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"content": "\u003cp>Our twin pandemics in the forefront at the moment—racism and health—underscore a democracy in crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Litt, author of \u003cem>Thanks, Obama\u003c/em> and a speechwriter for the 44th president, has a prescription: \u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think.\u003c/em> Litt refreshingly debunks myths about our founders, pointing up false narratives and warped historical perceptions. He is explicit on the calamitous risks of a widening income gap that concentrates power in the one percent. The racism that erodes our democracy bears repeating as well, and loudly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writing in breezy, digestible prose, Litt opens with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Until President Trump, “no politician … has so openly treated accumulating power as a sport,” Litt writes. McConnell’s political ideal: Constituents have nothing to do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt presents statistics that prove our democracy is ill: Since 1980, the number of Americans legally barred from voting has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, the odds of living in a competitive congressional district have fallen by half. Since 2000, money spent on lobbying in Washington has risen by 100 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less\u003c/em> explores egregious injustices throughout our system and proposes solutions. Voting inequities serve as illustration. Contrary to common perceptions, nonvoters are not “couch potatoes,” abjuring their civic duties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt discusses Rick Scott, a white man who ran a Florida hospital system that committed massive Medicare fraud. The Justice Department obtained a $1.7 billion settlement from the company but charged no executives. Litt then considers Ricky Scott, a black man charged with “grand theft” in Florida, which can be something as trivial as removing a fire extinguisher from a wall. The white man is the junior senator from Florida following two terms as governor; the black man was found guilty of a felony and barred from voting for life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before 2006, no state required an ID to vote. Today, Litt says, 17 states do. In Tennessee, a voter with a gun permit can vote, while a student using a University of Tennessee ID cannot. ID laws, however, aren’t the biggest problem. Voter “purges” result in glaring injustices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A chapter outs the “godfather of the modern purge,” Hans von Spakovsky, former member of the Federal Election Commission and the Republican party’s standard bearer for shrinking the electorate. Litt spotlights Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the white gubernatorial candidate who happened to be the state official in charge of voting, as responsible for purging 1.5 million names from the rolls under a new “Use It or Lose It” rule he put into place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreover, Litt recounts, on election day 2018, Fulton County, which includes much of metro Atlanta (read, African American), locked up a quarter of its voting machines. Abrams “lost” by 55,000. It is an ugly truth that in red and blue states alike, “The less white your neighborhood, the longer you wait,” Litt writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We don’t have to have million of adults legally barred from voting. Litt offers solutions, showing their success in other countries. He suggests we automatically register voters as soon as they turn 18; help disabled people get to the polls; vote by mail so people don’t miss work, or, in the age of pandemic, risk their health. He notes we can vote on weekends, when it’s easier for low-wage workers, and abolish voter ID laws because despite false claims by President Trump, voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The franchise can and has been expanded. Litt reports that 40 states have allowed non-citizen immigrants to vote at one time or another, but not since 1926. He believes there’s no reason why long-term undocumented people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, to say nothing of greencard holders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt examines the flaws of the Electoral College, which can result in the winner of the popular vote losing the presidency, as happened with Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Although the Electoral College is constitutionally mandated, there are ways to fix it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using Las Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson as an example, Litt probes the evils of money in politics. “Dark,” unreported money donated to candidates of both parties severs them from constituents, making them accountable only to their wealthiest donors. Although a majority of Americans care deeply care about a range of issues, including gun control and curbing global warming, politicians can not only ignore, but also escalate these problems with impunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s Litt on the Trump administration, where there is no daylight between official government and special interests: A coal-mining lobbyist was appointed to run the Environmental Protection Agency, an oil-and-gas lobbyist the Interior Department, a banking lobbyist the Labor Department, and a steel industry lobbyist to serve as U.S. Trade Representative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book has a long section on the negative impacts of gerrymandering congressional districts and ends with the challenges of getting a bill through Congress, two phenomena that are not unrelated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news is that there isn’t space to describe most of Litt’s proposed solutions. \u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less\u003c/em> is a no-nonsense guide for how we, the people, can fix ourselves. