Swing States, Big Government, Cultural Time-Capsules, Opioids

The Reason Swing States Exist Guest: Bill Schneider, PhD, Visiting Professor of Communications, UCLA 270\. That’s the number of electoral votes it takes to win the White House. If you look at an election map of the US, you’ll see red and blue states that experts consider reliably Republican or Democratic. And then you’ll see purple states – they’re toss-ups, swing states, battleground states – lots of different names. They are where the race will be decided. Obituaries and Culture in America Guest: Janice Hume, PhD, Head of the Department of Journalism, University of Georgia If you still get a print newspaper on your doorstep each morning, what do you flip to first? At a certain age, many people can’t resist looking at the obituaries right away. It’s not a morbid thing. For friends and family, obituaries are a way of celebrating an individual life. For strangers, there’s a kind of community connection that comes from reading about someone who breathed the same air and travelled the same streets as them. Taken together, obituaries are a historical record of society and what it values. What Kind of Government Did the Founding Fathers Want? Guest: Peter Kastor, PhD, Chair of the Department of History, Washington University St. Louis This – like all presidential elections – is a big day in America. It’s the day when ordinary citizens decide what kind of a country we want to live in; what kind of a leader we want; what role we want government to play in our lives in the form of taxes, regulations, and social safety net programs. Do we want government to be bigger or not? Have we strayed too far from the intent of the founding fathers, or not?  Scandal and Shamans in South Korean Politics Guest: Mark Peterson, PhD, Associate Professor of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, BYU Tens of thousands of South Koreans protested in Seoul over the weekend, even blocking a 16-lane highway as they called for President Park Geun-hye to resign. President Park is embroiled in a scandal involving her spiritual advisor, who is suspected of acting as a shadow-president or modern-day Rasputin. President Park has not agreed to step down, but she has apologized and today agreed to let parliament choose the next prime minister, which is a major concession of power on her part.  Teens Rebel by Eating Healthy Guest: Christopher Bryan, PhD, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science, FMC Faculty Scholar, University of Chicago Health experts would like to get teens to eat less junk food, so they bombard them with warnings about how bad it is for their bodies. And they hammer home the need for healthy choices, balanced meals, the food pyramid and so on. But face it: for most teens those messages amount to “yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah.” Researchers at the University of Chicago and University of Texas have landed on a better approach that taps into the age-old adolescent desire to rebel against authority. The researchers basically convinced a bunch of 8th graders that Big Sugar and Big Fat were manipulating them into eating junk food, and that if they really wanted to “stick-it-to-the-man” they should say “No” to chips and soda. Opioid Painkillers Might Cause More Pain Guest: Peter Grace, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Care Research, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Opioids, including morphine, fentanyl, and oxycodone, are powerful painkillers whose use has increased dramatically over the last few decades, as has concern for how addictive and overdose-prone they are.  New research suggests opioids may not always help with pain – in lab rats with nerve damage, morphine was found to intensify the pain and make it last longer.