The Takeaway

The anti-abortion movement continues to gain momentum, and its strategies against reproductive rights are evolving. We check in on attacks on abortion rights, from federal court in Texas, to Kentucky’s Supreme Court, to state legislatures across the country.  

We're joined by Caroline Kitchener, national political reporter covering abortion at the Washington Post.

Conflict, repression, economic circumstances, drought, and famine have driven the migration of nearly 2 million people from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East to Southern Europe in the last decade.

Migrants all over the world have died and gone missing at alarming rates. In the past decade, this endless tragedy has plagued the Mediterranean Sea in particular. Since 2014, over 25,000 migrants have gone missing and presumably died while taking the perilous journey asea.

Aid groups like who have been giving life-saving assistance to migrants who cross are now being criminalized. Twenty-four aid workers in Greece stand trial for helping migrants who were crossing through the Mediterranean.

We speak with New Yorker staff writer Alexis Okeowo who covers conflict, culture, and human rights across Africa, Mexico, and the American South to better understand the scale and impact of this crisis and what can be done to improve migration conditions.

For well over a decade, rural hospitals have been in crisis. Since 2010, 141 hospitals in rural communities have closed. And although they’ve been struggling financially for years, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them to the brink with a record 19 closures in 2020 alone. 

And while pandemic-era federal aid stopped some of these rapid closures, much of that aid expired at the end of last year. The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform estimates that more than 600 rural hospitals – or nearly 30% of all rural hospitals in the country – are at risk of closing in the near future.

The federal government tried to address this crisis with a plan called the Rural Emergency Hospital (REH) designation, but the plan comes with hard choices for many of these hospitals and would have a huge impact on the rural communities they serve.

For more on the crisis at rural hospitals, we spoke with Harold Miller, President and CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. 

Da’Shaun L. Harrison is an organizer, trans theorist, Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine and winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in transgender nonfiction for their book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness.

For our series Black.Queer.Rising, they share their understanding of the connection between anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, why and how they’re able to show up as their full unapologetic self, and what they view as the limitations of liberation while existing within an oppressive system. 

On February 24th, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an unprovoked, full scale military attack on Ukraine. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine are ongoing, and with the first anniversary of war approaching, we check-in with journalists we’ve spoken to throughout the conflict to reflect on the past year and look at the current state of the war. 

We spoke with Christopher Miller, Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and author of the forthcoming book about Ukraine, “The War Came To Us,” and Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.

We also spoke with Ukrainians we’ve talked to throughout the conflict:

Last April, we spoke with Olena Shevchenko, Head of Insight Ukraine, an LGBTQ advocacy group based in Ukraine. Olena was in the Kyiv at the start of Russia’s invasion. She stayed for 14 days, partially sheltering in a basement, and then decided to move the Kyiv-based part of her organization to the western city of Lviv. They went back to Kyiv in June, and have hubs all around the country. Throughout the war, the organization continued advocacy work around LGBTQ issues, but they also helped tens of thousands of people who were fleeing the country or who were internally displaced, by offering legal consultations, distributing humanitarian aid, and finding temporary shelter.

Last March, we spoke with Mariia Sirychenko, just a couple of weeks after the Russian Invasion. She was in Kyiv when the city was attacked and she left two days later, also to the safety of Lviv. Nearly a year later, she’s back in Kyiv. Mariia is from Mariupol, a city that was under siege for more than 80 days. And it's estimated that thousands of civilians were killed in the attacks, but exact numbers are difficult to verify. The city is currently under Russian control. When we last spoke to Mariia, she hadn’t been able to contact her grandmother in Mariupol for 10 days, but thankfully they found a way to rescue her.

We check-in with these voices on the ground in Ukraine about how life has changed for them and how they’re reflecting on this one-year mark of the war.

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and U.N. ambassador has officially entered the 2024 presidential race. She is the first major Republican challenge to Former President Donald Trump… only two years after she said she wouldn’t. 

Katon Dawson, former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party joins us to find out if Haley's bid is not just for president but for "the soul" of the Republican party. 

The new docuseries "Murder In Big Horn" which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and premiered on Showtime this Month looks into a disturbing trend: “the disappearances and possible murders of a group of Native American women in rural Montana.”

We hear from directors Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné) and Matthew Galkin about the epidemic of MMIW or Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women.

Democratic Colorado Representative Leslie Herod joins us for our series Black Queer Rising. Herod has held down the 8 district in Colorado since her victory in the 2016 – and is the first openly Black woman in the Colorado House of Representatives elected in the state’s history. 

Herod has made a name for herself by tackling and securing sweeping changes with a police reform bill signed into Colorado law in June 2020. Her efforts have defelonized drug possession and introduced bail reform. As a representative she supported and guided the passage of a voter supported tax to fund mental health and drug rehabilitation centers in the city of Denver. She turns to the city with her eyes on the coveted prize of Mayor. The Mayoral election is set to take place in early April of this year. 

Representative Herod joins us to explain the reasoning behind her focus on criminal justice reform, and her plans for the future of Colorado.

Two weeks ago, a train carrying toxic chemicals through a small town in eastern Ohio derailed in a fiery crash and flames and black smoke filled the sky. Federal investigators have said the derailment was caused by a mechanical issue with a rail car axle.

But rail companies have used their influence to lobby against federal regulations that could have made an event like this less possible — including mechanical safety upgrades for trains carrying hazardous chemicals and what chemicals are even classified as hazardous. With such trains criss-crossing thousands of miles across the U.S., the event in Ohio is a warning for the country.

The Lever, a national reader-supported investigative journalism outlet, recently investigated the rail industry's lobbying against proposed federal regulations. We speak with reporter Matthew Cunningham-Cook.

Gray Love: Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60 is an ambitious effort that includes forty-two essays covering a range of topics. From dating while mourning the loss of a partner, to what to write on an online dating profile. Some stories are sad and tragic while others are funny and joyful.

We talk to the Co-Editors of the book Nan Bauer-Maglin and Daniel E. Hood.