Think from KERA

Anyone who’s around teenagers often knows that they can be hard to pin down – mature and independent one minute, impulsive and emotional the next. Adriana Galván of the UCLA Brain Research Institute joins us to talk about how the teen mind develops. She’s in town for “The Brain: An Owner’s Lecture Series” tonight at UTD’s Center for Brain Health.

Many of us spend more time with our co-workers on a given day than with our spouses and friends. Rob Walker joins us to talk about how we can get along better with our colleagues, be better managers to our employees and develop a rapport with our bosses. He gives workplace advice as the Workologist columnist for The New York Times. And we’ll also talk with Brad Bitterly, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, about a recent workplace study he authored called “Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status.”

UT Southwestern Medical Center’s O’Donnell Brain Institute recently launched the Con-Tex Registry, a statewide database to track concussions among middle- and high-school athletes. Dr. Munro Cullum and Dr. Hunt Batjer – who operate the data base – join us to talk about what we can learn from collecting data on a large scale. And we’ll also talk with Reid Forgrave, whose profile of a young football player who committed suicide after suffering from CTE appears in the current issue of GQ.

Slavery is the great stain on American’s history – and while African Americans bore the brunt of the practice, they weren’t the only ones. Andrés Reséndez joins us to talk about the tens of thousands of Native Americans who also served as slaves dating back to the times of Columbus. He writes about the topic in “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He’s in town to participate in the symposium “Indians at the Center: Rethinking U.S. History and Geography,” sponsored by the UTA Center for Greater Southwestern Studies.

Death is an experience that every human who ever lives will go through. And yet our understanding of the mechanics of death is relatively limited. Dr. Haider Warraich of Duke University Medical Center joins us to talk about how technological advances are giving scientists a better understanding of how we die, which he writes about in “Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life” (St. Martin’s Press).

Of the thousands of people who attempt to “thru-hike” the Appalachian Trail each year, only one in four complete the trip. About 25 percent of those hikers are women, and last year, Rahawa Haile become one of the few women of color to finish the 2,000 mile trek. She joins us to talk about how books by black authors helped her along the way. Her essay “How Black Books Lit My Way Along the Appalachian Trail” appears on BuzzFeed.

As of last fall, more than 45,000 Texas students have received nonmedical exemptions for their school vaccinations. That makes the state a prime location for an outbreak of measles – one of the most contagious and lethal of all diseases. That’s according to Dr. Peter J. Hotez, a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development. He joins us to talk about how the anti-vaccination movement is gaining ground nationwide, which he wrote about recently in The New York Times.

For decades, Mexico has ranked as one of America’s top trading partners, thanks in part to NAFTA. In recent years, though, there have been calls to tighten border security and even build a wall along the border, straining the alliance between the two countries, Eric Meeks, senior fellow at SMU’s Clemens Center for Southwest Studies, joins us to talk about our relationship with Mexico. On Feb. 21, he’ll deliver a lecture entitled “Bridges and Barricades: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Border” on the SMU campus.

The proliferation of fake news online has troubled legitimate members of the media as well as those who rely on the media for information about the world. Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research for the Pew Research Center, joins us to talk about how people consume news online – the subject of an expansive new study conducted by Pew.

Elliot Ackerman is a decorated Marine who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And since 2013, he’s reported on the war in Syria from Istanbul. He joins us to talk about tapping into that firsthand knowledge of the world’s most dangerous places for his novels, the latest of which is called “Dark at the Crossing” (Knopf). Ackerman speaks to the World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth on February 24.