The Takeaway

On Sunday, 31-year old Elijah Muhammad, who was being held at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, was found dead in his cell. It is the 8th death of an inmate at Rikers Island just this year. Last year, 16 people died while in custody at Rikers. The city’s Department of Correction has released a plan for reforming Rikers, but a federal takeover of the facility is still possible later this year.

We speak with WNYC and Gothamist reporter Matt Katz about the conditions at the jail complex.

Right now, the American West is facing its worst megadrought in 1200 years. And like much of the American West, Utah, and its fast-growing capital of Salt Lake City, is facing a looming water crisis, which is also impacting the state’s iconic body of water: the Great Salt Lake. And due to poor water management and a growing population, the Great Salt Lake is slowly drying up, which could hurt the local ecosystem, Salt Lake City's economy, and could have health impacts as dust with toxic metals is kicked up from the dried lake bed. We speak with Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, who has been studying the impacts of the increasing number of dust storms in the area surrounding the Great Salt Lake. 

In 2020, friends Ashley Scott, Renee Walters and Laura Riley-Cooper pooled their money to buy 502 acres of in a rural area of Georgia. Their goal? To create a haven for Black people in the wake of the upheaval caused by the pandemic and police brutality. They've since recruited 19 families to work together to build a town from scratch. They’re calling it Freedom, Georgia. But before Freedom can become a town, it needs infrastructure, governance and an economy. We speak with Freedom co-founder Ashley Scott about the town's goals and challenges, and Dr. Teruko Mitsuhara, an anthropologist at the University of California Los Angeles, about what Freedom can learn from historic attempts to build utopian communities.

The new federally mandated crisis hotline, 988, is launching on July 16. The hotline will serve as an alternative to 911 and is meant to specifically target people in need of mental health and suicide prevention assistance.  988 callers will be routed to local and state funded crisis centers, or connected with the National Suicide prevention hotline.  We hear from Hannah Wesolowski, National Alliance on Mental Illness Chief Advocacy Officer, and Tonja Myles, community activist and peer counselor, about what the potential of the program of helping many more people experiencing mental health issues.

We also hear from Dan Gorenstein of the podcast Tradeoffs, whose reporting has revealed how many states may not have the mental health infrastructure in place yet to support the launch of 988, with the rollout just days away. 

Across the country, hospitalizations for COVID-19 have risen to their highest levels since March. This rise in cases is being driven by the new BA.5 variant, which now accounts for around 65 percent of all COVID infections in the U.S. To help us understand this stage of the pandemic, we speak with Dr. Celine Gounder, Senior Fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and a former member of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. 

This summer has been a turbulent one, and this is probably the understatement of the decade but it’s been ”eventful” in the US, with a series of high-profile mass shootings, the January 6th investigations, SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade, continuing incidents of police violence, tensions on the Mexican border–all amidst the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. For many of us here in the U.S., it has felt like an overwhelming onslaught of events. But how is the rest of the world thinking about our country in these turbulent times? We speak with Council on Foreign Relations president Dr. Richard Haass. 

Humans live meaningful lives with the knowledge they will eventually die, but an increasing amount of money and resources are being put into researching whether we can significantly prolong the aging process. There’s a growing field of scientific research dedicated to staving off both the physical and mental changes that tend to accompany older age. According to The New Statesman, this anti-aging industry, also referred to as the “immortality industry” will be worth 610 billion dollars by 2025.

But if we do extend life beyond the bounds of present day medicine, what would that mean for humanity, and the planet?

For more on this, we spoke with Thomas Fink, founder and director of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, about his understanding of anti-aging and immortality, and the physics behind it.

India has long been considered the largest democracy in the world.  But India’s constitution is struggling against the test of time. Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the BJP, a right-wing, Hindu-majority government, and today, there are growing concerns about the direction of India’s democracy.

Recently, two BJP party leaders made anti-Islamic comments, sparking protests, and clashes between Muslims and Hindus. Hundreds of Muslims were arrested and the homes of Muslim activists and protestors were reportedly demolished. Some prominent voices in India say that India’s democracy has been damaged beyond repair, and worry that the country is becoming a Hindu-nationalist state. In May, ten human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, condemned India for targeting and prosecuting journalists and government critics, particularly Muslim journalists. 

We speak with Indian-Muslim journalist Rana Ayyub, who has been subjected to harassment and detainment, and Indian-born journalist and writer Salil Tripathi about how India has gotten to this moment.

This week, NASA released the first photos taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveal galaxies as they appeared up to 13 billion years in the past. This is the most powerful space telescope of all time, with a 270-square foot mirror that can collect infrared light from some of the most far-flung stars and galaxies in the universe. Dr. Ezinne Uzo-Okoro, Assistant Director for Space Policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, speaks with us about what these photos can tell us about our universe's past and future.

The Russian government recently declared an "operational pause" in its war on Ukraine, in the face of difficulties recruiting troops and continued international aid to Ukraine. Christopher Miller, world and national security reporter with POLITICO, covering Russia's war on Ukraine, explains what this means and where the war will go from here.