Georgia Flips, Virtual Nature, Social Media Data

11/18/20 • 103 min

The last time a Democrat for President won in Georgia, it was Bill Clinton in 1992–a Southerner, by the way. With shorter days and colder temperatures setting in, it gets harder to get yard work done, let alone spend time relaxing outdoors. You can’t just kill a hummingbird and turn it into a good luck charm–which is something people do Sam drops by to talk about Thanksgiving stories. This has been a really rough year. It’s probably safe to say that a lot of people aren’t doing great. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for “discovering one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.”

Previous Episode

Biden on Climate, Dolly Parton, Life Changing

President-elect Joe Biden has promised to put the US back in the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. There’s a petition–with tens of thousands of signatures–calling on the state of Tennessee to take down all of its Confederate monuments and replace them with a “true Tennessee hero, Dolly Parton.” Humans are pushing the evolution of living species into overdrive. Robots can do a lot of amazing things, but unfortunately, they’re pretty limited in movement.

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Rideshare Drivers, Hollywood Diversity, Cary Grant

What Do Rideshare Drivers Really Want? (0:30)
Guest: Chris Gerace, Rideshare Driver, Creator of YouTube Channel “Real RideShare Stories”
Tension has been building for years about what rights and protections people have when they drive for an app like Uber or Lyft. The companies say drivers are just freelancers. The state of California tried to force Uber and Lyft to treat drivers as employees with access to health benefits, paid sick days and unemployment insurance. It all came to a head in the recent election with a measure called Prop 22 in California. The rideshare companies won that fight. Now they’re looking to do the same thing in other states. But what do drivers for these apps think?

Juvenile Detainees Losing Ground and Academic Credits in the System (22:56)
Guest: Nadia Mozzafar, Senior Lawyer, Juvenile Law Center, Co-Writer, National Report "Credit Overdue"
The US has a different justice system for children who commit crimes. They’re locked up separately from adult offenders and typically face different punishment. The underlying idea being that kids are still developing–their brains, their behaviors, and the hope would be that after detention, a teen could turn his or her life around. Education is foundational to that theory–so kids in the juvenile justice system spend a lot of their time taking classes so they don’t fall behind. But too often, that time studying behind bars turns out to be wasted for youth in the juvenile justice system.

The Impact Lack of Diversity Has on the TV & Film Industry (35:41)
Guests: Gerald Higginbotham, Social Psychology Doctoral Student, University of California, Los Angeles; Darnell Hunt, Professor and Dean of Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles
The film industry has struggled with diversity–remember the #OscarsSoWhite controversy? And #OscarsSoMale? Well, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently announced that starting in 2024, any movie hoping to win an Oscar for Best Picture will have to meet a minimum threshold of actors and crew from an underrepresented group, including women, people of color, people with disabilities and LGBTQ individuals. But movie studios also have a cash incentive–big-budget films that are more diverse make more money.

Cary Grant: Symbol of the 20th Century, Icon of Hollywood’s Golden Era (52:16)
Guest: Mark Glancy, Professor of Film History, Queen Mary University of London, Author of “Cary Grant, the Making of a Hollywood Legend”
Cary Grant is an iconic actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood. He's possibly the most debonair film star ever. And entirely self-made. He was born Archie Leach–a sad, neglected, working-class boy from a troubled family in Bristol, England. How did he become something so completely opposite–and do it so successfully on screen for thirty years?

Books for Teaching the True History of Thanksgiving (1:31:40)
Guest: Rachel Wadham, Host, Worlds Awaiting on BYUradio, Education and Juvenile Collections Librarian, Brigham Young University