The Takeaway

Growing up, Keri Blakinger was a rising star in competitive figure skating. But an eating disorder and drug addictions sent her down a different path that eventually led her into a prison in New York state. She’s now a reporter for The Marshall Project covering prisons and jails, motivated by her time in the system. We speak with her about her memoir Corrections in Ink.

This past Sunday, Operation Save Abortion tackled the question: what can one person do after the Dobbs vs. Jackson decision took away the constitutional right to abortion?  The Takeaway attended the day of learning, action and fundraising.

We hear from five of the panelists and Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and founder and Chief Creative Officer of Abortion Access Front, to discuss Operation Save Abortion, the movement for abortion access, and securing reproductive justice for all.

After a Supreme Court session that ended the right to an abortion and put other rights in jeopardy, some Democrats have proposed expanding the Supreme Court as a way to restore political balance. Some analysts have even called for the Court to be abolished. But these arguments hinge on the assumption that the Court has enormous power.

We speak with Dr. Gerald Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Lecturer of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. His foundational book, "The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?" examines landmark Supreme Court cases that are often credited with creating sweeping social and political changes, and questions whether they truly did so. 

What if you found out that everything you thought you knew about your family and your identity…was a lie? That’s what Carmen Rita Wong tackles in her new book, Why Didn’t You Tell Me: A Memoir, as she confronts the stories her mother told that kept her biological father’s identity a secret for decades.

Payments for federal student loans have been paused since March 2020, and after multiple extensions, they are currently scheduled to restart on September 1, 2022. President Biden has not said whether he plans to extend the pause again, or if he has made the decision to cancel up to $10,000 of student loans for borrowers.

But there’s a federal program that has already promised loan forgiveness to an estimated 9 million public service workers with federal student loans.

In 2007, Congress created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, also known as the PSLF, to help incentivize people to work in the public sector. The program promised to forgive student loans for eligible employees after 120 payments over 10 years. But in reality, it rarely worked like that. 

In 2018, when the first wave of employees were due to qualify for forgiveness, the Department of Education reported that only around 1 percent of applications were approved. Tens of thousands of other applications were denied, mostly due to hard-to-understand requirements and administrative missteps.

To try and address this problem, last October, the Department of Education announced temporary reforms that they hope will make it easier for public sector workers to have their student loans forgiven. And the Department is urging people to apply (or even re-apply) for forgiveness with this waiver, before it expires at the end of this coming October.

Last week, Democratic House Representative Joe Courtney introduced a bill that would make many of the PSLF changes permanent.

In the meantime, there are still some obstacles. But some people are already seeing a degree of success.

For more on the PSLF, we spoke to Kat Welbeck, Director of Advocacy & Civil Rights Counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center… and a former student of mine at Princeton University. 

Oakland’s 2018 Youth Poet Laureate Leila Mottley joins us to discuss her debut novel, Nightcrawling. The work, already an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, has been described as “dazzling” and Leila has been named a New York Times “writer to watch.”

Since Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020, prominent Republican figures have continued to fuel the “Big Lie” of voter fraud and election rigging. The coordinated efforts around pushing this false information have included widespread targeting and harassment of election officials and poll workers.

Many of these workers now feel unsafe at their jobs overseeing and certifying elections, and some are quitting to avoid the threats. In a recent poll from the Brennan Center of nearly 600 local election officials across the country, one in six repor­ted that they have experienced threats because of their job.

Ruby Freeman is a former poll worker in the Atlanta area. Near the end of June, the January 6th House Committee showed a video of Freeman’s testimony about the harassment. In a virtual hearing with GOP lawmakers in Georgia after the election, Rudy Guiliani accused Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, of processing fake ballots for Joe Biden. He pointed to a surveillance video in which Moss hands her mother a small item, which he claimed was a USB drive. In reality, that item was a ginger mint. Strangers began leaving Freeman and Moss death threats on their voicemails, sending racist texts, and even showing up on their doorsteps.

Freeman said that the threats were so violent and incessant that the FBI advised her to leave her home for 2 months. And Moss testified that she had to go into hiding, change her appearance, and leave her job due to the threats.

Tina Barton, a former Republican City Clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan faced some of this same harassment after the 2020 election. Tina and her colleagues had already been working late hours due to high voter turnout and the challenges of facilitating an election during a pandemic. And then there were the added pressures of political tensions and scrutiny over every part of the vote process. After a minor mistake with counting absentee ballots was fixed on the morning after the election, Tina, and her small town of less than 75,000 people, were thrust into the national spotlight, with some Republicans stating that the vote count was inaccurate. She received several voicemails with verbal harassment and death threats.

Tina left her city clerk job in 2021 because she wanted to make a bigger impact on her fellow election officials who she saw needed help. She spent time working at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and is now working as a senior elections expert at The Elections Group. But she still sees more work that needs to be done.

We speak with Gowri Ramachandran, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Team.

After each census every 10 years, a fight for redistricting ensues.  The process of redrawing congressional maps is supposed to ensure a representative democracy, yet partisan gerrymandering has meant that many states do not have fair representation. And the gerrymandering happens from both political parties. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project which assigns grades based on a set of fairness metrics gave F’s to several states this redistricting cycle: Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court announced in June it would hear a case on North Carolina maps, potentially giving state legislators independent power over election rules—including redistricting—rendering them not subject to state constitutions or review by state courts.

We speak with Allison Riggs, co-executive director and chief counsel for voting rights for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, about what fair maps look like, the work that goes into advocating for them, and what the future is for a fair redistricting process.

During the pandemic, a new wave of Americans have moved abroad in search of cheaper rent, better weather, and slower lifestyles. Many of these young workers are self-described digital nomads, with disposable incomes.

In many cities, this influx of well-off migrants has led to gentrification and displacement of local residents. To zero in on how this issue is playing out in Mexico City, we speak with Tamara Velasquez, a doctoral student and researcher of gentrification in the Rutgers University Global Urban Studies program. And we hear from an American digital nomad in Mexico City, Meckell Milburn, about her experience as a Black woman abroad and how she tries to be a responsible nomad.

Formed in the 1970s, the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo were a powerful cultural force across Latin America, and, eventually, for Spanish speaking audiences worldwide. The group’s founder, Edgardo Díaz, employed a strategy of phasing out older members once they entered their later teens, and replacing them with younger ones, so that the group could continue indefinitely.

The new HBO Max documentary “Menudo: Forever Young,” co-directed by Kristofer Ríos and Angel Manuel Soto, traces the rise of the group and also examines the allegations made by several former members that Díaz physically abused them. Díaz has denied those allegations.

The Takeaway speaks with Ralphy Rodriguez, former member of Menudo and current singer and bass player for the band Veinte/Ochenta and Kristofer Ríos, co-director and co-executive producer of “Menudo: Forever Young.”