The Takeaway

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 44 children in the U.S. has been identified with an autism spectrum disorder. And almost 5-and-a-half million adults in the U.S. have autism.  And the average age of an autism diagnosis comes at about 4 years and 4 months.

But that's not the case for everyone.

We speak with Lauren Ober, radio producer and host of The Big Listen from WAMU and NPR, who discovered that she is autistic at the age of 42, and chronicles it in her new podcast, The Loudest Girl in the World.

Homelessness among veterans has decreased by 11 percent over the past 2 years.  This represents a decline of more than half since 2010.  But the problem persists in some particularly challenging communities.

Village for Vets is a non-profit organization working to address homelessness among veterans in Los Angeles, which has the largest population of unhoused veterans of any Metropolitan area.

We speak with Mary McGuire, Executive Director of Village for Vets, and Cari Bagdonas, a Coast Guard Veteran who has experienced housing insecurity.

For full transcripts, see above.

The number of military veterans elected to Congress has been slowly but steadily increasing since 2015, after decades of historic lows since the 1970s. The 2022 midterm election cycle saw the largest field of veteran candidates in a decade: 196.

We hear about the unique assets that veterans can bring to elected office, with Leo Shane III, deputy editor of The Military Times.

For full transcript, see above.

The new film Retrograde is an unflinching portrait of what happened in the nine months after President Biden announced he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. The film follows one Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to tell an emotional story of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Award-winning filmmaker Matt Heineman and his team of Green Berets were there to capture the final months of some 20 years of U.S. involvement in the conflict prior to the fall of Kabul.

When President Biden announced that the U.S. was pulling out, Heineman and his team shifted gears, and embedded with Afghan forces to see what would happen. We speak with Matt about the withdrawal from Kabul. 

Veterans day is about honoring those who served.  Some folks are thinking about parents and grandparents who dedicated their life to service. Many reflect on the hardships veterans have endured, as well as their courage at home and abroad.

We asked listeners to tell us about the veterans they hold near and dear in their hearts.  

For full transcripts, see above. 

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Haaland v. Brackeen, which could strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).

The ICWA was intended to prevent Native children from being separated from their tribes and families. It was enacted in 1978 in response to US Government practices that forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of Native children from their homes.

We speak with Rebecca Nagle, a freelance writer and member of the Cherokee Nation, about what this new challenge in the Supreme Court could mean for ICWA and the SCOTUS precedents it could overrule.

The new Netflix series “Blockbuster” premiered on November 3rd.

The show stars a diverse cast of characters, fighting to save the last Blockbuster store.

Cast member Tyler Alvarez joins us to discuss the new series, his connection to the character Carlos, and if not Blockbuster, what he hopes to save in this world.

All the votes have been cast in Midterms 2022, and many of the results are in. 

Florida Republicans are celebrating statewide victories in the elections for Governor and Senate. But outside of the Sunshine state, it’s hard to find evidence of a significant "red wave" that many Republicans had hoped for. For the most part, Republican candidates won in Republican districts, and Democrats carried Democratic districts. 

The statewide races didn’t bring many surprises: Republican JD Vance took Ohio. Democratic candidate for governor Stacey Abrams conceded to Republican governor Brian Kemp. Democrat John Fetterman secured Pennsylvania. And as of Wednesday morning, many of the toss up state-wide races like Wisconsin and Nevada were still up in the air. 

We get election takeaways from Joel Payne, Democratic strategist, and CBS News political contributor and Brendan Buck, a partner with the political communications firm, Seven Letter. Brendan was the press secretary for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and former House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

This year, a record number of women ran for governorships at 25 candidates, while the number of women running for Congress fell short of the record-setting 2020 and 2018 cohorts. But 45 of those races for Governor, House or Senate featured two or more women candidates running against each other. We’ve brought you special coverage of some of those races in our SHE-lection series: a partnership between The Takeaway and the Center for American Women and Politics. What do the 2022 midterm results tell us about the future of women in politics?

We're joined by Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Find all episodes in the SHE-lection! series here.

Heading into the 2022 Midterms, 37 states are governed by trifectas: a single party controls a majority in the state house, state senate, and also holds the governor’s seat.  There are 23 Republican trifectas and 14 Democratic trifectas.  This sort of single party control of states has increased since 2018, and in this election cycle, a handful of states could gain or lose  trifectas.  

We speak with Archon Fung, Director of the Harvard Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, about what trifectas mean for democracy and for public policy.