The Takeaway

Lorgia Garcia-Pena was a respected and beloved professor at Harvard University.  There, she says, she and her predominantly Latinx students faced consistent scrutiny and surveillance from the Harvard campus police. 

We talk with Lorgia Garcia-Pena, author of Community As Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color and Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University, about her experiences at Harvard with campus police and later being denied tenure there.  We also explore how those events informed her latest book on building communities of rebellion.

Twenty-seven years may seem like a long time between seasons of a television show, but for the Kids in the Hall, it’s like the five members of the legendary Canadian sketch comedy troupe never split up. This month, they are back with the series available on on Amazon Prime after nearly three decades off the air, and no surprise here, they’re still pretty weird.

Bruce McCulloch, Canadian actor, writer and comedian, and one of the founding members of the group, tells us what's new with the Kids.

According to an economist at Indeed, more than a million people have come out of retirement to reenter the workforce. We speak with Dr. Beth Truesdale, an expert on the aging workforce at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, to understand this trend. Dr. Truesdale speaks to the reasons behind unretirement and why retirement works for some and not for others in this country.

For Memorial Day, we speak with Richard Brookshire, co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, an organization dedicated to advocating for the needs of Black veterans. Brookshire can speak about the disparities in how Black veterans are treated compared to their white counterparts, and is also very open about his own mental health struggles following the end of his active duty service.

This weekend, hundreds of military families gathered in Arlington, VA, for a unique program designed to provide support for relatives of the fallen. Bonnie Carroll founded Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) after the death of her husband, Brig. Gen. Tom Carroll. Since its founding, they have helped more than 100,000 surviving relatives of military service members with comprehensive assistance, including financial support, counseling services, helping navigate government agencies, and much more. 

One of their signature programs is the Good Grief Camp, where children find support and community with one another, and get assigned an active duty military service member as a mentor. We share some of their stories here.

The United States has a long history of military presence in Somalia dating back to the early 90s. More recently, as his time in office was ending, President Trump withdrew troops from the country. But last week, President Biden reversed that decision and announced that the U.S. would be sending 500 troops into the country in a security effort against Al-Shabab, an islamic insurgent group active in the country. Meanwhile, the country's struggles with unrest have been compounded by natural disasters and a food crises.  

We speak with Omar Mahmood, senior analyst for Somalia for the International Crisis Group, to explore why the U.S. is going back to Somalia, and what it means for the country.

We take a look at the latest primary election results from this past week. We’re joined by Maya King, politics reporter for The New York Times, and Stephen Fowler, state and local politics reporter for Georgia Public Radio.

Lidiya Yankovskaya is the conductor and artistic director of the Chicago Opera Theatre; one of the few women to hold that title at a major arts organization. She's also a former refugee. Raised in Russia, with summers in Ukraine, her family fled St. Petersburg in the post-Soviet Reconstruction era due to anti-semitism there and came to the United States. She founded the Refugee Orchestra Project in the wake of the Syrian conflict to raise awareness about the contributions refugees make.

This Memorial Day Weekend, the orchestra will play a special benefit concert in Boston to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees.The performance will feature all refugee soloists, performing music by refugee composers, with an orchestra made up primarily of refugee musicians or recent descendants of refugees.  We speak with Yankovskaya and one of composer Milad Yousufi about the project. 

19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday. Though their lives were all tragically cut short, all of them were loved by their families and friends in unique ways. We take a moment to remember the victims. 

In the wake of the tragedies in Uvalde and Buffalo’s East Side, there is a need for mental health care for families, for survivors, and for the community as a whole.  Yet tragedies like these also highlight inequities in mental health care access for communities of color, where the data shows that people of color are less likely to access mental health treatment than white folks.  

To explore the importance of culturally competent mental healthcare and the need for expanded mental health care access in communities of color, we speak with Luis Zayas, dean of the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin.