A new program the the University of Virginia encourages medical students to marry their passions for medicine and the humanities. Allison Quantz has the story of a second year who pulls poetry from treating patients.

Written in another time and in another country, the Russian classics—Tolstoy, Lermontov, and all the rest—are still relevant today. Andrew Kaufman (University of Virginia) and his students are proving that by teaching masterpieces of Russian literature to incarcerated youth. The readings prompt discussions: What makes for a “successful” life? How I can be true to myself? What is my responsibility to others? Given that I will die, how should I live? Also featured: Most incarcerated women are single mothers—and sole financial providers of one or more youngsters. Virginia Mackintosh (University of Mary Washington) says no kids are more at risk. She taught a parenting course for the mothers behind bars and leads some of her college students in a one-week summer camp for the children left behind. And: Southside Virginia Community College has started a pioneering program that enables inmates to obtain college credits, by creating a campus ‘pod’ within prison walls. It’s called “Campus Within Walls” and is made possible by funding from The Sunshine Lady Foundation. Chad Patton administers the program and says it is the product of an enormous amount of cooperation between the Department of Corrections, the Department of Correctional Education, and the Governor’s office.

Later in the show: Why do people get so much pleasure from movies that frighten them out of their wits? Stephen Prince (Virginia Tech) says horror films allow us to explore the anxieties of our times along with questions about human nature, all from the safety of a darkened movie theatre. Also: Science fiction writer John Rosenman (Norfolk State University) says the genre has come a long way since the early days of Buck Rogers.

The power of logos and branding wasn’t lost on the ancients. Bruce MacDonald (Virginia Military Institute) says after William the Conqueror defeated Harold, the Saxon king, William wisely combined the crests of the two forces into a new British logo—two winged lions on a yellow field—which helped him unify and govern his new land. Also featured: Sequoyah, or as he signed his name, (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya, is the great Cherokee Indian who invented the Cherokee alphabet that made reading and writing in Cherokee possible. Ken Smith (Radford University) is having the students in his typography and design class create new typeface designs for the Cherokee language. And: As summer comes to a close and incoming college freshmen gear up for their first fall semesters, we visit the College of William and Mary, where new students are welcomed with a unique and celebratory tradition. Later in the show: Brian Ulrich’s (Virginia Commonwealth University) new book Is This Place Great or What is a decade long photographic study of consumerism in America, post 9-11. His pictures portray shoppers and employees in “Big Box” stores and small thrift stores. He also documents abandoned shopping malls on the brink of demolition, holding a mirror up to our society’s love of the retail economy. Also featured: The story of America is a story of dreamers and defaulters and of dramatic financial panics that defined the nation and created its political parties. Scott Nelson (College of William and Mary) is the author of A Nation of Deadbeats, a fresh, irreverent look at our addiction to debt and how it has made us what we are today.

There is, believe it or not, only one recorded instance of a person from an illiterate people creating an effective written language. A Virginia scholar is combining that story with the challenge of graphic design. Allison Quantz reports.

The personal and professional lives of musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane can’t be divorced from the struggle for racial equality. Music scholar Antonio Garcia (Virginia Commonwealth University) says they all contributed in significant ways to interracial understanding and social progress. Also featured: The composers of the Civil Rights anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” also created musical theater at the turn of the century, transforming the public image of African American characters and performers. Paula Marie Seniors (Virginia Tech) looks at the lives of the composers Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, whose work helped break down stereotypical portrayals of black Americans. Also: The skilled oratory of civil rights leader James Farmer was shaped in part as a member of the legendary 1935 all African American debate team portrayed in the film, The Great Debaters. Timothy O’Donnell (University of Mary Washington) is leading an effort to help historically black colleges and universities field high-quality debate teams on crucial public policy issues. And: During segregation, African American funeral directors were historically among the few black individuals who were economically independent. In her book, To Serve the Living, Suzanne Smith (George Mason University) shows how their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights as well as bury the dead.

