In The Moment podcast

It’s no secret that housing costs are climbing and income is struggling to keep up. It’s a complex problem with a lot of loud voices. One of the newest voices, however, is the YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”) movement.

This growing number of influential activists are calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Max Holleran’s book, Yes to the City, offers an in-depth look at the movement and how it fits into the larger debate of how we shape where we live.

From YIMBY’s origins in San Francisco to its current group of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Holleran explores how changing the way we look at urban density can make an impact. Once blamed for overpopulated slums, urban density has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and simultaneously unable to pay high rents. For many, the YIMBY movement has become a way forward. Yet, with many points of view and powers at play in this fast-changing public debate, there is much tension between activists and proponents of other housing movements.

In this installment of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Marcus Harrison Green talks with Holleran about the current state of the housing movement, the history that got us here, and how both might shape the future of where we live.

Max Holleran is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on urban development in Europe and the United States, particularly how cities manage tourism. He has written about gentrification, architectural aesthetics, post-socialist urban planning, and European Union integration for anthropology, sociology, geography, and history journals. His work on cities and politics has also appeared in Australian Book Review, Boston Review, Contexts, Dissent, Slate, and many other publications. He is currently an Urban Studies Foundation research fellow. He is the author of Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union.

Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald and a columnist with The Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity, and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020.

Buy the Book—Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing 

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Since it started, Social Security has been a cornerstone for retirement in America. But Americans are living longer and having fewer children, which means that this popular program now pays more in benefits than it collects in revenue. There’s less going into the pot than there is going out. Without reforms, 83 million Americans will face an immediate benefit cut of 20 percent in 2034, just a dozen years away.

What’s more, most future retirees are not participating in employee-sponsored retirement plans outside of Social Security, which could otherwise buffer the impacts of these cuts. Many people are counting on the safety net of Social Security for their future.

How did we get here and what is the solution? In Fixing Social Security, R. Douglas Arnold explores how Social Security has played out in American politics, why Congress struggles to fix its problems, and what legislators can do to save it.

In the 140th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Sally James interviews Arnold about whether or not America will be able to fix the future of Social Security and how we might go about doing it.

R. Douglas Arnold is the William Church Osborn Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University. His books include Congress, the Press, and Political Accountability (Princeton), The Logic of Congressional Action, and Framing the Social Security Debate.

Sally James is a writer and journalist who covers science and medical research. She has written for The Seattle Times, South Seattle Emerald, Seattle and UW Magazines, among others. For the Emerald, she has been focusing during the pandemic on stories about health and access for communities of color. In the past, she has been a leader and volunteer for the nonprofit Northwest Science Writers Association. For many years, she was a reviewer for Health News Review, fact-checking national press reporting for accuracy and fairness.

Buy the Book — Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

What is it like to be a young, Black, American woman traveling in Southern and Eastern Africa? In her new novel, No Blame, No Shame, No Guilt, Leoma James explores the profound experience of being surrounded by Africa’s natural beauty and vibrant culture while also realizing the harsh realities of racism and the long-term implications of colonization in Africa. Through short stories and poetry, James exposes readers to the different racial relations present within each story, allowing them to draw their own conclusions about racism and white supremacy.

James only has one request: that readers consider what they know about history and current events and reflect on how they have contributed to the racial relations that exist within society today. Who is to be blamed for the gross discrepancies we see and experience? Who should feel shame for the perpetuation of colonial ideals? Who is guilty for the dramatic and disproportionate physical and mental brutality invoked against Black bodies?

In the 139th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Charlie James interviews Leoma James about No Blame, No Shame, No Guilt. 

Leoma James is a young Black poet, storyteller, activist, and educator from Seattle, Washington. She primarily writes poetry and short stories that focus on the Black experience, from a global standpoint. Leoma is a world traveler who extended her studies at Washington State University through the Knowledge Exchange Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. Leoma also served in Namibia with the U.S Peace Corps from 2017-2019 as a Secondary English teacher and has traveled extensively through Southern and Eastern Africa. Leoma is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Education at the University of Washington and has the desire to support students who are disadvantaged academically and socially due to race, income, immigration status, and language barriers, as well as people with disabilities.

