Eastern Standard

On this week's edition of Eastern Standard: Episode 5 of our special election year series, Democracy Optimist, hosted by University of Kentucky election law and voting rights research professor Josh Douglas.

• Why can’t we just vote on the internet? We do our banking online, after all. A few jurisdictions in the United States have used a phone app to conduct their elections, and a company called Voatz is trying to use it to revolutionize our voting system. Our guest is Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney. 
• Also in this episode: Voter ID is one of the biggest hot-button issues in election law today, with 38 states now requiring voters to show some form of ID to vote. Josh talks with Lauren Kunis, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of VoteRiders, an organization that has been at the forefront of an effort to ensure voters have the IDs they need.

We explore the anxieties of college student parents with Boston University Staff Psychiatrist Mathilde Ross, Eastern Kentucky University Clinical Psychologist Maggie Freeman, and University of Kentucky Psychologist Shannon Sauer-Zavala. Poet Lynelle Edwards discusses her latest book about life with an adult child with a mental illness. Drug pricing researcher Antonio Ciacia illuminates the costs of our meds. And Josh Douglas, host of our election year special series “Democracy Optimist,” is out with a new book detailing how recent decisions of the US Supreme Court have undermined American voters.

The focus of Episode 4 of Democracy Optimist, an Eastern Standard special election year series: 4.6 million Americans have lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction due to a policy known as felon disenfranchisement. The policy has a disproportionate impact on people of color given our criminal legal system.

Our guests for this episode are Debra Graner who had been convicted of a felony in Kentucky and recently regained her voting rights, as well as Claire Sandberg, the law student who helped Graner through the process to have her criminal conviction expunged. We’re also joined by Desmond Meade, founder of the Florida Rights Restoration Clinic, formed to re-enfranchise 1.4 million returning citizens in the Sunshine State.

Historian Clayborne Carson, keeper of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr: One person’s wokeism is another’s democracy

A safe method to remove toxic lead paint from pre-1978 homes

A new book about the nation’s oldest non-ticketed Shakespeare Festival. It’s here in Kentucky.

Crystal Jones investigates the ways we listen to music and how technology has changed both listening to and creating music.

America's nuclear monarchy: the president’s sole, absolute authority to order the launch of nuclear weapons.

Education contributor Gill Hunter gets the story of the Decode Project, created to support and promote literacy among young Kentuckians.

Kentucky Authors contributor Tom Eblen gets details of a working legacy of the James Baker Hall.

Lexington poet Dorian Hairston takes us into the pages of his new book, “Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow.” 

Eastern Standard contributor Chris Begley describes an evening of civil discussion about a contentious subject.

Follow Lamar Zala Gran’s journey from the harsh rule of the Taliban of Afghanistan to the campus of Berea College in Kentucky.

Check your county’s education report card with this comprehensive guide. It’s from the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. We get details from Prichard’s CEO, Brigitte Blom.

Hear about the expectations of high school students from Minhul Nazeer and Raima Dutt of the KY Student Voice Team.

Lexington’s new Youth Poet Laureate hopes to find poetry in law.

Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director for strategy and design at Freedom House, discusses her report, "Foreign Governments Silencing International Students and Educators in the United States."

In Episode Three of the special Eastern Standard series Democracy Optimist: 2020 saw unprecedented attacks on the results of the presidential election, even though there was no evidence to question its results. Host Joshua Douglas, an election law and voting research professor at the University of Kentucky, asks Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, co-author of “How to Steal a Presidential Election,” if this could happen again in 2024. Also in this episode: The Constitution does not explicitly confer the right to vote. Professor Rick Hasen of the UCLA Law School wants to change that.

On this week’s edition of Eastern Standard:

“It feels unusual in that the pro-authoritarian forces are not disguising their authoritarianism” - Robert Farley, a professor in the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School for Diplomacy on segments of the U.S. population who openly welcome autocratic rule in the White House.

Can “Red and Blue” folks gather in one place and hold a civil conversation? That’s the aim of workshops coming to Lexington, hosted by Braver Angels, a national organization devoted to facilitating such discussions. Our guest: Braver Angels Kentucky State Coordinator, Carolyn Dupont.

Moonshinin’ was not just an Eastern Kentucky thing. Our latest Ten Minute Radio Play is the true story of a Depression-era moonshine still bust in Fayette County.

Truth and honesty are those values that give us that “North Star” that we can rely on as we navigate our way in the world. But William Damon, one of the world's leading scholars of human development, observes that these days we seem to be going through a dysfunctional period of social change, when “an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed.” Our guest is former U.S. Attorney, University of Michigan law professor and NBC/MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade. Her new book is titled: “Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America.”

The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky has pumped tens of millions of dollars into the communities of Eastern Kentucky and serves as an umbrella organization for more than 100 community groups spread across the region. There has been a succession of leadership at the foundation. We talk with now-retired founding CEO Gerry Roll and her successor, Kristin Walker Collins.

Robby Cosenza was beloved in Lexington for his art, music and good humor. His close friend and colleague Duane Lundy remembers Robby in conversation with Tom Martin.