Violence Between India’s Hindus and Muslims Is Escalating, But It’s Not New (0:32)

Guest: Aatish Taseer, Reporter, “In Search of India’s Soul” on Al Jazeera, Author of “Twice Born,” “The Way Things Were,” “Stranger to History”

While President Trump was dining with India’s Prime Minister in New Delhi last week, violence between Muslims and Hindus turned into three days of riots on the streets of India’s capital. Homes, businesses and cars were set on fire. More than 40 people died and hundreds were injured. Police are accused of aiding the rioters who were targeting Muslims, or looking the other way. It was the deadliest such violence Delhi has seen in decades, but just the latest in a worrisome escalation of religious tension in India. 

 

A Book Designed to Help You Feel for Honeybees (20:58)

Guest: Candace Fleming, Author; Eric Rohmann, Illustrator of “Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera”

Bees pollinate a lot of our food. And they’re in decline for a lot of reasons. So we’re supposed to be nice to bees. But when one comes buzzing around you or your kid, how are you supposed to fight that panicky urge to swat – or squash?  Maybe start by taking in a gorgeous new picture book called “Honeybee.”

 

After More Than a Century, Congress Makes Lynching a Federal Crime (37:06)

Guest: Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Ph.D., Professor of History at Florida Memorial University, Author of “Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home”

A measure to making lynching a federal crime has finally passed Congress, after more than a century of failed attempts. President Trump is expected to sign the law and advocates say it’s an important symbolic step toward justice for the more than 4,000 victims of lynching – most of them African Americans. The vast majority of those murders went unpunished. And they weren’t all in the South.

 

The Apple Seed (50:38)

Guest: Sam Payne, Host of The Apple Seed

The power of storytelling, and how this weekend's Daylight Savings promted a story from Sam's childhood.

 

Some People Consistently Buy Products That Fail (59:44)

Guest: Duncan Simester Is a Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Where He Holds the NTU Chair in Management Science. His Recent 2019 Study Is Titled “The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure.”

There’s this frustrating thing that keeps happening to me at Trader Joe’s: I’ll discover a treat I really like and then one day I can’t find it on the shelf and I ask the clerk when it’ll be back in stock and the answer is – “Oh, that was discontinued. Nobody liked it.” One time it was these dried mangos covered in spicy chili powder and dipped in dark chocolate. They were so good, but a little weird, so I get maybe they weren’t a huge seller. But another time it was potato chips dipped in chocolate – I mean who doesn’t like salty, crunchy and chocolatey? Marketing researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management have come up with a name for people like me who systematically pick losing products – “harbingers of failure.”

 

When Democracy Failed to Protect Religious Minorities in the 1830's, the Mormons Hatched a Dramatic Plan (1:14:57)

Guest: Benjamin Park, PhD, Assistant Professor of History, Sam Houston State University, Author of “Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier”

Americans are so divided today over politics and culture and race and religion, that you’ll sometimes hear comparisons to the Civil War era. That’s an exaggeration. Yes, our disagreements run deep, but Americans today are not seriously discussing our democratic system as a “failed experiment” or arguing that we should scrap the Constitution. Roll back the clock a century and a half, and there were widespread, serious doubts about whether the Founding Fathers had got it right.