The Takeaway

In December, the index for eggs rose 11.1 percent, meaning there was some serious “egg-flation.” Eggs saw the highest month-over-month inflation of any expenditure category, so why are the prices of eggs going up?

Chickens. The egg, bird, and the food have played multiple roles in the lives of African American women. Chickens have provided food and a source of income for many Black families, and helped women define and exert themselves in a hostile and racist society.

The chicken and the egg have a long legacy and history in America that might "BEAK" your interest. 

We speak with Thérèse Nelson, chef and founder of Black Culinary History.

Kenny Torrella, staff writer at Vox and author of the newsletter Meat/Less, tells us it's more than just supply chain issues– chickens are finding themselves in a tough and "PECK-uliar" circumstance.

And we hear from Beth Hoffman, journalist, farmer, and author of Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America.

In Atlanta, Georgia, community activists remain locked in a nearly 2-year struggle against the development of a massive police training center in a forest just outside the city, dubbed "cop city." 

Only weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the 2020 police killing of Rayshard Brooks, calls to "demilitarize" and "defund the police" amassed all over the country. It was difficult for Atlanta, as it was for many cities across the country. The city’s 14 percent increase  in homicides was accompanied by several, tragic, high-profile murders just as the voters were facing a choice of who would serve as the next mayor. The race and runoff were dominated by these public perceptions of crime and questions about how candidates would respond became central. 

In September 2021, the Atlanta City Council approved plans to grant a ground lease to the Atlanta Police Foundation for a $90 million dollar police training facility to be built on 85 acres of land near Southeast Atlanta, located in a lower-income, predominantly Black area not represented on Atlanta's City Council. A local firm conducted a survey of residents near the proposed site and found 98% of respondents opposed the project. The approval was also granted despite strong opposition from community groups who oppose this substantial allocation of public resources to Atlanta police. 

Additionally, the land slated for development has a fraught history, having formerly served as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm where inmates were subjected to abusive, "slave-like" conditions. Digital producer Zachary Bynum reports from Atlanta, talking with activists, organizers, and elected officials from the city to determine what this all means about race, land stewardship, and power in the struggle for the future of Atlanta's South River Forest.

Editor's note: We reached out to the Atlanta Police Foundation for comment and we have not yet received a response. If we do, we will post it on thetakeaway.org.

Negro spirituals and Freedom songs carry within them expressions of joy, pain and the realities of living as a Black person in the United States. These songs provided the sonic background of the Civil Rights Movement.

Today, a new sound provides the sonic background in the ongoing movement for Black liberation and agency: Trap music. Trap music traces its roots to the heart of the Black American south. It’s part of the continuing evolution of Hip-Hop in America with lyrics that paint a picture of surviving a system that entraps while pursuing the “American Dream”.

We discuss music as a form of Black expression from the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement to Trap music’s existence as a route to self-determination and the path it carves on the journey of Black liberation.

The Big Payback is a new documentary film that chronicles the efforts for reparations on both the national level with H.R. 40 through Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and on the local level in Evanston, Illinois by following the work of Alderman Ruth Rue Simmons.

Co-Directors Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow talk about their film which makes its television premiere on PBS’ Independent Lens on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

411, the number that embedded itself into our vocabulary as a synonym for “information” is going the way of the dinosaur. AT&T announced the end of the service this month for their landline customers.

It’s a move that impacts three million subscribers. We’re talking about the history of 411, what it means to say goodbye to the service and who’s impacted by its end.

We get the 411 from Associate Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Josh Lauer. 

To read the full transcript, see above. 

More than 10,000 nurses at five hospital facilities across New York City are on strike today. They're protesting staffing shortages and demanding wage increases and better working conditions as they head into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, hospitals have scaled back services, canceled some elective surgeries, and are diverting the majority of ambulances to other hospitals.

We speak with Nancy Hagans, President of the New York State Nurses Association and a frontline nurse at Maimonides Medical Center, about the strike and working conditions.

It’s been more than six months since The Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Since then, anti-abortion activists have continued to try and restrict access to abortion care, even in states where abortion is legal. And The Food and Drug Administration and its oversight of the abortion medication, Mifepristone, has been one of their targets. 

Medication abortions account for half of abortions in the United States, and Mifepristone is the first of two pills used in the method, for use in up to 10 weeks of pregnancy.Last week, the FDA issued new rules on Mifepristone, making it easier for people to access from retail pharmacies, with a prescription from a specially certified health provider. Previous to these new rules, patients could only receive the medication in-person at a specially-certified clinic, or through a telemedicine appointment and have the medication mailed to them through a certified mail-order pharmacy.

This latest move by the FDA could expand access to abortion care, at least in states that don’t already restrict abortions or the drugs for medical abortions.

We speak with Andrea Miller, President of the National Institute for Reproductive Health who says this is a step forward, but there is still a lot of bureaucratic hoops that pharmacies have to jump through to provide the medication, and she says this is yet another case of “abortion exceptionalism.”

The new federally mandated mental health assistance and suicide prevention hotline, 9-8-8, launched in July.

Since July, according to data from SAMHSA, calls and texts to the lifeline have risen significantly before the adoption of 9-8-8. But questions still remain whether state and local authorities have the infrastructure to provide services for this great demand.

We hear from Dan Gorenstein, executive producer and host of the podcast Tradeoffs, who provides updates on how things are going with 9-8-8 thus far.

Last summer, Janeé Kassanavoid made history as the first Native American woman to medal at the World Athletics Track & Field Championship in Oregon. 

Kassanavoid is a professional track & field athlete, member of Comanche Nation, and a Women’s hammer throwing for Team USA and we spoke to her about what this feat meant to her, her identity as an indigenous woman in sports, and about her side passion: the culinary arts. 

Many women who encounter domestic abuse and are caught up in our criminal legal system are punished both for fighting back and when they don't.

“Criminalized survival” refers to this highly gendered and racialized phenomenon, and we see it in stories of self-defense, like Tracy McCarter and Pieper Lewis. Criminalized survival is also, in many states, essentially codified into law with “failure to protect” laws that punish parents who allegedly did not protect their children from abuse they were aware was occuring. In Oklahoma, where this practice is especially prevalent, 90 percent of people charged with the crime are women.

We speak with one of them, who was sentenced to serve 30 years in prison while her abuser got a lesser sentence. 

We’re also joined by Dr. Alisa Bierria, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and a co-founder of Survived & Punished, to unpack the larger cultural mindset of misogyny and misogynoir that makes women responsible for other people’s actions, but also punishes them if they are not deemed “good victims.”