DecodeDC

Antoine Lynch is having a hard time finding an affordable place to live. That is, until the DC government provided him with a housing voucher that guaranteed partial payment of his monthly rent. But, when he called around to housing complexes where he wanted to live - apartments that were in neighborhoods with grocery stores, good schools, and low crime rates - the landlords told him they wouldn’t accept his voucher.
Antoine is facing what’s called source of income discrimination, and it’s illegal. Now he’s filing a discrimination complaint with the DC Office of Human Rights, hoping to eventually settle the issue and find that stability he wants.

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We think our cities look a certain way because of people’s choices and preferences, but it turns out, the government has had a huge hand in keeping neighborhoods separate and unequal.
This week on DecodeDC, we tackle the question that’s been vexing the country for more than half a century, how much can, and should, the government do to right its past wrongs when it comes to housing and segregation?

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This week’s podcast challenges a political sacred cow. In fact, it might be the mother of all sacred cows. It is the belief that foreign terrorism is one of the most serious threats to the safety of Americans and the security of what since 9/11 we have called the “homeland.”
That belief is deep. The facts supporting it are thin. But it is a premise so fundamental to our post-9/11 worldview that is rarely debated, challenged or reexamined.
No one has tried harder to unsound the alarm, to show that the sky is not falling, than John Mueller, our guest this week, a political scientist at Ohio State University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington.
In a book coming out in the fall, “Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism” (Oxford University Press), Mueller and co-author Mark G. Stewart take a hard-boiled, empirical look a the politics, phobias and failed leadership that feeds the sacred cow of counterrorism at any cost.

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Every once in a while, we like to rerun one of our most popular podcasts, and this is one of those occasions. Enjoy listening--or relistening--to our conversation with Yuval Noah Harari about his book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind".

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Renee Petro was desperate to help her son, Brandon, who sometimes would experience as many as 100 seizures a day. She tried medications, she looked into surgery...and then she discovered cannabis.
On this episode of the DecodeDC podcast, guest host Miranda Green teams up with News 21 reporters who talked to parents desperate to get their children access to medical marijuana.

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On this week’s podcast, we sit down with reporter Carol Rosenberg, who’s outlasted soldiers, interrogators, and lawyers at Guantanamo Bay. For more than 13 years, she has become the keeper of record for what remains a controversial response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 – the decision to detain, without trial, hundreds of men picked up around the world for their alleged connections to al-Qaeda and other U.S. enemies.

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The creator of The Wire and Treme has a new miniseries debuting this Sunday. We talk with David Simon about 'Show Me A Hero,' Simons's first project that he says is explicitly about race, class and how decades of government policy have created 'two Americas'.

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With more than two million people behind bars, a 500 percent increase since the mid 1970s, politicians on both sides of the aisle have come to agree that America has a prison problem.
On this week’s DecodeDC podcast—our 100th episode—guest host Emily Kopp sits down with Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and Sean Walker, a former inmate who spent two decades behind bars, about what they see in the push for prison reform.

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The similarities of reality TV and politics – especially with The Donald on the debate stage – are the topic of this bonus episode of the DecodeDC podcast. Host Miranda Green talks with Robert Galinsky, president and coach at the Reality TV School of New York, who says politicians could learn a thing or two from reality TV stars.
Alanna Haefner contributed to this story.

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On this week’s DecodeDC podcast, guest host Todd Zwillich talks with Rupal Mehta, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, about why countries that start down the path of developing nuclear weapons decide to stop.

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