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d sure like to live in a country like that,” Litt concludes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Me too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Martha Anne Toll’s writing is at \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.marthaannetoll.com/__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKijbcpXig%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">www.marthaannetoll.com\u003c/a>, and she tweets \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/twitter.com/marthaannetoll?lang=en__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKiTsrfMmg%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@marthaannetoll\u003c/a>. She was the founding executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.butlerfamilyfund.org/__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKjQbl3oAQ%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Butler Family Fund.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Democracy+In+One+Book+Or+Less%27+Proposes+Solutions+To+U.S.+Government+Ills&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Our twin pandemics in the forefront at the moment—racism and health—underscore a democracy in crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Litt, author of \u003cem>Thanks, Obama\u003c/em> and a speechwriter for the 44th president, has a prescription: \u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less: How It Works, Why It Doesn’t, and Why Fixing It Is Easier Than You Think.\u003c/em> Litt refreshingly debunks myths about our founders, pointing up false narratives and warped historical perceptions. He is explicit on the calamitous risks of a widening income gap that concentrates power in the one percent. The racism that erodes our democracy bears repeating as well, and loudly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writing in breezy, digestible prose, Litt opens with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Until President Trump, “no politician … has so openly treated accumulating power as a sport,” Litt writes. McConnell’s political ideal: Constituents have nothing to do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt presents statistics that prove our democracy is ill: Since 1980, the number of Americans legally barred from voting has more than doubled. Since the 1990s, the odds of living in a competitive congressional district have fallen by half. Since 2000, money spent on lobbying in Washington has risen by 100 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less\u003c/em> explores egregious injustices throughout our system and proposes solutions. Voting inequities serve as illustration. Contrary to common perceptions, nonvoters are not “couch potatoes,” abjuring their civic duties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt discusses Rick Scott, a white man who ran a Florida hospital system that committed massive Medicare fraud. The Justice Department obtained a $1.7 billion settlement from the company but charged no executives. Litt then considers Ricky Scott, a black man charged with “grand theft” in Florida, which can be something as trivial as removing a fire extinguisher from a wall. The white man is the junior senator from Florida following two terms as governor; the black man was found guilty of a felony and barred from voting for life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before 2006, no state required an ID to vote. Today, Litt says, 17 states do. In Tennessee, a voter with a gun permit can vote, while a student using a University of Tennessee ID cannot. ID laws, however, aren’t the biggest problem. Voter “purges” result in glaring injustices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A chapter outs the “godfather of the modern purge,” Hans von Spakovsky, former member of the Federal Election Commission and the Republican party’s standard bearer for shrinking the electorate. Litt spotlights Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the white gubernatorial candidate who happened to be the state official in charge of voting, as responsible for purging 1.5 million names from the rolls under a new “Use It or Lose It” rule he put into place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreover, Litt recounts, on election day 2018, Fulton County, which includes much of metro Atlanta (read, African American), locked up a quarter of its voting machines. Abrams “lost” by 55,000. It is an ugly truth that in red and blue states alike, “The less white your neighborhood, the longer you wait,” Litt writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We don’t have to have million of adults legally barred from voting. Litt offers solutions, showing their success in other countries. He suggests we automatically register voters as soon as they turn 18; help disabled people get to the polls; vote by mail so people don’t miss work, or, in the age of pandemic, risk their health. He notes we can vote on weekends, when it’s easier for low-wage workers, and abolish voter ID laws because despite false claims by President Trump, voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The franchise can and has been expanded. Litt reports that 40 states have allowed non-citizen immigrants to vote at one time or another, but not since 1926. He believes there’s no reason why long-term undocumented people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, to say nothing of greencard holders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Litt examines the flaws of the Electoral College, which can result in the winner of the popular vote losing the presidency, as happened with Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Although the Electoral College is constitutionally mandated, there are ways to fix it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using Las Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson as an example, Litt probes the evils of money in