With Good Reason

A few lucky college students who love the Harry Potter fantasy series get to travel to London for 3 weeks of magical creatures, potions, and herbology.

And if you're impatient for the final season of Game of Thrones, we have your GoT fix--how the women of Westeros gain and lose power in that fictional patriarchal world of dragons and warfare.

Plus: Long before there was Black Panther or the Blaxploitation movies, there were Race Movies. 500 were created by black actors and directors, but only 100 remain.

A story of Native American resilience comes to life in a new biography of Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota medicine man and Catholic preacher. Black Elk was born in 1863 and died at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Another new book illuminates the life of a Pequot Indian activist and author who is little known today, but has been called the Native American Frederick Douglas. William Apess challenged the power structure of his day using the pen, the pulpit, and protest.

In her new book, Real Love, Sharon Salzberg--one of the world's leading authorities on love and meditation--shows us love isn't just an emotion we feel when we're in a romantic relationship. It's an ability we can nurture and cultivate.

Also, Oliver Hill shares his journey in the 1960's from the segregated south, to black radicalism, to Transcendental Meditation with the Beach Boys.

Also: How "The Pause" got started. We talk with emergency care nurse Jonathan Bartels, who just wanted to take a quiet moment to honor the life of the patient who had just died before people rushed in to clean up and change the sheets.

Southwest Virginia has seen a decline in coal and tobacco—two industries that once boomed in the region. Could hemp be a way to boost the local economy? And more.

South Carolina saw the statewide prohibition of alcohol in 1915. But not before the state established its own dispensary system more than a decade earlier. Plus: oral histories of moonshiners in Appalachia.

When Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia’s central Rotunda, he set out to build a temple to the book, a stunning rebuke to the Christian churches that anchored every other college of his day. But Jefferson’s secular utopia didn’t pan out exactly as he planned.

With state support shrinking and the dependence on private support increasing for most public universities what does the financial landscape of the future look like? What makes an institution public? Is it the source of funding? History? Mission? Or something else?

Washington has its fair share of brown-nosers. We talk with the authors of Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy about yes-men, now and through the ages.

Scholars, historic interpreters, and descendants of enslaved people recently gathered at Montpelier, the home of James Madison. They were there to create a rubric for historic sites who want to engage descendant communities in their work. We share stories and interviews from Montpelier's Summit on Slavery.

Poet Kiki Petrosino in her poem, If My Body Is a Text, reflects on a year of tragic outcomes during traffic stops between police and African American drivers. Plus: Most of us have heard of Negro League Baseball, but there were many other all-black sports leagues and teams across America in the 20th century. David Wiggins shares how African-American athletes built their own place for sports in a segregated world.