Think from KERA

In the mid-19th Century, Chinese immigrants began settling in the U.S. – largely in San Francisco. And many of the young women and girls who crossed the Pacific were thrown into a life of slavery and prostitution. Julia Flynn Siler joins guest host John McCaa to tell the story of a courageous group of female abolitionists who dedicated their lives to rescuing these women, which she writes about in“The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown”(Knopf).

New York’s Central Park and other urban spaces were conceived as natural breaks from the hustle of city life. San Francisco Chronicle urban design critic John King joins guest host John McCaa to talk about how these spaces – including Dallas’ Klyde Warren Park – have evolved to offer a variety of experiences, which he writes about for The American Scholar.

More than 70 percent of the planet exists underwater. Today, we’ll take a deep breath and dive down to meet some of the animals who call our oceans home – including dolphins, whales and array of cephalopods. And later in the hour, we’ll learn how seahorses, lobsters and other sea creatures reproduce.

Chuck Klosterman is an essayist, New York Times best-selling nonfiction author and pop-culture critic. His joins host Krys Boyd to talk about his new book,“Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction” (Penguin), a collection of fictional stories featuring far-from-normal everyday scenarios, off-the-beaten path settings and characters that sometimes go off the rails.

There are designations for protected lands, including “park,” “monument,” “sanctuary” and “wilderness.” It’s this last one that interests author Dan Richards most. He joins host Krys Boyd to talk about some of the most remote places on Earth and what makes the isolation and rawness of a place worth the journey, which he writes about in “Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth” (Canongate).

The American West still invokes images of untamed, vast landscapes stretching for miles. Author and journalist Christopher Ketcham joins host Krys Boyd to talk about how the American West is actually slipping away, in no small part due to lax federal protections and commercialization harming fragile ecosystems. His new book is called “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West”(Viking).

When an offensive post appears on social media, a user can flag it, block it, or mute it. But thousands upon thousands of violent, racist and explicit posts never make it to your screen, thanks to a hidden industry of moderators combing through the worst of the web. Sarah T. Roberts, co-director of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the people on the front lines of offensive content — and the emotional toll it takes. Her new book is called “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media”(Yale University Press).

For most kids today, their entire lives have been documented on social media. Kate Eichhorn, associate professor of culture and media at The New School, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about how this generation can never escape their online personas, which she writes about in “The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media” (Harvard University Press).

Cars are such a part of American life that in most places, car ownership is assumed. Gregory H. Shill, associate professor of law at the University of Iowa College of Law, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the many ways driving has been written into our legal system – and about how that’s had a negative effect on public transit and the environment. His essay “Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, But the Law Insists on It” appears in The Atlantic.

A new field of archaeology has researchers not digging in the dirt, but instead hovering thousands of miles about the earth in search of ancient civilizations. Sarah Parcak, professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, joins host Krys Boyd to talk about how satellites are being used to scan for buried artifacts, which she writes about in“Archaeology From Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past”(Henry Holt and Company).