Think from KERA

The ability for people to so easily switch from, say, devoted family man to serial killer is the crux of America’s continued fascination with true crime. That’s the subject of “American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century.” Author and investigative journalist Maureen Callahan joins guest host Courtney Collins to talk about the subject of the book, a man named Israel Keyes, who meticulously plotted and murdered victims undetected for 14 years.

Dr. Ayaz Virji says something fundamentally changed when President Trump was elected. The Georgetown-educated physician serves a rural Minnesota town, and where once he was welcomed, he found his Muslim family targeted by racism and rejection. After a local church invited him to speak to the community, Virji turned his oratory into a memoir, “Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor’s Struggle for Home in Rural America.”  He joins guest host Courtney Collins to discuss his hopeful message.

Julia Heaberlin says she learned about “evil and wicked surprise” as a newspaper editor. Later she funneled those forces into her renowned crime novels, including international best-seller “Black-Eyed Susans.” The native Texan’s newest novel,“Paper Ghosts”, takes a deep dive into the mind of a possible serial killer using a road trip across Texas to solve a long-ago crime. In fact, Texas plays heavily into all Heaberlin’s works, and she joins guest host Courtney Collins to talk about how she crafts her dark, mysterious tales.

This week, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have taken to the streets to call for the resignation of the island’s governor, Ricardo A. Rosselló. Ed Morales covers Puerto Rico for The Nation, and he joins guest host John McCaa to talk about how years of corruption, economic problems and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria have led to the current uprising.

A new report from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund finds a connection between racial residential segregation and black access to water systems. Sparky Abraham is an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who worked on the report, and he joins guest host John McCaa to talk about how this lack of water access contributes to the nation’s economic divide.

The psychedelic alkaloid mescaline occurs naturally in peyote cactus and other plants. And though it became popular in the mid-20th Century, its use dates back to the earliest Andean cultures. Mike Jay joins guest host John McCaa to tell the stories of seekers through the years who have experimented with mescaline in search of new states of consciousness, which he writes about in “Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic”(Yale University Press)

Between 1910 and 1997, African-American farmers lost about 90 percent of their land because the law does little to protect the passing down of land between generations. ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser joins guest host John McCaa to tell the stories of families who are fighting to keep their property – and about how landowners can protect what they already own. Her recent reporting on the topic was co-published with The New Yorker.

Jazz is one of the truly American art forms. But is the American youth of today still interested in the music of Armstrong, Ellington and Coltrane? Bart Marantz has dedicated his career to teaching jazz, and he joins guest host John McCaa to talk about the standout students he helped develop at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts – and about the next generation of jazz greats.

In the late 1920s and early ’30s, Zora Neale Hurston befriended Cudjo Lewis, and elderly formerly enslaved man living in Alabama. Hurston’s interviews with Lewis about his capture in Africa and transfer to America form the basis of “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” (Amistad), and Deborah Plant joins guest host John McCaa to talk about this documentation of an integral part of the nation’s history. Plant wrote the introduction to the book, which was released for the first time last year.

There may be no state more in love with its mythical past than Texas. Sam Houston State history professor Ty Cashion joins guest host John McCaa to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Texas legends. Cashion’s new book is called “Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History” (University of Oklahoma Press)