politics. “Dark,” unreported money donated to candidates of both parties severs them from constituents, making them accountable only to their wealthiest donors. Although a majority of Americans care deeply care about a range of issues, including gun control and curbing global warming, politicians can not only ignore, but also escalate these problems with impunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s Litt on the Trump administration, where there is no daylight between official government and special interests: A coal-mining lobbyist was appointed to run the Environmental Protection Agency, an oil-and-gas lobbyist the Interior Department, a banking lobbyist the Labor Department, and a steel industry lobbyist to serve as U.S. Trade Representative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The book has a long section on the negative impacts of gerrymandering congressional districts and ends with the challenges of getting a bill through Congress, two phenomena that are not unrelated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The good news is that there isn’t space to describe most of Litt’s proposed solutions. \u003cem>Democracy In One Book Or Less\u003c/em> is a no-nonsense guide for how we, the people, can fix ourselves. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d sure like to live in a country like that,” Litt concludes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Me too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Martha Anne Toll’s writing is at \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.marthaannetoll.com/__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKijbcpXig%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">www.marthaannetoll.com\u003c/a>, and she tweets \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/twitter.com/marthaannetoll?lang=en__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKiTsrfMmg%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@marthaannetoll\u003c/a>. She was the founding executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/www.butlerfamilyfund.org/__;!!Iwwt!DXh2BZkEDFfk4_3Bc_6MxcNx_fXTM1J_aRI26iciHR8feUuB9mWeHKjQbl3oAQ%24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Butler Family Fund.\u003c/a>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27Democracy+In+One+Book+Or+Less%27+Proposes+Solutions+To+U.S.+Government+Ills&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Long Summer Ahead: What Writers Are Reading As The Pandemic Goes On",
"headTitle": "A Long Summer Ahead: What Writers Are Reading As The Pandemic Goes On | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>What are you reading during the pandemic? We’ve been asking that question to a range of writers and they’ve responded with suggestions for fantasy, poetry, new fiction, old fiction, web comics, fairy tales and more. You can find recommendations below from Ben Philippe, Jade Chang, Raina Telgemeier, Tess Taylor and Thomas Pierce—and we’ll add more as the summer goes on.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Ben Philippe Recommends The ‘Animorphs’ Series\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882055\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 302px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882055\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Invasion' by Katherine Applegate.\" width=\"302\" height=\"443\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM.png 302w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM-160x235.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Invasion’ by Katherine Applegate.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, Ben Phillipe, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/01/21/687255684/field-guide-to-the-north-american-teenager-taps-into-the-raw-anxiety-of-adolesce\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Field Guide to the North American Teenager\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> has realized that all of his previous desert island lists (you know, the lists of books you’d take with you if you were stranded on a desert island) were “complete BS.” Turns out, he’s not rereading \u003cem>The Virgin Suicides\u003c/em> or Dostoevsky, but rather the children’s fantasy \u003cem>Animorphs\u003c/em> series by K. A. Applegate—in its entirety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The \u003cem>Animorphs\u003c/em> are actually an incredibly dark dystopia,” he explains. An alien invasion of Earth is underway, and five kids must fight for their doomed planet as best they can. “Underneath it all, there is such a looming sense of despair,” Phillipe says. “I don’t think I ever sort of latched onto that darkness when I was, you know, 14, 15. But now I’m like: Oh, God, this is so bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Phillipe finds the kids’ tenacity soothing right now. “Even though the world is so dark, these kids keep going on,” he says. “They still have crushes. They still go to dances. They have family gatherings. … They just have to keep pretending everything’s fine. … I think that that sort of element of pretending and going on is very appealing to me right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Tess Taylor Recommends The Poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Poetry critic Tess Taylor says she and her family are doing their best to keep busy and stay positive but “every so often, something will happen and one of us will burst into tears.” There’s a sense that the family is all in it together—but that they are fragile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I think is really important right now is to remember that poems and literature can give us a chance to reroute ourselves,” says Taylor. And at a time when most of our real-world journeys are canceled, we can still escape in our own minds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taylor has found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats\u003c/a> is “a very convincing imaginary journey.” Yeats describes a small cabin, honey bees and cricket song. “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” he writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I love about that poem is that we go with him,” Taylor explains. At the end, readers find he’s still standing on the gray pavement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He reminds us that he hasn’t actually gone anywhere,” she says. “But he’s just taken this beautiful imaginative journey, and he’s made this beautiful sound in language. And he’s calmed us down. He’s calmed himself down.