Eastern Standard

This week on Eastern Standard:

Former Standard & Poors Managing Director and lifelong Appalachian journalist Jim Branscome on what local officials should make sure they do before green lighting a data center in their locales.

Richmond physician Dustin Devers, chair of an exploratory committee formed to develop plans for a new college of osteopathic medicine at EKU.

"Healthy Aging" series hosts Bill Goodman and Dr. Jeff Foxx ask "how do we learn to be old"? Their guest: longtime geriatric care management specialist Esther Hurlburt.

Former KET documentary filmmaker Tom Thurman discusses his debut novel "Their Secret Places."

This week on Eastern Standard:

As co-founder of the Lexington-based aerospace and biotechnology company Space Tango, and founder or the organization “Humanity in Deep Space,” Kris Kimel is tuned-in as preparations are underway to resume manned space exploration. How will Kentucky be involved? Kimel shares details of a “Kentucky Space Summit” in Lexington on November 13.

How is AI in the classroom working out? Lisa Blue, Director of AI Strategies at Eastern Kentucky University walks us through the challenges and advantages being encountered by faculty. And Dr. Blue also offers some examples of AI agents run amok. It’s the latest in the Art Shechet series, “The AI Revolution: Promise and Peril.”

British journalist Guy Kiddey arranged to rent a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in Nashville for a tour of the American South, producing a podcast series along the way to document his conversations with the people he is meeting along the way.  Kiddey, who has reported for The Economist, as well as the BBC and other international media, has made stops in central and eastern Kentucky. Listen to the impressions he is sharing with his U.K. audience. 

This week on Eastern Standard: Episode 33 of our series, “Democracy Optimist” with Joshua Douglas.

Preparing for the midterm elections with Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams and Andrea Hailey, CEO of Vote.org.

Part One
Election Day is almost here, which means that in Kentucky voters can go to the polls on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before Election Day as well as on Tuesday, November 3. Kentucky continues to serve as a positive national story about its transparent and secure election administration. Returning to the show is the person behind that smooth process, Secretary of State Michael Adams. Secretary Adams is in the middle of administering his fifth statewide election as Secretary of State,[1] and the voters have some important decisions to make. Not only will this election decide who will succeed long-time Senator Mitch McConnell, but every house seat in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Kentucky General Assembly are up for grabs. There are also important races for Mayor, city council, school board, and more.

Part Two
As Americans gear up to vote in this year’s midterm elections, questions about the voting process continue to swirl. There has been election litigation all over the country regarding gerrymandering and the maps that will be used. Lawsuits have considered the rules about the voting process, such as with mail-in ballots. And the media keeps reporting on potential threats. That’s where vote.org comes in. It’s a nonpartisan organization that has a simple but important mission: to connect voters with the tools and information they need. Here to tell us all about it is vote.org’s CEO, Andrea Hailey. Andrea has been at the helm of Vote.org since 2019,[1] and she brings to the organization nearly two decades of professional experience focused on connecting with voters.

This week on Eastern Standard:

In September, McClatchy Media made deep cuts at newspapers around the country, including the Lexington Herald-Leader. Among those losing their jobs was reporter Alex Acquisto, who spent seven years at the paper covering subjects including public health, politics and Eastern Kentucky. She joins us to discuss what a community loses when professional reporters no longer cover public affairs.

Where are Americans these days on press freedoms? The Pew Research Center asked and senior researcher Kirsten Eddy tells us what was found in the data.

British-born Rory Harris has lived in multiple countries but when it came time to settle, he chose Georgetown, Kentucky. Why? Hear the answer and more in this latest episode of our series, “I’m Not From Here.” hosted by David Miller.

It’s cider season and there’s a celebration in the works. Greta Wright from Wise Bird Cider in Lexington has those details and shares what’s happening in the Kentucky cider industry.

This week on Eastern Standard:

Today's voter maps tend to break us down into two main camps: Red or Blue, Republican or Democrat, with some Independents in the middle. But data from the Pew Research Center finds the American electorate far more colorful and complex. Carolyn Dupont, host of our series “Civics, Civility and the Path to a Shared American Future” is joined by Pew researcher Dexter Oliphant.

Our series “I’m Not From Here” is bringing to light a Kentucky population that is made up of people from all over the world. David Miller’s latest guest, Katerina Stoykova is from Bulgaria but for decades has made Lexington her home.

Tom Eblen talks with Erin Miller Reid about “But For Fortune,” Reid’s new novel exploring mental illness, family secrets, and generational trauma through the intertwined stories of a young Kentucky medical student and her grandmother, whose decades of psychiatric institutionalization conceal a painful family history.

And, as they say, "you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take the Kentucky out of the boy." That’s certainly true of eastern Kentuckian Chris Mullins, now living in California and producing music that sounds an awful lot like home. Chris joins us with some samples from his latest album, "Coal."

This week on Eastern Standard:

David Phemister, Nature Conservancy-KY, acquisition of 1700+ acres of forest in Bell Co. and what this means.

