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 i