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the powerful roles of literature, she says, is to “let us have some space to imagine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Jade Chang Recommends, ‘Minor Feelings,’ ‘New Waves’ and ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882057\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 285px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882057\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM.png\" alt=\"'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' by Betty Smith.\" width=\"285\" height=\"428\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM.png 285w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM-160x240.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 285px) 100vw, 285px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Jade Chang, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2016/10/05/496446345/the-wangs-is-sparkling-family-travelogue-with-teeth\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Wangs vs. The World\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>has found herself thinking a lot about authors trying to launch their books this spring and summer. “It’s so hard in any climate, but it’s especially hard right now,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chang is excited to dig into \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/02/27/802298200/in-minor-feelings-asian-american-racial-trauma-is-laid-bare\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Cathy Park Hong. “It’s part memoir, part cultural criticism,” Chang explains, “And at a time when we have a president who is introducing a term like ‘Chinese virus,’ it feels like really essential reading.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/03/10/814164937/new-waves-asks-how-can-we-form-true-friendships-in-an-online-world\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>New Waves\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Kevin Nguyen is also on her nightstand. “It is kind of a heist story in the tech world, so I think it should be pretty fun,” Chang says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for an older story, she recommends one of her “true loves”—\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=138257002\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Betty Smith. This is “a true comfort read that still won’t feel completely frivolous right now …” Chang says. “It really is about this girl kind of figuring out how to be a person in the world, how to make her way in the world, how to love the world. And … I think it’s important for us in any time, but especially in a time like this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Raina Telgemeier Recommends Julia Kaye Comics, ‘Hot Comb’ And ‘Almost American Girl’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Raina Telgemeier, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/437620370/smile\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Smile,\u003c/em>\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/359420787/sisters\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Sisters\u003c/em>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/753513015/guts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Guts, \u003c/em>\u003c/a>says the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t really changed her work habits—she’s used to working from home with her two cats—and it hasn’t really changed her reading habits much either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My work has always dealt with anxiety and sort of the inner condition of the mind,” she explains, “so I’ve always been drawn to realistic fiction and to memoir and to people’s kind of daily lives.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Telgemeier reads a lot of web comics, and she’s been enjoying the work of trans cartoonist Julia Kaye. Her Instagram handle is \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/upandoutcomic/?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@upandoutcomic\u003c/a> and “her more recent comics are about having transitioned and just, you know, what comes next?” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.instagram.com/p/B7q-tVbBYJh/\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, Telgemeier says she’s found herself gravitating to “regular stories about regular people and the regular relationships they have with their regular families.” And there are two graphic novels that have really done that for her as of late.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/777038341/hot-comb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Hot Comb\u003c/em> \u003c/a>by Ebony Flowers, is about black hair and “about the relationships that develop when women and girls sit down in a beauty shop to put in braids or to take them out,” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And next, in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/868723064/almost-american-girl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Almost American Girl\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, Robin Ha tells her story of moving from Seoul, Korea to Alabama in the 1990s. “It’s so, so hard to see Robin struggle with the culture clash and with feeling isolated, but then it’s wonderful to see her find her people,” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Personal comics and memoirs allow readers to “really get to see what people’s lives looks like,” Telgemeier says—and that’s exactly what she needs during this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Thomas Pierce Recommends ‘The Fairy Tales Of Herman Hesse’\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882058\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 302px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882058\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse' by Hermann Hesse.