Charlie James has been an organizer in the Black American community for most of his life, beginning at age five after he led black kindergartners into the Michigan school system in 1956. A leader for Black students throughout his schooling, Charlie became the founder and First President of the Black Student Federation at Lake Michigan Junior College and was named a Ford Foundation Scholar. After receiving death threats due to his community activism, Charlie left Michigan and came to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he became the President of the Black Student Union and an editor for the UW Daily. Today, Charlie is a well-known editorial writer for every major newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, including his own platform, the African American Business and Employment Journal. He is also the founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Park in Seattle and one of the founders of Northwest African American Museum. He is currently in the process of writing a book called The Survival of Black America and is a proud father of three daughters.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Design is more than an aesthetically pleasing logo or banner – it has the power to solve problems in unique ways, cultivate innovation, and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. In Reimagining Design, Kevin Bethune describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity. Bethune, who began as an engineer at Westinghouse, moved on to Nike (where he designed Air Jordans), and now works as a sought-after consultant on design and innovation, shows how design can transform individual lives and organizations.

In Bethune’s account, diversity, equity, and inclusion emerge as a recurring theme. He shows how, as we leverage design for innovation, we also need to consider the broader ecological implications of our decisions and acknowledge the threads of systemic injustice in order to realize positive change. He contends that design transformation takes leadership by leaders who do not act as gatekeepers but, with agility and nimbleness, build teams that mirror the marketplace.

Bethune is joined by Beverly Aarons in the 138th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment Podcast, as they discuss design in harmony with other disciplines.

Design in harmony with other disciplines can be incredibly powerful; multidisciplinary team collaboration is the foundation of future innovation. With insight and compassion, Bethune provides a framework for bringing this about.

Kevin G. Bethune is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, a think tank for design and innovation. Over a career that spans more than twenty years, he has worked in engineering, business, and design.

Beverly Aarons is a writer, artist, and game developer. She works across disciplines exploring the intersections of history, hidden current realities, and imagined future worlds. She specializes in making unseen perspectives visible and aims to infuse all of her creative work with a deep sense of emotionality. She’s won the Guy A. Hanks, Marvin H. Miller Screenwriting Award, Community 4Culture Fellowship, Artist Trust GAP Award, 4Culture Creative Consultancies Award, and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture smART Ventures grant.  She’s currently publishing in-depth artist profiles at Artists Up Close on Substack.

Buy the Book—Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

In today’s internet-based world, it’s easy to forget that there was a time before it was mainstream. How is it built? Who decides its content? And how has that content affected our culture? In this episode of In the Moment, author and researcher Alexander Monea takes a close look at this thing we all take for granted and argues that the internet isn’t as open source as one might think.

In his new book, The Digital Closet, Monea explores how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden in algorithms, keywords, and content moderation. Monea argues that the internet became straight by suppressing everything that is not, forcing LGBTQIA+ content into increasingly narrow channels — rendering it invisible through opaque algorithms, automated and human content moderation, warped keywords, and other strategies of digital overreach. Monea explains how the United States’ thirty-year “war on porn” has brought about the over-regulation of sexual content, which created censorship of a lot of nonpornographic content, including material on sex education and LGBTQ+ activism.

It turns out that we may take a lot for granted when it comes to the internet. Monea offers a chance to confront its flaws and examine the cultural, technological, and political conditions that put LGBTQIA+ content into the closet.

In the 137th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Monea discusses The Digital Closet with Edward Wolcher.

Alexander Monea is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University.

Edward Wolcher is a writer, media artist, and cultural organizer based in Seattle. His technology consultancy, cultureindustry.org, helps artists and activists find their digital voice.

