After a childhood in foster homes, Sixto Cancel only found out about the family that would’ve taken him in after he aged out of care. The chief executive officer of Think of Us, a nonprofit focused on foster care, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the practice of kinship placement and the need for systemic change so that children aren’t kept from loving homes. His recent essay published in The New York Times is headlined “I Will Never Forget That I Could Have Lived With People Who Loved Me.”

From freshly baked cookies to barnyard stalls, smell imprints places and people in our memories. Journalist Jude Stewart joins host Krys Boyd to talk about how this sense shapes our world from art to history and reveals the surprising science behind it. Her book is called “Revelations in Air: A Guidebook to Smell.”

When the pandemic drove many Americans to work from home, it also opened the possibility for reimagining career success. Bill Burnett, executive director of the Design Program at Stanford, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss ways to access creativity and personal growth even as the workplace is radically changing.  His book, co-written with Dave Evans, is called “Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work.”

Anita Hill’s testimony during Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Senate confirmation hearings nearly kept him from being confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University joins host Krys Boyd to discuss her decades long fight for women’s rights and gender equity, which she writes about in “Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.”

Millions of Asians have immigrated to the U.S. since a restrictive 1965 law was lifted. Jay Caspian Kang, writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the evolution of what it means to be Asian-American – and about his own family’s story as they moved across the country to find their footings. His book is called “The Loneliest Americans.”

On this week's show: a mortician and a British journalist talk death and Halloween.

Listen to the full conversation with mortician Caitlin Doughty here:

https://think.kera.org/2019/09/24/anything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-death/

Listen to the full conversation with journalist and writer Oliver Burkeman here:

https://think.kera.org/2013/10/31/halloween-minus-the-death/

In post-war America, building a nuclear family was paramount, which meant unmarried pregnant women were often pushed to give up children, whether they wanted to or not. Gabrielle Glaser joins host Krys Boyd to tell the story of how a system of closed adoptions across the nation operated on shifty moral ground and separated mother from child in the name of a wholesome environment. Her book is “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption.”

 

This episode originally aired on March 17, 2021.

Suffering from an undiagnosed disease can motivate some to look for solutions that go beyond traditional medicine. Ross New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins host Krys Boyd to talk about living with Lyme Disease, the pain and isolation he’s felt, and his new understanding of why some patients seek solace in conspiracies. His book is called “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.”

Is our genetic makeup part of our civil rights? Jorge L. Contreras teaches intellectual property, science policy and the law and ethics of genetics at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss a landmark case brought when the U.S. government issued patents to biotech companies to use human genes, and the field of human genetics law it created. His book is called “The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA.”

Cancel culture can be about consequences, but it can also damage the causes it attempts to champion. John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University, and he joins host Krys Boyd to make the case that people of color are sometimes harmed by well-meaning antiracists who sometimes lose sight of the thing they are fighting against. His book is called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”