\" width=\"302\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM.png 302w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM-160x247.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse’ by Hermann Hesse.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Thomas Pierce, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/01/11/575488659/the-afterlives-explores-what-well-do-for-another-glimpse-of-the-departed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Afterlives\u003c/em>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2015/01/07/374034287/confident-tales-of-small-mammals-funny-videos-and-childhood-ghosts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Hall of Small Mammals, \u003c/em>\u003c/a>is recommending a book of fairy tales, but says he’s tempted to call them anti-fairy tales instead. “They are lots of fragments and allegories, and they flow like dreams,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One story, about a quaint city called Faldum, is what brought Pierce back to the book after many years. A fair is happening in town, and a mysterious stranger appears and grants wishes to the townspeople. Two men—who had been up in an attic all day playing and listening to the violin—are the last two to make their wishes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The violinist wishes he could play so beautifully that no one would ever disturb him again—and he gets his wish … ” Pierce says. “He disappears into the heavens and he’s never heard from again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who had been listening to the violin music wishes to become a mountain—so that he can continue to hear the beautiful violinist play—and his wish is granted as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Time just lunges forward in this really interesting way,” Pierce says. “Generations just come and go in this city, and the mountain’s there throughout it all. … I find it to be very comforting. It’s about cycles of time, and the seasons, and the ebbs and flows, and the fact that we all exist within these cycles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This series is produced by Mallory Yu and edited by Justine Kenin. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Long+Summer+Ahead%3A+What+Writers+Are+Reading+As+The+Pandemic+Goes+On&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>What are you reading during the pandemic? We’ve been asking that question to a range of writers and they’ve responded with suggestions for fantasy, poetry, new fiction, old fiction, web comics, fairy tales and more. You can find recommendations below from Ben Philippe, Jade Chang, Raina Telgemeier, Tess Taylor and Thomas Pierce—and we’ll add more as the summer goes on.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Ben Philippe Recommends The ‘Animorphs’ Series\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882055\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 302px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882055\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Invasion' by Katherine Applegate.\" width=\"302\" height=\"443\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM.png 302w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.01.40-PM-160x235.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Invasion’ by Katherine Applegate.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, Ben Phillipe, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/01/21/687255684/field-guide-to-the-north-american-teenager-taps-into-the-raw-anxiety-of-adolesce\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Field Guide to the North American Teenager\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em> has realized that all of his previous desert island lists (you know, the lists of books you’d take with you if you were stranded on a desert island) were “complete BS.” Turns out, he’s not rereading \u003cem>The Virgin Suicides\u003c/em> or Dostoevsky, but rather the children’s fantasy \u003cem>Animorphs\u003c/em> series by K. A. Applegate—in its entirety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The \u003cem>Animorphs\u003c/em> are actually an incredibly dark dystopia,” he explains. An alien invasion of Earth is underway, and five kids must fight for their doomed planet as best they can. “Underneath it all, there is such a looming sense of despair,” Phillipe says. “I don’t think I ever sort of latched onto that darkness when I was, you know, 14, 15. But now I’m like: Oh, God, this is so bad.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Phillipe finds the kids’ tenacity soothing right now. “Even though the world is so dark, these kids keep going on,” he says. “They still have crushes. They still go to dances. They have family gatherings. … They just have to keep pretending everything’s fine. … I think that that sort of element of pretending and going on is very appealing to me right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Tess Taylor Recommends The Poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Poetry critic Tess Taylor says she and her family are doing their best to keep busy and stay positive but “every so often, something will happen and one of us will burst into tears.” There’s a sense that the family is all in it together—but that they are fragile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I think is really important right now is to remember that poems and literature can give us a chance to reroute ourselves,” says Taylor. And at a time when most of our real-world journeys are canceled, we can still escape in our own minds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taylor has found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats\u003c/a> is “a very convincing imaginary journey.” Yeats describes a small cabin, honey bees and cricket song. “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” he writes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I love about that poem is that we go with him,” Taylor explains. At the end, readers find he’s still standing on the gray pavement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He reminds us that he hasn’t actually gone anywhere,” she says. “But he’s just taken this beautiful imaginative journey, and he’s made this beautiful sound in language. And he’s calmed us down. He’s calmed himself down.