The Takeaway

Pete Souza, was the former Official White House Photographer for President Ronald Reagan and former Chief White House Photographer for President Barack Obama.  

We speak to him about his career documenting presidencies and his latest book of photographs, The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside The Presidency.

Last Wednesday, draft papers were delivered to thousands of people across Russia after Vladimir Putin announced the country’s first mobilization since World War II. Tens of thousands of men are fleeing the country to dodge the draft.

We’re checking in with Dr. William Pomeranz, director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, to better understand what’s going on in the country.

The Senate will likely pass a stopgap bill Thursday after West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin pulled his contentious energy permitting legislation from the package. While some House Republicans with inconsequential votes framed the bill as Democrat-led over-spending, Republican leadership is looking forward. 

As the stopgap bill ends on December 16, Bloomberg congressional reporter Erik Wasson says the bigger budget fight will likely come later as Republicans hope to regain control of the House. He joins the show to discuss how the threat of a shutdown factors into partisan politics ahead of the midterms. 

Gretchen Whitmer (D) is the second woman governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm (D), the current Secretary of Energy, was the first.

No Republican woman has ever served as governor of Michigan, but the relatively unknown, Trump-endorsed Tudor Dixon would be the first if elected over incumbent Gretchen Whitmer. After winning in 2018, Governor Whitmer quickly became a star in her party, and in 2020 delivered the Democratic response to President Trump’s final State of the Union address. 

In Michigan's May primaries, 10 candidates were seeking the Republican nomination, but half were disqualified when it was discovered that their nominating petitions included tens of thousands of forged signatures. The early Republican front runner and the Republican candidate with the biggest campaign budget were among those disqualified early, and suddenly Tudor Dixon was leading a much narrower field.

With fewer dollars to spend than her opponent, Dixon is relying more heavily on earned media. It’s an incentive to be more outrageous and earn free news coverage to keep her name in front of the voters. Dixon effectively did this earlier in September when she used her address to the annual CPAC conference to make light of a 2020 plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. In August, two men were convicted of conspiracy in the case. 

Michigan voters are also in a unique position this year. Not only will they decide the state’s governor, they will also vote on a ballot measure which could ensure that access to abortion is protected by the state’s constitution. Governor Whitmer is a proponent of abortion access; meanwhile, Tudor Dixon has been an open opponent of abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Democratic ad attacks have made this a central theme of the campaign because much like the Governor, Dixon has also emphasized her identity as a woman and a mother. So, what will be the outcome in this SHElection?

We hear from Simon Schuster, a senior political reporter with M Live and Jenna Bednar, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan and External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute about Michigan's governor's race. 

The new animated series, Spirit Rangers, debuts on Netflix on Indigenous People’s Day, October 10th. It follows the story of Kodi, Summer and Eddy, junior park rangers who have secret abilities to be Spirit Rangers and protect the environment. Series creator Karissa Valencia joins us to discuss the show.

"Quiet quitting" is the latest workplace trend sparking conversation in social and mainstream media. The idea went viral after TikTok user Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old engineer in New York City, talked about not actually outright quitting a job, but "quitting" the idea that you have to go above and beyond the job description.  It also spawned a spinoff, "quiet firing," which refers to employers who don't offer raises or promotions, or use other tactics to passive-aggressively push employees out of a job.

We speak with Sarah Damaske, Professor of Sociology and Labor & Employment Relations at Penn State University, about "quiet quitting," "quiet firing," and what these viral ideas say about the current state of labor and work. 

The 1835 Treaty of New Echota between Cherokee leaders and the U.S. government forced the Cherokee Nation off their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River and onto the deadly "Trail of Tears”- what is now present-day Oklahoma. A quarter of the Cherokee population died on that treacherous journey. 

Today, nearly 200 years after the The Treaty of New Echota displaced the Cherokee in forced migration West, Cherokee Nation is one of the country’s largest tribes. And the treaty which pushed them off their lands also contains an unfulfilled article: a guaranteed right to send a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives. Now, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr., is calling on Congress to make good on the promise of its predecessors as soon as this year.

We spoke with Delegate Kim Teehee, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Director of Government Relations for Cherokee Nation and Senior Vice President of Government Relations Cherokee Nation Businesses. In 2019, Chief Hoskin designated Kim TeeHee as the first Cherokee Nation delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.

The bestselling book, "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together," tells stories of racism at the root of our most complicated issues, like white communities burying their lavish public pools instead of sharing them with their Black neighbors. 

In the new podcast, also titled The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee discovers the stories of everyday Americans who are working to build multi-racial communities to rally against the racist policies, practices and ideas built into our society. McGhee comes with some examples, and explains how the podcast differs from and continues the goal of her original book. 

As Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott send migrants to Democrat run cities and the Supreme Court's conservative majority evades long-standing legal procedure, Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer discusses how the cruelty of these practices is still the point. 

His bestselling collection of essays, "The Cruelty is the Point," argues the Trump administration effectively used cruel policies to rally its supporters. Now out on paperback with new writing, The Cruelty is the Point: Why Trump's America Endures, brings Serwer's premise to the latest issues in politics. 

The devastation caused by Hurricane Fiona has re-opened conversations about the unsustainable nature of Puerto Rico’s status as a colonial entity. Many are calling for statehood as a solution to bureaucratic challenges that slow down disaster relief.

In revisiting this discussion, we hear from Christina Ponsa-Kraus, a Geroge Welwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia Law School and Dr. Charles Venator-Santiago, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, about the status of Puerto Rico’s future and the Island’s political possibilities.