Enoch Pratt Free Library Podcast

In 2000, the Pentagon had fewer than 50 aerial drones; ten years later, it had nearly 7,500. Drones are already a $5 billion business in the U.S. alone; the U.S. Air Force now trains more drone "pilots" than bomber and fighter pilots combined.

Medea Benjamin provides the first extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who pilots these unmanned planes, and what are the legal and moral implications. She also looks at what activists, lawyers, and scientists across the globe are doing to ground these weapons. Benjamin argues that the assassinations we are carrying out from the air will come back to haunt us when others start doing the same thing -- to us.

Medea Benjamin is a cofounder of the peace group CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange. A former economist with the United Nations and World Health Organization, she is the author and editor of eight books.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 22, 2013

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Marian House, a traveling exhibition profiles Marian House alumnae and their remarkable journeys from dependence to independence.

Accompanying Community Dialogue: The Disease of Addiction: Treatment Not Incarceration.

Recorded On: Wednesday, May 15, 2013

The ensemble plays an original arrangement by Peabody faculty member Phillip Kolker of the Quartet in d minor by Georg Phillipp Telemann. Also on the program are several arrangements of music by  the “Bubonic Bassoon Quartet” including “I Was a Teenage Bassoon Player” and “Entrance and Polka of the Bassoon Players.”

Recorded On: Saturday, May 11, 2013

When the U.S. inaugurated its first African American president in 2009, many wondered if the country had finally become a post-racial society. In Ghosts of Jim Crow, F. Michael Higginbotham argues that we're far from that imagined utopia. Indeed, the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate systemic prejudice and racism in the 21st century. Using history as a road map, Higginbotham arrives at a provocative solution for ridding the nation of Jim Crow's ghosts, suggesting that legal and political reform can successfully create a post-racial America, but only if it inspires whites and blacks to significantly alter behaviors and attitudes of race-based superiority and victimization.

F, Michael Higginbotham is the Wilson H. Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is the author of Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions.

Recorded On: Tuesday, May 7, 2013

On the program are the quintet for winds Op. 43 by Carl Nielson and Samuel Barber's "Summer Music"  woodwind quintet.

Recorded On: Saturday, May 4, 2013