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the powerful roles of literature, she says, is to “let us have some space to imagine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Jade Chang Recommends, ‘Minor Feelings,’ ‘New Waves’ and ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882057\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 285px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882057\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM.png\" alt=\"'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' by Betty Smith.\" width=\"285\" height=\"428\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM.png 285w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.06.59-PM-160x240.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 285px) 100vw, 285px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Jade Chang, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2016/10/05/496446345/the-wangs-is-sparkling-family-travelogue-with-teeth\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Wangs vs. The World\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>, \u003c/em>has found herself thinking a lot about authors trying to launch their books this spring and summer. “It’s so hard in any climate, but it’s especially hard right now,” she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chang is excited to dig into \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/02/27/802298200/in-minor-feelings-asian-american-racial-trauma-is-laid-bare\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Cathy Park Hong. “It’s part memoir, part cultural criticism,” Chang explains, “And at a time when we have a president who is introducing a term like ‘Chinese virus,’ it feels like really essential reading.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/03/10/814164937/new-waves-asks-how-can-we-form-true-friendships-in-an-online-world\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>New Waves\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Kevin Nguyen is also on her nightstand. “It is kind of a heist story in the tech world, so I think it should be pretty fun,” Chang says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for an older story, she recommends one of her “true loves”—\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=138257002\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn\u003c/em>\u003c/a> by Betty Smith. This is “a true comfort read that still won’t feel completely frivolous right now …” Chang says. “It really is about this girl kind of figuring out how to be a person in the world, how to make her way in the world, how to love the world. And … I think it’s important for us in any time, but especially in a time like this.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Raina Telgemeier Recommends Julia Kaye Comics, ‘Hot Comb’ And ‘Almost American Girl’\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Raina Telgemeier, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/437620370/smile\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Smile,\u003c/em>\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/359420787/sisters\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Sisters\u003c/em>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/753513015/guts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Guts, \u003c/em>\u003c/a>says the coronavirus pandemic hasn’t really changed her work habits—she’s used to working from home with her two cats—and it hasn’t really changed her reading habits much either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My work has always dealt with anxiety and sort of the inner condition of the mind,” she explains, “so I’ve always been drawn to realistic fiction and to memoir and to people’s kind of daily lives.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Telgemeier reads a lot of web comics, and she’s been enjoying the work of trans cartoonist Julia Kaye. Her Instagram handle is \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/upandoutcomic/?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">@upandoutcomic\u003c/a> and “her more recent comics are about having transitioned and just, you know, what comes next?” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>During the pandemic, Telgemeier says she’s found herself gravitating to “regular stories about regular people and the regular relationships they have with their regular families.” And there are two graphic novels that have really done that for her as of late.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>First, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/777038341/hot-comb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Hot Comb\u003c/em> \u003c/a>by Ebony Flowers, is about black hair and “about the relationships that develop when women and girls sit down in a beauty shop to put in braids or to take them out,” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And next, in \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/868723064/almost-american-girl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Almost American Girl\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, Robin Ha tells her story of moving from Seoul, Korea to Alabama in the 1990s. “It’s so, so hard to see Robin struggle with the culture clash and with feeling isolated, but then it’s wonderful to see her find her people,” Telgemeier says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Personal comics and memoirs allow readers to “really get to see what people’s lives looks like,” Telgemeier says—and that’s exactly what she needs during this time.