Buy the Book—The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

As COVID-19 began to spread around the world in 2020, so did a steady stream of information — and disinformation. Running parallel to the pandemic was an “infodemic,” a digital and physical deluge of information that resulted in mass confusion and censorship. In their new book, The Infodemic, authors Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney lay bare the mechanisms of a modern brand of “censorship through noise” that moves beyond traditional means of state control (jailing critics and restricting the flow of information, for example) to open the floodgates of misinformation. The result? A public overwhelmed with lies and half-truths.

Simon and Mahoney have traveled the world for many years defending press freedom and journalists’ rights as the directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists. They’ve charted COVID censorship beginning in China, through Iran, Russia, India, Egypt, Brazil, and inside the Trump White House. They argue that increased surveillance in the name of public health, the collapse of public trust in institutions, and the demise of local news reporting all contributed to help governments hijack the flow of information and usurp power. Through vivid characters and behind-the-scenes accounts, Simon and Mahoney argue that under the cover of a global pandemic, governments have undermined freedom and taken control — and that this new political order may be the legacy of the disease.

Truth may seem like a simple concept, but Simon and Mahoney highlight how complex it really is. What do you consider a fact? How do you know what a fact is? In this installment of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, radio host Katy Sewall interviews Simon and Mahoney about these questions in the context of today’s pandemic and political powers.

Joel Simon is a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School and formerly the Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Before joining CPJ, he worked as a journalist in Latin America and California. He is the author of three books, including We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Hostages, Kidnapping, and Ransom, also from Columbia Global Reports. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Robert Mahoney is Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He was a Reuters correspondent with postings in Southeast Asia, West Africa, India, Israel, France and Germany. This is Robert’s first book. He lives in New York City.

Katy Sewall is a back-up announcer/host for KUOW and a feature reporter. She’s a PRINDI award-winning producer who trained with Radiolab and toured with A Prairie Home Companion. Her work has appeared on The Takeaway, Here & Now, the BBC, and more. Katy spent nine years as the Senior Producer of Weekday with Steve Scher and is currently the host and creator of the international podcast The Bittersweet Life.

Buy the Book—The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Have you ever watched a dog sleep? At times it doesn’t look like sleep at all with their tails thumping, paws padding at an invisible ground, and squeaks, grunts, and growls disrupting an otherwise quiet slumber. We might assume that they’re dreaming about squirrels, or a really good bone. But are they?

What really goes on in the minds of animals when they sleep? Author David Peña-Guzmán brings together behavioral and neuroscientific research on animal sleep with philosophical theories of dreaming in his new book, When Animals Dream. Through his research, Peña-Guzmán builds a convincing case for animals as conscious beings and examines the thorny scientific, philosophical, and ethical questions it raises.

In the 135th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, senior correspondent Steve Scher and David Peña-Guzmán discuss the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhuman animals, challenging us to regard animals as beings who matter, and for whom things matter.

David M. Peña-Guzmán is associate professor of humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco State University. He specializes in critical animal studies, the history and philosophy of science, and contemporary European philosophy. He is a coauthor of Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers’ Brief and cohost of the popular Overthink podcast.

Steve Scher is a podcaster and interviewer and has been a teacher at the University of Washington since 2009. He worked in Seattle public radio for almost 30 years and is Senior Correspondent for Town Hall Seattle’s In The Moment podcast.

Buy the Book: When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness 

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

The Tirukkuṟaḷ, or Kural, for short, is considered a masterpiece of universal philosophy, ethics, and morality. Traditionally attributed to Thiruvalluvar, also known as Valluvar, the original text has been dated from 300 BCE to 5th century CE. The classic Tamil work is one of the most cited and translated ancient texts in existence; it has been translated into over 40 Indian and non-Indian languages and has never been out of print since its first publication in 1812.

