Knox Pods

When Jimmy Hoffa said to Frank Sheeran "I heard you paint houses," they both understood the code—to paint a house is to kill a man. Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett gives his take on the book "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt (recorded October 19, 2016). This compelling history presents Sheeran's deathbed confession as a ruthless man who was not just a high official of the Teamsters Union, but also a Mafia assassin. 

Mayor Burchett has served as Mayor of Knox County since 2010, after serving in the Tennessee legislature (House and Senate) for 16 years.

(This book was published in 2004 as "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa. The 2016 updated edition may have the alternate title above.)

Dr. Annette Mendola responds to Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande in this podcast of a Books Sandwiched In program (recorded June 22, 2016).

Dr. Mendola comments, "The American healthcare system has ardently pursued heroic, lifesaving technologies. It has been less invested in helping people preserve the things that matter most to them in life, such as mobility, relationships, meaningful activity, and being at home. Gawande encourages us to question the way medicine is produced and consumed, and to ask ourselves what we really want from healthcare."

Dr. Mendola’s experience as a nurses’ aide during high school and later on the inpatient psychiatric floor of a small county hospital naturally led to her interest in end-of-life issues and medical ethics. Prior to her current tenure as Director of Clinical Ethics at the University of Tennessee Medical Center, she was a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The Honorable Pamela Reeves reviews Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman in this recording. Hirshman’s dual biography includes revealing stories of how these trailblazers fought for their own recognition in a male-dominated profession—battles that would ultimately benefit every American woman. She also makes clear how these two justices have shaped the legal framework of modern feminism, including employment discrimination, abortion, affirmative action, sexual harassment, and many other issues crucial to women’s lives.

Judge Reeves became the first female District Judge in the Eastern District of Tennessee in 2014. She was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate on a vote of 99-0.

Dr. Suzie Allard offers a researcher's viewpoint on Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. Whether it is used by the National Security Agency to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.

Dr. Allard is Associate Dean for Research at the University of Tennessee College of Communication and Information where she researches how scientists and engineers use and communicate information, with a focus on scientific data.

Between the World and Me is a letter that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his adolescent son about how to be Black in America. Coates tells his son, “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." Pivoting from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, he offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Coates shares the story of awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder.

Pastor Chris Battle of the Tabernacle Baptist Church is joined by Chris Woodhull of the SoulCare Project in Chattanooga to lead this community discussion of the book.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjørn Lomborg is the subject of this discussion led by Renée Hoyos, Executive Director of the Tennessee Clean Water Network.

In Cool It, Lomborg takes a conservative approach to climate change, arguing that many of the elaborate and staggeringly expensive actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ultimately will have little impact on the world’s temperature. He suggests that rather than focusing on ineffective solutions that will cost us trillions of dollars over the coming decades, we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches (such as massively increasing our commitment to green energy research and development) that will allow us to deal not only with climate change but also with other pressing global concerns, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. And he considers why and how this debate has fostered an atmosphere in which dissenters are immediately demonized.

The catastrophic explosion of Fraterville mine in Coal Creek, TN killed 184 men and boys. Robby Griffith and Craig Smith read the May 20, 1902 front-page coverage, and Derek Washington sings a song based on some letters written by miners trapped without hope of rescue. Steve Cotham discusses the importance and dangers of coal mining.

This episode is based on three articles telling of violent events between Union and Confederate sympathizers during and just after the Civil War, both involving the prominent Baker family whose home is now known as the Baker Peters House. The first event is the shooting death of Dr. Harvey Baker in his home, and the second is the lynching of his son in downtown Knoxville. Steve Cotham follows the readings with some comments about the Baker family and tensions between neighbors during this period.

To read about the ghost legend of the Baker Peters house, check out Mysterious Knoxville by Charles Edwin Price. For more about Governor "Parson" Brownlow, see chapter 8 of Betsey Beeler Creekmore's book, Knoxville!

Dr. Dan Terpstra summarizes a vast amount of research found in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein.

"The good news in this book is that the climate crisis has created our best opportunity yet to reinvent capitalism to work for the needs of society instead of the profits of corporations," Terpstra says.

Klein argues that climate change is an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways.

"Don't read This Changes Everything if you're looking for compromises," Terpstra says. "Naomi Klein says the time for compromise is past. To have a chance at slowing global warming, we'll need to change everything we think we know about free market capitalism. The real message is in the subtitile: 'Capitalism vs. the Climate.' It's one or the other, and we get to choose."

Terpstra is retired from the University of Tennessee Innovative Computing Laboratory.

Nate Allen, Knoxville's Deputy Chief of Police, was invited to discuss 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman by Adam Plantinga. Allen remarked "This book is a great way to build understanding and transparency between the community and police officers. It is extremely important for the community to know and understand the laws provided for police officers to perform their job in a safe and responsible manner." He responded to many questions from the audience, but the recording captured only his remarks. This recording is edited from his answers to those questions.