Working Memory

Guest: Michele Dunne, PhD, Director of the Carnegie Middle East Program, Former Middle East Specialist at the US Department of State  Five years ago this week, tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets calling for more freedom, a better economy and less corruption. They wanted longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak gone. And after 18 days of protest, he resigned. The country rejoiced. The world dubbed it an Arab Spring and thought it just might be the end to a long era of dictators ruling Egypt with a strong fist.  But today, many experts say Egypt is in a spot that’s just as bad as it was before the uprising.

Romeo and Juliet. Othello and Desdemona. Lovers who find themselves in love with someone their family and their society reject. All that tension makes for compelling stories that we fall for over and over.  At the Sundance Film Festival, Producer Tennery Taylor has found a couple tales of star-crossed lovers, where the events of history combine against lovers who find themselves alone against the world. Today we’re talking love and war, discussing the narrative feature films “Ali and Nino” and “Sophie and the Rising Sun” that have just premiered at the Festival this week.

Guest: Perry Renshaw, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Utah  By one ranking, Utah is America’s happiest state. The beautiful surroundings certainly contribute – if you’ve never seen the mountain range running along Utah’s biggest cities, you’re missing out.  But here’s a paradox that puzzles public health officials: the suicide rate in the American West – Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming—is roughly 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the nation. Researchers sometimes call it "the Suicide Belt."  Is it the landscape? The social structure? Something in the “Western mindset” that causes more people to take their own life? University of Utah psychiatry professor Perry Renshaw has proposed an intriguing hypothesis – he says it’s the altitude.

Guest: Debby Irving, Racial Justice Educator and Author of “Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race”  What does it mean to be racist? Is it enough to say that you’re “colorblind” when it comes to skin color and then avoid the uncomfortable conversations that accompany race in America? Debby Irving thought so for much of her life, but then, in her 50s, she “woke up to her whiteness” and began to see the many subtle ways that being white has privileged her existence.