Vacancies, Screen Time, Eugenics, Mongolian Music

Guest: Max Stier, President and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service The latest indication from the White House is that President Trump will sign a compromise spending bill, which would avoid another government shutdown at the end of this week. No one in Washington seems eager to go there again. An effective government should never be allowed to shutdown, according to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. It’s based in DC, and one of its main areas of focus right now is monitoring key government positions that are currently vacant or filled by temporary appointees. There are a lot. Six in the President’s Cabinet alone.

Guest: Kara Bagot, MD, Study Co-Investigator As a parent, you may be worried about how things like screen time, substance use, and sports could affect your child’s brain. Right now, we don’t have solid answers to those questions. But hundreds of researchers are embarking on the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the US to find out. It’s called ABCD or the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study and is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Guest: Paul Lombardo, Regents' Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law, Georgia State University In the early 1900s, it was legal for people in America to be sterilized against their will –the Supreme Court even said so. After the Nazi horrors came to light most states stopped enforcing their eugenics laws. Even so, there were people into the 1970s who were being forced into sterilization because they were poor, black, disabled, in prison or just deemed unfit to parent. We hope that’s all in the past, right? But have you ever thought to yourself, “that person really shouldn’t be allowed to have kids”? Parents with intellectual disabilities in America, for example, have their children removed by the state up to 80 percent of the time, according to the National Council on Disability. Have we fully learned the lessons of our dark history with eugenics?

Guest: Sam Payne Sam Payne shares a story

Guest: Kip Hutchins, Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison A band called The Hu has racked up more than 13 million views for their first two music videos on YouTube in the last few months. Not The Who –W-H-O. This The Hu -H-U –and they’re a Mongolian heavy metal group. The video shows a motorcycle gang in leathers and bandanas riding across spectacular landscapes while the band plays traditional Mongolian instruments and singing styles. It’s really something to see.

Guest: Joshua Hunt, Author of “University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education” It’s common for public universities across the country to have close relationships with big corporations and wealthy donors. These arrangements have grown substantially in recent decades, as states have cut funding for higher education. Journalist Joshua Hunt says one deal led the way: “A lot of them refer explicitly to the blue print that was laid out by Nike and Phil Knight and the University of Oregon back in the 1990s. It was a highly unusual situation. I mean, there really wasn’t a roadmap.”