Parent Previews: Longest Ride, Freetown

Guest: Anna Bowen, medical officer in the CDC’s Waterborne Diseases Prevention Branch Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning that infections of a drug-resistant strain of shigella are on the rise in the U.S. They say the spike is linked to people traveling internationally and bringing the bacteria back to the US, where it spreads quickly through contaminated food and recreational water.

Guest: Caroline Hoxby, Economics Professor at Stanford University and co-editor of the book "How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education" At 5.5 percent, the national unemployment rate is nearly back to where it was just before the Great Recession hit. Which is not to say that all Americans feel as though they’ve recovered from the shock to their earnings, their retirement funds, or the value of their homes. A new book co-edited by Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby finds universities managed pretty well during the recession, due in no small part to the fact that more people enrolled in college when the job market tanked.

Guest: Birgit Koopmann-Holm, lecturer at Santa Clara University. Co-author of a series of studies on the differences between American expressions of sympathy and German expressions of sympathy. When someone passes, we often hear typical responses like: "So sorry for your loss." "My prayers are with you and your family." "Be strong." Pretty standard stuff as far as sympathy goes. But maybe it’s not so standard from a global perspective. Apparently, sympathy is culturally-specific. Santa Clara University researcher Birgit Koopman-Holm has found Americans sympathize differently than other cultures—specifically Germany, where Dr. Koopmann-Holm comes from.

Guest: Marjorie Cohn, professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of the book, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.” The War on Terror itself has evolved a lot in the last decade. Since President Barack Obama took office in 2008, it has increasingly been fought by soldiers sitting in secret command sites in the U.S. remotely controlling unmanned aircraft that hover and fire on suspected terrorists 7,000 miles away in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The use of drones has become intensely controversial among politicians, lawyers and academics of all partisan stripes. Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn parses the legal, moral and geopolitical issues of America’s drone program in her book, “Drones and Targeted Killing.”

Guests: Steve Castle is a professor of chemistry and associate director of the Simmons Center for Cancer Research at BYU