Supreme Court Nominee, Creeping Obesity, School Discrimination

Supreme Court Nominee (1:03) Guest: RonNell Anderson Jones, JD, Professor in the BYU Law School, Former Clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor  Supreme Court Justice nominee Merrick Garland’s courtship of US Senators who must confirm his selection is underway, though not with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell who is refusing to meet with Garland and says the Senate will not hold hearings on President Obama’s nomination to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.  Obama said during a speech announcing the nomination yesterday that he knew his choice would face an uphill battle in the Republican Senate. That’s why he chose Garland.  Vacations and Creeping Obesity (27:47) Guest: Jamie Cooper, PhD, Associate Professor in the University of Georgia’s Department of Foods and Nutrition  The average American gains 1 to 2 pounds a year, which doesn’t sound like a lot of weight until you consider that over the course of 50 years, you’re looking at a gain of 50 to 100 pounds. Research out of the University of Georgia sheds some light on when and where we might be packing on that extra weight. Not to put a damper on your spring break, but vacations might actually be making us fatter.  Discriminatory School Discipline (38:27) Guest: Albert Ksinan, Doctoral Student in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Family Sciences  In a perfect world, students who misbehave in school will be disciplined equally. But a snowballing body of evidence finds African American, Hispanic and American Indian students are punished more severely and more often than white students in US middle and high schools. The most comprehensive analysis of this problem to date includes 23 million students in 35,000 schools across the country.  Urban Parks (51:50) Guests: Ryan Gravel, Atlanta-based Urban Planner and Author of “Where We Want to Live;” Soren Simonsen, Visiting Professor of Urban Design at the University of Utah; Jamin Rowan, PhD, English Professor at BYU; Gonzalo Casals, Vice President of Public Programs & Community Engagement at The High Line park in New York City  The CDC says “nearly half of youth live in neighborhoods without parks or playgrounds, community centers, and walking paths or sidewalks.”  Most of us live in cities built for cars. So, when communities decide they want more green places for walking and recreating – as is happening in cities across the country – the question is where do we put it? Big empty fields are hard to come by in most urban centers.  What cities do have is abandoned infrastructure—old gasworks, viaducts, and rail lines.  Using a hefty dose of creativity, urban planners around the country are taking these cast-offs from the industrial age and turning them back into greenspace. It’s like recycling land for a new use. But these aren’t your typical grassy-field-and-playground-parks. And they’re often tied-in with other kinds of development like housing, transit or retail.