The Takeaway

You may know Jesse Williams from his years starring as the self-proclaimed pretty-boy otolaryngologist Jackson Avery on Shonda Rhimes' hit medical drama Grey's Anatomy. Or maybe you know him from his extensive catalog of television roles, like on Little Fires Everywhere or Power. You might also know him as a fierce advocate against police brutality. But you've never seen him like this. 

Williams has taken the stage as Darren Lemming in the Broadway revival of TAKE ME OUT, a play by Richard Greenberg. In the play, Lemming is a biracial baseball player whose life becomes infinitely more complicated after he decides to come out to the world as gay.

Williams is now on his second run of the show, currently staged at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre until February 5th. He joins The Takeaway to talk about some of our favorite words that start with a B: Broadway, bravery and baseball. 

In this last installment of The Takeaway Holiday Book Club we speak with Sarah Thankam (Thun-gum) Matthews about her debut novel, All This Could Be Different.

The "tripledemic" is surging, there’s a medicine shortage, China has ended its “zero COVID” policy, and public health institutions are under attack from activists and policy makers. 

We speak with Gregg Gonsalves, The Nation’s public health correspondent, co-director of the Global Health Justice Partnership, and associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health about what it all means for our ability to act now, and in future public health crises.

The death of beloved dancer and host Stephen “Twitch” Boss took many by surprise. It once again thrusts the always present yet rarely covered reality of suicide by Black and Brown people back into the mainstream.

We discuss suicidality within Black and Brown communities, the disparities that exist and the help that’s available. Michael Lindsey, Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work, NYU School of Social Work and Kiara Alvarez, Bloomberg Assistant professor of American Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health join us to discuss.

Americans love trains, and so does The Takeaway! So we’re telling the stories of how trains built America. Today, we go inside the trains and explore the experiences of passengers riding the rails in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We hear how trains were sites of civil rights struggles long before the 1960s, with Miriam Thaggert, associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo and author of "Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad."

And we speak with Jarred Johnson, executive director of Transit Matters in Boston, about how the struggle to ensure that trains are engines of freedom for all Americans continues to the present day throughout the country's public transit systems. 

Check out the first episode in this mini-series, "How How Trains Built America's Labor Movement."

By some measures, 2022 was the year in labor organizing. Workers at  Starbucks and Amazon secured historic victories. Our  Takeaway Book Club selection for Tuesday is "Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor." We talk with the author, Kim Kelly, labor columnist for Teen Vogue. 

We also take a look at the 2022 words of the year. Merriam Webster’s word of the year for 2022 is “gaslighting.” Oxford’s is “goblin mode.” We take a look at these words of the year and hear from Team Takeaway on their selections for word of 2022.

On Monday, the January 6th committee referred former president Donald Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on four charges including: inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States and the obstruction of an act of Congress.

We speak with Hunter Walker, investigative reporter with Talking Points Memo and co-author of "The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th," about the referrals and the likelihood of actual charges.

After a recent series of convictions against police officers who killed unarmed Black Americans, including the officer who killed Atatiana Jefferson, questions still linger about what police accountability actually looks like.

While convictions can bring a sense of resolution, they don’t transform the cultures of police forces.

We’re joined by Andrea Ritchie, a co-founder of Interrupting Criminalization and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Mariame Kaba, to better understand this sometimes-nebulous idea of police accountability. 

Americans love trains, and so does The Takeaway! So we’re telling the story of the people who work on the rails and make sure all our precious cargo gets to us on time. As crucial as these workers are to every facet of the American economy, they’re currently facing grueling working conditions and paltry benefits. After negotiations broke down between rail worker unions and companies this past month over paid sick leave benefits, Congress moved to prevent rail workers from striking. But that basic right to strike was won by early labor organizers at the cost of many lives.

We’re looking at this current labor dispute and the epic battles on the rail that shaped the labor movement, with Jeff Schuhrke, assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State.

Then, we learn about the workers who were left out of that early labor movement, with Manu Karuka, assistant professor of American studies at Barnard College, and author of "Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad."

And we hear about how some of these rail workers later built their own engines of power and became vital drivers of the movement for civil rights, from Bob Lettenberger, associate editor of Trains Magazine.

On Monday, a young man named Majidreza Rahnavard was executed by the Iranian government. He is the second protester officially convicted and executed since the anti-regime protests began in September, over the death of Masah Amini while in the custody of Iran's morality police. Nearly 500 other protesters have also been killed by police and security forces during the protests.

We hear from Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director for the Center for Human Rights in Iran, about the escalating situation and the continuing determination of the protesters.