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, Black parents still face an impossible choice about where to send their kids. Gene talks with his twin sister about the different choices they’ve made for their kids, and with historian Noliwe Rooks about why Black families are still stuck choosing between schools that will teach their children and schools that will love them.

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The Lindsay Clancy trial captured the nation this summer, and reactions toward Clancy have been split. The case brought much needed attention to postpartum psychosis, but some question the support Clancy received from the public. This week, we speak with writer Myriam Gurba about why some cases of family annihilation get more attention than others, why we villainize mothers and the parallels with the Latin American legend of La Llorona.

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When Rep. Jasmine Crockett took the stage at a Chris Brown concert to honor him, the backlash came fast. It's a familiar cycle: every few years, Brown lands back in the news, and the public relitigates a history of violence stretching back to 2009. Gene talks with cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux and writer and DJ Noella Williams about why so many fans stay 10 toes down for him, and what accountability could even look like.

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