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Thomas Pierce Recommends ‘The Fairy Tales Of Herman Hesse’\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13882058\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 302px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13882058\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse' by Hermann Hesse.\" width=\"302\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM.png 302w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-16-at-2.10.52-PM-160x247.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse’ by Hermann Hesse.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Thomas Pierce, author of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/01/11/575488659/the-afterlives-explores-what-well-do-for-another-glimpse-of-the-departed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>The Afterlives\u003c/em>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2015/01/07/374034287/confident-tales-of-small-mammals-funny-videos-and-childhood-ghosts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>Hall of Small Mammals, \u003c/em>\u003c/a>is recommending a book of fairy tales, but says he’s tempted to call them anti-fairy tales instead. “They are lots of fragments and allegories, and they flow like dreams,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One story, about a quaint city called Faldum, is what brought Pierce back to the book after many years. A fair is happening in town, and a mysterious stranger appears and grants wishes to the townspeople. Two men—who had been up in an attic all day playing and listening to the violin—are the last two to make their wishes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The violinist wishes he could play so beautifully that no one would ever disturb him again—and he gets his wish … ” Pierce says. “He disappears into the heavens and he’s never heard from again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The man who had been listening to the violin music wishes to become a mountain—so that he can continue to hear the beautiful violinist play—and his wish is granted as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Time just lunges forward in this really interesting way,” Pierce says. “Generations just come and go in this city, and the mountain’s there throughout it all. … I find it to be very comforting. It’s about cycles of time, and the seasons, and the ebbs and flows, and the fact that we all exist within these cycles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This series is produced by Mallory Yu and edited by Justine Kenin. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Long+Summer+Ahead%3A+What+Writers+Are+Reading+As+The+Pandemic+Goes+On&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'The Art of Her Deal' Presents Melania Trump as an Influential Collaborator",
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"content": "\u003cp>From the outside, Melania Trump looks like a woman in over her tastefully balayaged head. At public events, she rarely speaks, but assumes the rictus smolder—like a model who has just spotted a lion over the photographer’s shoulder—that inspired a thousand #freemelania signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A new, scrupulously reported biography by \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> reporter Mary Jordan counters this perception, arguing that the first lady is not a pawn but a player, an accessory in the second as much as the first sense, and a woman able to get what she wants from one of the most powerful and transparently vain men in the world. The book is called \u003cem>The Art of Her Deal. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881974\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881974\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-15-at-12.20.49-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,' by Mary Jordan.\" width=\"303\" height=\"477\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,’ by Mary Jordan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For this book, Jordan interviewed more than a hundred people, including Melania’s Slovenian childhood acquaintances, staff members at Donald Trump’s properties, players in the New York and Paris modeling world, and one-time Trump insiders like Chris Christie, Roger Stone and Anthony Scaramucci. She also spoke briefly to the first lady herself in the course of her reporting on the 2016 election. The result is a convincing case that those “who dismiss her as nothing more than an accessory do not understand her or her influence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake: Beauty is the first line in the job description. As \u003cem>Women’s Wear Daily\u003c/em> reported, Melania was asked in 2005 whether she would be with Donald Trump if he were not rich. “If I weren’t beautiful,” she replied, “do you think he’d be with me?” That stinging, cynical answer seemed to capture the essence of their exchange: money for beauty, beauty for money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the years since, Melania has had to offer much more than her looks: She has endured a presidential campaign, the humiliations of Stormy Daniels and the Access Hollywood tape, and the daily demands of life in the White House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout these trials, Jordan characterizes Melania as a canny operator who believed “she had more to gain by standing by her husband than walking away.” Jordan writes that after Trump was accused of infidelity and assault, Melania used the fact that he needed her public loyalty and presence in Washington to negotiate a better prenuptial agreement. Melania referred to this process as “taking care of Barron.” Jordan reports that she was worried that their son Barron would not be treated as well as Trump’s other children. (As Jordan points out, this was perhaps for good reason—Trump has at least once seemed to forget Barron was his, saying of Melania at a 2019 press briefing, “She’s got a son.