Illicit Vaping Products Are Making People Sick. Here’s Where They Come From (0:30)

Guest: David Downs, California Bureau Chief, Leafly

The CDC’s latest update on the mysterious vaping illness sweeping the country says more than 800 people have been injured and 12 have died. The precise cause of the lung injuries is still under investigation, but the CDC says most of the patients report using black market vaping products that contain THC –which is the psychoactive component of marijuana. A team of reporters with the cannabis publication Leafly tracked THC vaping products available on the street back to their source for some insight into what’s causing so many people to get sick.

 

Why Some People Get Their Blood Sucked More Than Others (24:01)

Guest: Jonathan Day, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology, University of Florida

My legs are covered in itchy, red welts right now because I just got back from a trip to the Grand Canyon and got eaten alive by mosquitos. But annoyingly, no one else in my group did. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, so as soon as I got cell service, I googled it and discovered that it’s not just bad luck –there are actual genetic factors that make one person more likely to get their blood sucked than another.

 

TV Shifts from Cable to Streaming Services, the Latest on “The Streaming Wars” (40:01)

Guest: Kirby Grines, Founder of 43Twenty

The best shows on television right now are not on TV at all, at least according to the recent Emmy Awards. What I mean is they’re not on network television. And beyond that, most aren’t even on cable. To watch them, you’ll need a fast internet connection and a subscription to Netflix or Amazon or Hulu. And soon you’ll also need a subscription to Disney+ and Apple TV and YouTube TV and HBO Go. And if you’ve been watching your favorite new –or old –network TV shows like The Office or The Good Place on a streaming site like Netflix or Hulu, that’s changing, too. CBS already requires a subscription to its own service to stream its shows and NBC will soon be doing the same with a service called “The Peacock.” Anyway, it’s all very confusing. And for those of us who abandoned cable because paying for a few streaming sites was a lot cheaper –well it was good while it lasted.

 

Apple Seed (51:08)

Guest: Sam Payne, the Apple Seed

Sam Payne of the Apple Seed shares a story about space travel.

 

How We Listen to Race (1:02:05)

Guest: Jennifer Lynn Stoever, PhD, Associate Professor at Binghamton University, author of “The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening”

The argument that we may someday live in a “color blind society” rests on the idea that racism is just a visual practice. But maybe we also hear race. W.E.B.DuBois said that the color line, or the way in which people are segregated against in society, was “the problem of the 20thcentury.” Drawing from that ideaand theorists, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Associate Professor at Binghamton University, has looked at the way that racism also works through listening or the “sonic color line.

 

Are College Athletes Getting a Raw Financial Deal? (1:19:54)

Guest: Allen Sanderson, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Chicago

The state of California passed a law this week that has the whole college athletics world spinning. Starting in 2023, athletes at California’s state-run universities will be allowed to make their own sponsorship and endorsement deals. That’s completely against the rules of the NCAA. And the NCAA says California going rogue like this is going to cause all sorts of problems for collegiate athletics. So there will of course be lawsuits and ongoing attention to this question of whether or not college athletes are getting a raw deal and maybe ought to just get paid like the pros.