Apple Seed

Guest: Eric Jensen, JD, International Law Professor at the BYU Law School  The South China Sea is the hotly-disputed portion of the Pacific Ocean that’s surrounded by Asian countries – China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia all touch the South China Sea. But China has grown increasingly possessive of it in recent years – sparking disputes that are becoming military in nature. The conflict is now so worrisome to international leaders that the developed nations known as the G7 – which include the US, Canada, Japan and several European countries – issued a statement this week basically calling on China to back off – without actually naming China. Beijing shot back that the G7 should mind its own business.

Guest: Stephanie Coontz, Author of “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” and Professor of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington  “Marrying up” the social and financial ladder has been a deeply-held tenet of courtship in America. Today, though, women are increasingly looking to marry an “equal,” and the shift is affecting both the quality of marriages and the socioeconomic landscape of the country.

Guest: Jessica Kirkpatrick, PhD, Lead Product Data Scientist for Hired  Women working full-time in the United States make only 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. So a woman looking to earn as much money as a man did all of last year would have to work last year and the first few months of this year – up until April 12 – yesterday, which is known as Equal Pay Day.  But there’s an interesting exception to this well-documented wage gap: in the sales, marketing and technology fields it turns out that young women fresh out of college end up with salaries 7% above what men are offered for the same jobs. The finding comes from a report compiled by the jobs website Hired.

Guest: Derek Muller, JD, Professor of Election and Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University School of Law  When we say that a democracy is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, what people are we talking about? Is it just those who are eligible to vote? Or do we expect our elected officials to be just as concerned about the needs of people who can’t vote – either because they’re not old enough or they not a legal resident of the United States? The nation’s highest court recently weighed in on these questions with a closely-watched ruling in a case called “Evenwel v. Abbott.”