The Takeaway

Puerto Rico is still reeling from Hurricane Fiona, which has brought widespread flooding, damage, and power outages across the island. 

We speak with Alana Casanova-Burgess, host of the La Brega podcast, about what she's been hearing from Puerto Ricans following Hurricane Fiona, and hear "desahogos," or "vents" from the Puerto Rican diaspora that La Brega has been collecting.

La Brega invites Puerto Ricans to share audio memos about how they are feeling following Hurricane Fiona at http://labregapodcast.com/buzon. 

Lynsey Addario has spent more than two decades capturing intimate and human moments in the midst of the world’s most devastating disasters and conflicts. Her stunning photography shines a light on humanitarian issues including war, gender based violence, and climate change. Most recently, she has been documenting the war in Ukraine and its impact on the country’s civilians.

Now the School of Visual Arts is honoring her with a career-spanning solo exhibition of her courageous work. Lynsey shares why photojournalism is important, how she braves dangerous situations, and what inspires her through it all.

There are still a lot of barriers to voting, and when we’re thinking about access to voting, it should be easier for every voter to cast a ballot. 

According to the CDC, about 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. live with some type of disability: nearly 61 million people. When it comes time to cast their ballots, voters with disabilities can face a number of challenges at the polls. For in-person voters in the 2016 election, the Government Accountability Office found that less than half of polling places were accessible from parking to the voting booth.

Accessibility increased in 2020, and people with disabilities made large gains in the historic voter turnout surge of 2020. Expanded access to mail-in ballots pushed disability turnout to 17.7 million in 2020, up from 16 million in 2016, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

We spoke with Michelle Bishop, Voter Access & Engagement Manager at the National Disability Rights Network, and Michelle explained how the steps taken during the 2020 presidential election and against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, lowered some of those barriers and helped make it safer to cast a ballot for all voters,  including voters who have a disability.

Jean-Michel Basquiat remains one of the most impactful artists more than three decades after his tragically untimely death. His boundary-defying artwork has influenced music, fashion, and film and television. It has also completely transformed the contemporary art world. In 2017, his 1982 piece Untitled sold for $110.5 million.

This is the Jean-Michel Basquiat the world knows and now his family has decided to share a more personal side of their beloved son and brother. This spring, his sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux opened a 12,000 square foot exhibition that features hundreds of their brother's artwork, photos, and personal artifacts so visitors can get to know him in an entirely new way.

A newly national show from WNYC Studios debuts this Sunday. Notes from America will be a live weekly call-in show inviting you to listen in and join conversations on the country’s attempt at a plural society. 

From conspiracy theories and social media algorithms to Christian nationalism and minority rule, Notes from America will parse out the big issues in our culture, media and democracy all to explore how we got to this point in our country’s history and how to grapple with where we might be going. 

We heard from host Kai Wright about the show's "dinner party" atmosphere and how you can join the conversation. 

This week marks Bisexual Awareness Week – a week to celebrate the bi-plus community and help bring light to the issues that bi-plus individuals face.

The bi-plus community – which includes bisexual, pansexual, and omnisexual folks, among others – is the largest population within the LGBTQ community. But among other issues, bi-plus folks disproportionately struggle with physical and mental health issues. According to the Bisexual Resource Center, bi-plus people face even higher rates of depression and anxiety than lesbians and gay men.

And for the first time, the Biden Administration hosted a Bisexual Health Equity Roundtable. Yesterday, 15 bi-plus healthcare policy experts and advocates met with federal agency officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to discuss the health disparities facing the bisexual community, and made policy recommendations to address these issues.

We spoke with one of those advocates, Kierra Johnson, the Executive Director of the National LGBTQ Task Force.

Frida Kahlo is everywhere. Her signature flower crown, bold unibrow, and brightly colored dress have become cultural shorthand for third wave feminism. Her life, at times turbulent and painful, has been depicted dramatically in movies and on television.

This extraordinary artist was not just an icon, she was human. A Broadway musical about her life, currently in development, aims to show a different side of the Mexican artist. The show is based on the book Intimate Frida, written by her niece Isolda P. Kahlo, as well as personal conversations with her family in Mexico.

Composer Jaime Lozano seeks to highlight the Frida not everyone knew behind the now-legendary icon, and honor their shared Mexican heritage on the Broadway stage.

Detroit, Michigan is the largest Black-majority city in the United States, with almost 78-percent of the population Black.  And since 1955, Detroit has been represented in Congress by at least one Black representative.  But a redistricting process and a primary in which 8 of 9 Black candidates split 71-percent of the vote left the only non-Black candidate, Shri Thanedar, to win with just 28-percent of the vote.

We speak with Mario Morrow, political consultant based in Detroit and CEO of Mario Morrow and Associates, and Andra Gillespie, political scientist at Emory University, and explore the history of Black representation in Michigan, the political and electoral forces which led to this result, and the implications of this outcome on the Black community in Detroit.

2022 has seen more anti-LGBTQ legislation proposed so far than any other year. According to LGBTQ advocacy group Freedom for All Americans, 39 states introduced more than 200 such bills since April. The legislation mainly targets trans youth, running the gamut from healthcare restrictions, exclusion from sports and even equating gender affirming parenting to child abuse. 

For Carolyn Hays, that policy threatened her family when an investigator from the Department of Children and Families knocked on her door. In her new memoir, A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter, Hays writes: “...we quickly learned that in this southern state with Republican-appointed judges, we could lose custody. We could lose you.”

We hear from Carolyn on how raising her daughter expanded her understanding of parenting, faith, science and gender. 

Hurricane Fiona has left devastation in Puerto Rico. Massive flooding has occurred in some areas, and 1.3 million people, in a country of 3.2 million, were without electricity on Monday.  As of Tuesday, the hurricane is responsible for at least two deaths and at least 1000 people have had to be rescued.

We speak with Carlos Berrios Polanco, freelance journalist in Caguas, Puerto Rico, to hear the latest on the ground in Puerto Rico.