Changing the Game

Guest: Mark Potok, Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center  You can feel anger on the presidential campaign trail – especially at rallies for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. It’s in the comments on your Facebook feed and the voices of people calling in to radio and TV shows. A poll by Esquire Magazine and NBC taken at the end of last year found half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago, and that white Americans are the angriest of all. This rage is borne out in the yearly report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups and extremist activity: For the first time in five years, the total number of hate groups rose in 2015.

Guest: Cynthia Hallen, PhD, Associate Professor of Linguistics and English Language at BYU  One of the most significant writers in American history was virtually unknown during her lifetime. Poet Emily Dickinson was an introvert. She hardly left the house, never married, and maintained many of her friendships through correspondence alone. It was only after she died that her poems became popular. Emily Dickinson’s poems are much like her life; there is more to them than meets the eye, full of allusion and ambiguity, puns and idioms.

Guest: Nanfu Wang, Independent Filmmaker   To what lengths would you go to reveal injustice? Would you speak up despite disapproval from your neighbors? Use hidden cameras to document it? Would you be willing to face interrogation by national security agents? Filmmaker Nanfu Wang claims she witnessed all the above while filming “Hooligan Sparrow”, a human rights documentary which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was filmed in 2013, when Wang returned to her native China to document a protest led by an activist who calls herself “Hooligan Sparrow.” It wasn’t long before Wang became a character in her own film, capturing on camera the lengths to which the Chinese government was willing to go to keep her from telling those human rights activists.

Guest: Juan Felipe Herrera, US Poet Laureate  The life story of the first Latino U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is a classic American story—he grew up the son of itinerant migrant farm workers, but through hard work and timely scholarships, was able to earn degrees from UCLA and Stanford. Always a writer, artist and teacher, he began his term last fall as the 21st poet laureate of the United States.