In a new translation of the Kural, Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma brings English readers closer than ever to the brilliant inner and outer music of Tiruvalluvar’s work and ideas. The work consists of 1,330 short philosophical verses, or kurals, that together cover a wide range of personal and cosmic experiences, such as —

Politics:

Harsh rule that brings idiots together—nothing

Burdens the earth more

Friendship:

Friendship is not a face smiling—friendship

Is a heart that smiles

Greed:

Those who won’t give and enjoy—even with billions

They have nothing

Drawing on the poetic tradition of W. S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, and William Carlos Williams, and nurtured by two decades of study under Tamil scholar Dr. K. V. Ramakoti, Pruiksma’s translation transforms the barrier of language into a bridge, bringing the fullness of Tiruvalluvar’s poetic intensity to a new generation.

In the 134th episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Pruiksma discusses his translation of the Kural with poet, editor, and translator, Dr. Ruben Quesada.

Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is an author, poet, performer, and teacher. His books include The Safety of Edges and Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar. Pruiksma teaches writing for Cozy Grammar and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, 4Culture, Artist Trust, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the US Fulbright Program, the American Literary Translators Association, and Oberlin Shansi.

Ruben Quesada, Ph.D. is editor of Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (University of New Mexico Press, 2022) and author of Revelations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011), and translator of Selected Translations of Luis Cernuda (Aureole Press, 2008).

Dr. Quesada has served as an editor for AGNI, Pleiades, and The Kenyon Review. His writing appears in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. He is an Associate Teaching Fellow at The Attic Institute and teaches for the UCLA Writers’ Program. He lives in Chicago.

Buy the Book: The Kural—Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural: A New Translation of the Classical Tamil Masterpiece on Ethics, Power and Love

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

As Curator-in-Residence for Town Hall, Linda Lee has been working with Town Hall Seattle since October 2021 to better interpret and display our permanent art collections, as well as develop a longer-term exhibition plan including artwork from the community.

In the 133rd episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Program Director Shin Yu Pai interviews Lee about her work as Curator-in-Residence, her collaboration with Urban Artworks to put art on our walls, and exciting opportunities for the public to get hands-on and make murals with us this June.

Linda Lee is a Museology graduate student at the University of Washington and aspires to pursue a Ph.D. in Paleobiology after graduation in 2022. Her fields of interest are in Curatorial and Collections Management, with a particular proclivity towards Natural History, Heritage and History museums.

Shin Yu Pai is Program Director for Town Hall. She hosts the Lyric World podcast for In The Moment and is developing a podcast with KUOW Public Radio that will launch in June 2022. She’s the author of 11 books and a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Studies clearly indicate that Black women, girls, and non-binary people face disproportionately high rates of physical and sexual violence, and face a greater risk of death by homicide than women and non-binary people of white, Latinx, and Asian/Pacific Islander descent. What forces have contributed to a legacy of violence, and is justice possible?

In America, Goddam, Black feminist historian Dr. Treva B. Lindsey explores the combined force of anti-Blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and capitalism in the lives of Black women and girls in the United States today. Dr. Lindsey explains that the struggle for justice begins with a reckoning of the pervasiveness of violence against Black women and girls in the United States. Through a combination of history, theory, and memoir, Dr. Lindsey highlights the gender dynamics of anti-Black violence and addresses how the circumstances of this violence remain underreported and understudied.

Dr. Lindsey also shows that the sanctity of life and liberty for Black men has been a rallying cry within Black freedom movements – movements that Black women are rarely the focus of despite their lived experiences, frontline participation, and leadership in demanding justice. Across generations and centuries, their refusal to remain silent about violence against them led many to envision and build toward Black liberation through organizing and radical politics.

In the 132nd episode of Town Hall’s In the Moment podcast, Dr. Lindsey and Leoma James discuss the collective journey toward just futures for Black women.

Dr. Treva B. Lindsey is Associate Professor in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Ohio State University and founder of the Transformative Black Feminism(s) Initiative in Columbus, Ohio.

Leoma James is a writer, activist, political science and communication broadcasting Alum at Washington State University and Peace Corps Namibia 2017-2019.    Buy the Book—America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women and the Struggle for Justice    Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.