A conversation with Silas House about The Tulip Poplars, his latest eastern Kentucky-based novel due to publish on Oct. 13

Eugene Poole, Hopkinsville native and an architect and certified project construction manager who oversaw restoration of the U.S. Capitol dome, on his quilts depicting in life size, Black jockeys from the early days of the KY Derby. Now on display at Headley Whitney Museum in Lexington.

Latest international artist (Cape Verdean Lucibela) coming to Lexington for a Greenroom Exchange concert.

Theatre program for coming season at Union Commonwealth University in Barbourville.

This week on Eastern Standard:

Kentucky has hundreds of nursing homes caring for some of the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable residents. Questions have persisted about staffing, inspections, neglect and whether government oversight is adequate to protect the people living in them. Lexington Herald-Leader Government Accountability Reporter John Cheves has been examining those issues for years. His latest reporting focuses on nursing homes with repeated serious deficiencies — including facilities singled out by the federal government for additional scrutiny.

More than two-thirds of American adults, 40 or older, say they worry about their brain health and about developing Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia. That’s according to a 20-26 survey from the Alzheimer’s Association. For the latest in their series on “Healthy Aging,” Bill Goodman and Dr. Jeff Foxx talk about the latest developments in Alzheimer's research with Dr. Gregory Jicah with the University of Kentucky Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

So the kids have been in school for a little over a month now. How’s it going? How about math? It can be a struggle for students and parents. And as hear in the latest from education contributor Brigitte Blom and her guest, there’s a movement among educators to make the math taught in our schools easier for all to digest with a clear eye on how number crunching is a vital lifelong skill.

This week on Eastern Standard:

Episode 32 of our series, Democracy Optimist, takes the temperature of a challenged American democracy with only weeks to go before a highly consequential midterm election.

Host Joshua Douglas, a research professor of election law and voting rights at the University of Kentucky welcomes Professor Steven Levitsky, Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and a Professor of Government at Harvard University, and League of Women Voters CEO, Celina Stewart.

This week on Eastern Standard:

As of September 15 under a new Trump administration rule, international students and exchange visitors generally are no longer admitted to the country for what has long been called the “duration of status” — essentially, the length of time required to complete their academic programs. Instead, most will be admitted for a fixed period of no more than four years and will have to seek federal approval to remain longer. Raising concerns about the implications is our guest, former University of Kentucky Provost, Kumble Subbaswamy.

“I’m Not From Here” is a new series from Eastern Standard contributor David T. Miller. He’s been talking with people whose origins are elsewhere in the US and the world about their experiences coming to our region. Today’s guest is: Nima Kulkarni, a Louisville-based immigration attorney and the first foreign-born Indian-American member of the Kentucky General Assembly. She was six years old when her family came to America from India, settling in Louisville.

Voter-registration data gathered and analyzed by USA-Facts finds that in three out of four counties where party-registration data is available, the share of voters registered outside the Democratic and Republican parties has increased. Joining us is Amber Thomas, Senior Data Visualization Engineer at USAFacts.

There’s a documentary about a documentary in the works. Derek Operle, news director at member station WKMS in Murray, has been talking with people involved in the making of the Oscar-winning film “Harlan County USA”, the legendary film that will be screened as part of the Twelve Lions Film Festival at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington.

*There has been an update since we produced the original version of this episode. U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor in Boston has ruled in favor of a coalition of unions and higher education advocacy groups saying the Department of Homeland Security adopted the policy based on "exceptionally weak" rationales. Judge Saylor, appointed to the bench by Republican President George W. Bush, wrote that the rule upended a system through which the U.S. for nearly five decades had issued visas to foreign students for their "duration of status.” So, for now, the administration’s rule is on hold.

This week on Eastern Standard:

A full hour focused on art: its well-being, its protection, its performance and its ability to bridge cultures.

Artists have always responded to change. But today, change is also reshaping the systems that allow art to be made, supported, exhibited and discovered.Those concerns are at the center of “Altered States,” a statewide symposium-series organized by the Great Meadows Foundation. The Central Kentucky symposium takes place September 19 at the University of Kentucky College of Design. We’re joined by symposium chair, Jeffrey Johnson.

The event will be followed by “Readiness Reimagined: the Arts Disaster and Crisis Preparedness Conference” September 24th and 25th at the University of Kentucky's Gatton Student Center in Lexington. Our guests are Dr. Leah Hamilton and Dr. Rachel Shane are with the University of Kentucky's Department of Arts Administration.

Disasters of all sorts are at the heart of a new record album from Lexington singer-songwriter and Transylvania University professor Scott Whiddon. We discuss influences, process and how the work informs his methods in the classroom.

Kevin Nance sits down with publisher, author, poet, filmmaker and actor Katerina Stoykova for a conversation about her latest film, “Other Houses,” set to screen during the upcoming Twelve Lions Film Festival at the Kentucky Theater in Lexington.

Shawn Choi is the US representative for the South Korean band Insun Park & General, the latest presentation by Lexington’s Greenroom Exchange.