The Takeaway

Last week, Scotland became the first country in the world to make tampons, pads and other period products free to the public. The legislation was initially approved by lawmakers in 2020. 

Scottish leaders are using this initiative to combat period poverty, or the lack of access to period products because of the high cost, something we have plenty of in the United States, especially among young people. 

And although menstrual hygiene is a basic need, there are still many barriers to accessing products to meet it. A 2021 study by George Mason University of college women showed that 1 in 10 college women experience period poverty. In another study commissioned by Thinx & PERIOD, called the State of the Period, it found that a quarter of students who menstruate, ages 13 to 19, experience period poverty. 

As we begin a new school year, addressing period poverty here in the U.S. remains critical as ever.For more, I’m joined now by Michela Bedard, Executive Director of PERIOD., a non-profit that is fighting to end period poverty.

In July, a man was diagnosed with polio in New York State’s Rockland County.

Officials say that polio has been in the county’s wastewater since May and New York City officials detected polio in the city’s wastewater earlier this month. Other countries that had not detected polio in decades have also confirmed new cases this year.

We speak with Apoorva Mandavilli from the New York Times about these cases of polio and what it would take to eradicate the virus completely.

It is still legal to sterilize a disabled person without their consent in over 30 states in the United States. And despite the Americans with Disabilities Act barring discrimination, barriers persist in healthcare spaces that make it inaccessible to many disabled people, including costs. Even when disabled people find their way around these, many find they must constantly advocate for their healthcare providers to see them as capable of making their own choices in reproduction, pregnancy and parenting.

Bodily autonomy, self-determination, the right to have a child and the right to choose not to — these are the ideas at the core of both reproductive justice and disability justice. We speak with Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder and executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund and Rebecca Cokley, Program Officer for U.S. Disability Rights at the Ford Foundation.

Between 1820 and 1860, as the cotton industry in the United States boomed, about one million enslaved people were forcibly relocated from states in the upper South to the plantations of the Deep South. Historians call this the Second Passage, echoing the first forced migration of the Middle Passage.

After the Civil War, these newly-emancipated people tried to reunite their families. Thousands of them placed advertisements in their local newspapers, providing as many details as they could about when they last saw their loved ones and who they were sold to. One ad placed by Henry Anderson in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1895 began, "I would like to find my people."

Many of these families were never reunited. But their messages are being collected and archived by historians and genealogists, and archives like the Last Seen Project and the Georgetown Memory Project are now helping their descendants find their people.

In the segment you can hear professional voice artists from the Last Seen Project reading ads and messages, placed of 19th century Black Americans who were searching for family after the end of legal American slavery.

Rachel Swarns, contributing writer at the New York Times and an associate professor of journalism at NYU, joined us to discuss her recent reporting on people who are using archives to find their ancestors who had been enslaved. Dr. Blair Kelley, a professor of history at North Carolina State University and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also joined and she's done research into her own lost ancestors, and working on her forthcoming book, “Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class.”

This spring, comedian Jerrod Carmichael released his latest Emmy-nominated stand-up special, “Rothaniel” on HBO Max. In the new act, Carmichael comes out as gay, but the special is an exploration both of his own secrets as well as the ones held by previous generations of men in his family.

It’s part of an exciting new chapter in Carmichael’s career that also includes his directorial debut “On the Count of Three,” and his Emmy-nominated performance guest hosting SNL earlier this year. The Takeaway speaks with Carmichael about embracing honesty in his work.

On Monday, August 15th, the chair of the election commission, Wafula Chebukati, announced that Deputy President William Ruto had defeated billionaire Raila Odinga with 50.49% of the vote.

But the five-time candidate and his supporters have called the results into question and initiated a legal challenge to the results, promising weeks of turmoil for the country.

Declan Walsh, chief Africa correspondent at the New York Times joined us to discuss the election, the results, and what we can expect from the president-elect.

Despite years of press coverage on the pros and cons of the gig economy, less focus has been given to the question of whether app-based corporations do enough to protect workers’ lives. Data gathered from the last 5 years by The Markup and the advocacy group Gig Workers Rising indicates that they have not.

According to a recent report "Death And Corporate Irresponsibility In The Gig Economy: An Urgent Safety Crisis," Gig Workers Rising's research found news reports, legal filings, police records and family accounts indicating that over 50 gig workers have been killed on the job since 2017 in just the United States. The true number is likely to be much greater as gig corporations don’t regularly disclose the number of homicides that occur for people working using their app.

Recent reporting from The Markup also revealed that Uber reported more than 350 gig workers were carjacked, 28 killed, and 24,000 physically assaulted and threatened by passengers between 2017 and 2020. There have also been numerous reports of sexual assaults by drivers against passengers.  

There is relatively little government oversight of these companies, so we looked at whether change is possible to better protect rideshare drivers and passengers. We spoke with Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and author of the book "Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy" and Bobby Allyn, business and tech reporter for NPR.

In Beirut, Lebanon last week, an armed man took hostages at a bank because he couldn’t access his own money – funds he needed to pay for urgent medical care for his father. After an hours-long standoff, the man accepted a portion of the funds he was trying to take out of his bank account. The money was given to his brother in exchange for turning himself in and releasing the hostages. Meanwhile, crowds had gathered outside of the bank to support him.

This event underscored the deep economic crisis that Lebanon has been experiencing since 2019. According to the World Bank, it could be one of the “world’s worst economic crises since the mid-19th century.”

For more on this we spoke with Sarah Dadouch, Washington Post Correspondent covering the Middle East.

Marine Major Tom Schueman met interpreter Zainullah “Zak” Zaki while serving in Afghanistan. After Major Schueman’s tour ended in 2011, Zak continued to support the United States in spite of death threats from the Taliban. Zak applied for a U.S. visa in 2016. From 2016, Major Schueman launched a campaign to help Zak escape Kabul.

Brilliantly told in Tom’s and Zak’s alternating first person voices, ALWAYS FAITHFUL tracks the parallel lives of two men who each spent their childhoods in fear, peril, and poverty, and turned to war in attempt to build a meaningful future. Their experiences dovetail in Afghanistan’s deadly Helmand Valley, where they form a brotherhood, eventually culminating in Zak’s harrowing, eleventh-hour rescue.

Since first coming to America in fall 2021, Zak and his family have settled near cousins in San Antonio, Texas. But despite the dramatic and public circumstances of Zak’s escape, he still is battling red tape with the US State Department. As of April, his most recent visa application was rejected, meaning that his stay in the US still is not guaranteed.

Tom and Zak detail their experience in Afghanistan and Zak’s eventual escape in their book, "Always Faithful: A Story of the War in Afghanistan, the Fall of Kabul, and the Unshakable Bond Between a Marine and an Interpreter," and they joined us to share their story about friendship and loyalty.

Under the Trump Administration's “Zero Tolerance” family separation border policy, over 5,600 children were separated from their families.  Despite efforts from the Biden Administration to reunite families, anywhere from 700 hundred to 1000 children have still not officially been reunited with their families.

We speak with Caitlin Dickerson, staff writer for The Atlantic, whose latest investigative piece “The Secret History of Family Separation,”—which took 18 months to report and spans nearly 30-thousand words—chronicles the full scope and of the policy, its legacy, and how similar, future iterations may be adopted.