The Takeaway

Fungi under the soil plays an important role in forestry growth and capturing carbon, and it turns out understanding unknown territory of underground fungi networks could be critical for climate change mitigation efforts.

We spoke with Colin Averill (AiVE-rall), lead scientist at the Crowther lab at ETH Zurich and Co founder of The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks to understand why we should adopt a “fungi first” approach to climate change.

Last week, the Biden administration declared a public health emergency over the spread of the monkeypox virus in the United States. There are currently more than 7,500 known cases in the country, with more than 90% occurring among men who reported recently having had sex or other intimate contact with other men. After the public health emergency declaration, Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and several of her colleagues published a statement in partnership with leaders from twenty other countries calling for research around monkeypox to be shared openly among academics from different nations. We speak with Deputy Director Nelson about the importance of sharing this research.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the earth’s temperature will rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 if we don’t curb our greenhouse gas emissions. But what if there was another way — what if we could simply shade the planet from the sun's hot rays? It sounds like something right out of a science fiction movie, but research into making it a reality has recently won some powerful financial backers. Solar geo-engineering, as the idea is called, doesn't just pose environmental and technological challenges, but also questions of international cooperation and governance. 

Dr. Alan Robock, Distinguished Professor of climate science in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, joined us to explain the research, the technology, and the unintended consequences.

Primaries were held last week in Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington. On the Republican side, many of the races were close, making it hard to say definitively whether former President Trump had a strong sway on these votes. But overall, a number of the candidates he endorsed won, meaning that in several prominent midterm races the GOP nominee will be a candidate who has backed Trump on his 2020 election lies. At the same time that the primary season is moving along, Congressional Democrats do have some momentum back, passing a bill granting more benefits to veterans affected by toxic burn pits and garnering the votes necessary to pass federal climate change legislation.

We speak about all of these developments with Joel Payne, Democratic strategist, host of the podcast Here Comes the Payne, and CBS News political contributor and Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University, co-host of podcast FAQ NYC, and author of the book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration and the Pursuit of the American Dream.

In July, Google put software engineer Blake Lemoine on administrative leave after he claimed that the Google’s chatbot system he was working with had become aware of its own existence. Google dismissed his claims and denied that the application called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, was sentient. We speak with Dr. Karina Vold, assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology about the feasibility of sentient artificial intelligence.

90-year old Natalie Levant and 88-year old George Saltz are subjects of the new documentary Still Standing from The New Yorker and filmmaker Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough. After losing their life partners, they each began stand-up comedy careers in their early 80's

We talk with Natalie and George about the power of laughter as healing, and finding humor in the golden years.

You can watch the documentary Still Standing from The New Yorker online here.

You can see George Saltz perform at The Comic Strip in New York City on August 14th.

And can catch Natalie Levant at the monthly stand up show she hosts at Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar in Philadelphia.

On Thursday, WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner appeared once again in front of a Russian court. She faced up to 10 years in prison for drug charges, as Russian authorities alleged that they found vape canisters containing hashish oil with trace amounts of cannabis oil in her luggage in February. Before a judge handed down her sentence, she pled for leniency, saying, "I made an honest mistake and I hope your ruling doesn’t end my life here." But she was sentenced to nine years of prison. 

Dr. William Butler, John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor at Pennsylvania State’s Dickinson Law School, and Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a PhD candidate studying race in Russia at the University of Pennsylvania Department of History, joined us to explain Griner's defense, sentence, and what she's really facing for the next nine years.

The United States has a food waste problem. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, up to 40% of our food supply goes uneaten every year. That’s in a country where more than 38 million people face food insecurity. Unreliable food date labels are one of many reasons behind this. A 2019 survey found that 85% of people throw away their food based on those labels, but as it turns out, there isn't much science behind them. 

To learn more, we speak with Yvette Cabrera, Director of Food Waste at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

For the second half of the 20th century, Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine were the sources of news and entertainment for the African American community.

It was in these magazines, put out by the Johnson Publishing Company, where you could find news and images of Black celebrities, writers, artists, and political activists, as well as snapshots of Black life in our own neighborhoods. The Johnson Publishing Company was founded in 1942 by John and Eunice Johnson.

This week, ownership of the Ebony and Jet photo archives was transferred over to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Getty Research Institute. And as a result, millions of images as well as audio and video recordings from the Johnson Publishing archives will be preserved and eventually available to the public.

The Takeaway spoke with Dr. Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress and the first African American and the first woman to hold the post. Dr. Hayden led a board of experts who helped determine where and how to preserve these archives. 

Ten years ago this week, a white supremacist gunman entered the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, in Oak Creek, and shot ten people. Six people were killed on August 5, 2012, and they were part of Wisconsin’s Indian immigrant community. This was no random act of violence. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, targeted acts of violence directed at Sikhs increased significantly. Still, the FBI did not begin to collect data on anti-Sikh hate crimes until 2015. That decade of heightened hostility went largely unmarked by federal data and ended in a massacre.

Dr. Catherine Ceniza Choy says that this pattern of violence and erasure is critical to understanding the histories and experiences of Asian Americans. But there is also a third element to this pattern — resistance. 

Dr. Choy is a professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley. We speak with her about her new book, Asian American Histories of the United States, which upends cultural narratives about Asian Americans, highlights overlooked identities, and catalogs stories of resistance in these communities across the decades.