With Good Reason

In "Free the Beaches" Andrew Kahrl tells the story of activist Ned Coll and his campaign to open New England’s shoreline to African Americans, as northern white families fought to preserve their segregated beaches.

D you ever worry that the radiation coming from your cell phone might be harmful? Researching Deborah O’Dell recently finished a 5-year study that found cell phone radiation can cause changes to our brain cells.

100 pilgrims journey from Charlottesville to the national memorial to lynching in Montgomery, Alabama to pay homage to a black man who was lynched in 1898.

Beginning with the end of the Civil War, and well into the middle of the twentieth century, the extralegal and socially sanctioned practice of lynching claimed the lives of at least 3,959 African American men, women, and children. Hannah Ayers and Lance Warren are the directors of a recent documentary about lynching and its effects on families. The film is called An Outrage.

Can art heal? This week, the redemptive power of language and song. Hear how former inmates use writing to explore their paths to imprisonment and how jazz can tell stories of social justice, healing, self-reflection and redemption.

African Americans who fought for their country in Vietnam often experienced the racism their families endured back home. Plus: Native Americans fought in Vietnam in greater numbers relative to their population than any other group. We hear testimony of Native Americans who fought for the U.S. on foreign soil.

Summer reads from the With Good Reason universe! Inman Majors gives us some comedic escapism, Erin Jones is reading about mid-century women artists reclaiming the pin-up, and Sharon Jones shares why she, a black woman with a comfortable salary, is spending her summer reading about whiteness and poverty.

The 1987 pop song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega is considered the “mother of the MP3.” It was the test track used by German scientists to perfect this new file format that would revolutionize the music industry. Ryan Maguire has been experimenting with the sounds that got stripped out of that first MP3.

Jose Oberholzer is a transplant surgeon who lies awake nights thinking about a cellular cure for diabetes. He created the Chicago Diabetes Project so the best minds in the country can work together on a cure. He says we're close!

More than a hundred years ago, a small group of Russian Mennonites went looking for Christ in Central Asia. They didn’t find him, but they did find a home among Muslims in Uzbekistan. Sofia Samatar tells their history in her new memoir, alongside her own story of growing up the daughter of a Somali Muslim and an American Mennonite.