For every ten students who go to community college for an associate’s degree, only one graduates in three years. Stan Jones, president of Complete Colleges America says it’s time to overhaul the community college system. Math professor Randy Cone (Virginia Military Institute) says that his students are less math-literate today than they were fifteen years ago. He’s looking at new ways to bring students up to speed for college level math. Plus: Have you ever wondered just how big your feet would need to be to allow you to walk on water, or how about the amount of time lost in a person’s life for every cigarette smoked? Physicist Lawrence Weinstein (Old Dominion University) answers these brain teasers and many others by using a process called “guesstimation.” Also: David Wright (Tidewater Community College) uses some of the gravity-defying rides at Busch Gardens amusement park to teach the principles of physics. He says an understanding of basic physics helps make sense of the world around us.

The lives of thirteen people are featured in a new book–but the real star is a 1957 Chevrolet Townsman wagon. Auto Biography, tells the true story of the car and its many owners. Author Earl Swift is a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Also featured: “Bath salts” used to conjure up an image of a relaxing day at the spa. But lately, the terms carries a whole new connotation. Poison center director Rutherfoord Rose (Virginia Commonwealth University) says the new synthetic drug induces strange and violent behaviors. And: The blue dye of the modern rape kit doesn’t work on women with dark skin. Kathryn Laughon (University of Virginia) is researching a new dye that will work on all skin tones. Plus: The last decade has seen an increase in the rate of college women who engage in high-risk drinking, especially when they drink at fraternity parties. Jill Russett (Christopher Newport University) is studied the trend. Also featured: Much has been written about the way our culture raises girls. But what about boys? Popular books such as Raising Cain and The War on Boys suggest they are either weakened by feminism or stifled by hyper-masculine ideals about what men should be. Matt Pricket (Longwood University) says neither extreme tells the whole story.

In his new novel Tomorrow City, Kirk Kjeldsen (Virginia Commonwealth University) tells the story of an ex-con who is trying to reinvent himself in Shanghai, a city that has perhaps reinvented itself more than any other city in history. Kjeldsen recently moved to Shanghai, which he describes as “more American than America.” And: Everyone in America should understand what’s happening in China. That’s the message from economist and former Reagan advisor Deborah Hewitt (College of William and Mary). Hewitt says the changes taking place now in China are already affecting American businesses and households. Later in the show: Filmmaker Sonali Gulati (Virginia Commonwealth University) used to spot telemarketers by the way they mispronounced her Indian name. But when they started to get the name right, she knew something was up. American companies have long outsourced telemarketing and customer service jobs to India where workers compete for jobs at giant call centers. Gulati visited a call center in India and discovered how Indian telemarketers acquire American names and accents, and learn about American movies, music, and TV. Her film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night is a journey into that world.

Most of us learned in history class that slavery in the U.S. ended with the Thirteenth Amendment. But the trade in human beings—for sex and labor—is actually the fastest growing criminal industry in the world today, and it’s happening just below the surface of our everyday lives. Author Corban Addison confronts human trafficking in his novel A Walk Across the Sun. Also featured: Since World War II, the American “H2” program has brought hundreds of thousands of Jamaican men to the United States to do difficult and dangerous work for some of the nation’s largest agricultural corporations. Cindy Hahamovitch tells the story of these workers in her book No Man’s Land. Later in the show: New research examines how the traumatic events of WWII were addressed in German history textbooks after the war. Brian Puaca says the textbooks first depicted Germans as victims, but the schoolbooks gradually incorporated a frank and honest account of National Socialism and Nazi atrocities. He challenges those who have argued that the Germans have long repressed their memories of the Second World War—both in terms of their own suffering and the crimes committed in their name. And: It is generally thought that German intellectuals did not start examining the Nazi period until the 1960s, some twenty years after World War II. But Mark Clark identifies four German intellectuals—Thomas Mann, Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Meinecke, and Bertolt Brecht—whose work directly confronted the disastrous rule of the Third Reich immediately after the war.

The U.S. State Department has estimated that 1 million children each year are exploited by the global sex industry. Through a new novel, one Virginia man seeks to draw attention to this modern day slavery. Allison Quantz has the story.