The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (0:35)

Guest: Sabrina Strings, PhD, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Author of “Fearing the Black Body”

By 2030 – ten years from now – half of US adults will be obese, according to a prediction published in the New England Journal of Medicine in the last month. On the surface, health is the crux of the concern over America’s “obesity epidemic.” But if you pull the threads of that concern back a few centuries, the reasons why we’re so convinced that fat is bad, have a lot more to do with race than with health. (Originally aired 6/6/19)

 

iPhone Shortcut Allows Your Phone to Automatically Start Recording When Pulled Over by Police (18:34)

Guest: Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

There are smart phone apps – and even an iPhone shortcut – that make it easy to record a police encounter. The ACLU’s Mobile Justice app automatically sends the video to your local ACLU branch when you stop recording, just in case a police officer tries to confiscate your phone. The iPhone shortcut will start video recording when you say, “Siri, I’m being pulled over.” Should you install one of these apps? Are they even legal? (Originally aired 7/9/19)

 

Autopsy of a Wrongful Conviction (34:26)

Guest: John Hollway, Associate Dean and Executive Director, Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, University of Pennsylvania Law School

In the last 30 years more than 2,500 people have been exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit. Those innocent people spent an average of 8 years in prison before gaining their freedom. How do mistakes like that happen? Cities around the country are setting up task forces to answer that question. (Originally aired 9/3/19)

 

University of Nike (50:38)

Guest: Joshua Hunt, Author of “University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education”

If you watched the Oregon Ducks win the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, you saw that prominent bright yellow “swoosh” right in their jersey’s. The close relationship between the University of Oregon and Nike was first established in the 1990s and has been the model for other public universities looking to boost their funding through partnership with big corporations and wealthy donors. (Originally aired 2/13/19)

 

The CDC’s Sherlock Holmes (1:13:36)

Guest: Brian Amman, Ecologist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

An Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been going on now for a year and a half. More than half of the 3,400 people who’ve contracted the virus there have died. Among the international experts working to end the outbreak are disease detectives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They go into outbreak areas looking for the source of an infection. (Originally aired 3/13/19)