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melania has also influenced key policy decisions, mostly having to do with children: She pushed back against child separation at the border and advocated for harsher rules about marketing e-cigarettes to minors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the course of her reporting, Jordan finds that Donald Trump is not the only mythmaker in the family. She investigates, for instance, Melania’s suggestion that she speaks—in addition to English and Slovenian—French, Italian and German. Jordan concludes that, like Melania’s claim to have graduated from university in Slovenia, that section of her CV is likely fabricated or at least seriously exaggerated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>The Art of Her Deal \u003c/em>offers few scoops in the conventional sense; its major contribution is merely the insistence that Melania is a real person with complicated motivations. This point should be obvious: Isn’t everybody, in and out of the White House, complex, striving, conflicted, out for something? The flattening effect of political discourse, the special insipidity of the first lady role, and Melania’s own particular remoteness have allowed us either to forget that she has an inner life, or to imagine her as an elegant prisoner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Women in public life, from Hillary Clinton to Princess Diana, have a way of crystallizing attitudes about women more broadly. Melania speaks rarely and haltingly, and her face expresses emotion only through the narrowing and widening of flame-blue eyes. When she speaks, the planes of her face remain utterly undisturbed. Because of this ruthless blankness, she is better suited than almost any other woman in public to be a projecting screen. Which makes it worth asking: What is it in us that prefers a captive to a collaborator?\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27The+Art+Of+Her+Deal%27+Aims+To+Show+Melania+Trump+As+An+Influential+Collaborator&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>From the outside, Melania Trump looks like a woman in over her tastefully balayaged head. At public events, she rarely speaks, but assumes the rictus smolder—like a model who has just spotted a lion over the photographer’s shoulder—that inspired a thousand #freemelania signs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A new, scrupulously reported biography by \u003cem>Washington Post\u003c/em> reporter Mary Jordan counters this perception, arguing that the first lady is not a pawn but a player, an accessory in the second as much as the first sense, and a woman able to get what she wants from one of the most powerful and transparently vain men in the world. The book is called \u003cem>The Art of Her Deal. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881974\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881974\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-15-at-12.20.49-PM.png\" alt=\"'The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,' by Mary Jordan.\" width=\"303\" height=\"477\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump,’ by Mary Jordan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For this book, Jordan interviewed more than a hundred people, including Melania’s Slovenian childhood acquaintances, staff members at Donald Trump’s properties, players in the New York and Paris modeling world, and one-time Trump insiders like Chris Christie, Roger Stone and Anthony Scaramucci. She also spoke briefly to the first lady herself in the course of her reporting on the 2016 election. The result is a convincing case that those “who dismiss her as nothing more than an accessory do not understand her or her influence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake: Beauty is the first line in the job description. As \u003cem>Women’s Wear Daily\u003c/em> reported, Melania was asked in 2005 whether she would be with Donald Trump if he were not rich. “If I weren’t beautiful,” she replied, “do you think he’d be with me?” That stinging, cynical answer seemed to capture the essence of their exchange: money for beauty, beauty for money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the years since, Melania has had to offer much more than her looks: She has endured a presidential campaign, the humiliations of Stormy Daniels and the Access Hollywood tape, and the daily demands of life in the White House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout these trials, Jordan characterizes Melania as a canny operator who believed “she had more to gain by standing by her husband than walking away.” Jordan writes that after Trump was accused of infidelity and assault, Melania used the fact that he needed her public loyalty and presence in Washington to negotiate a better prenuptial agreement. Melania referred to this process as “taking care of Barron.” Jordan reports that she was worried that their son Barron would not be treated as well as Trump’s other children. (As Jordan points out, this was perhaps for good reason—Trump has at least once seemed to forget Barron was his, saying of Melania at a 2019 press briefing, “She’s got a son.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Melania has also influenced key policy decisions, mostly having to do with children: She pushed back against child separation at the border and advocated for harsher rules about marketing e-cigarettes to minors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the course of her reporting, Jordan finds that Donald Trump is not the only mythmaker in the family. She investigates, for instance, Melania’s suggestion that she speaks—in addition to English and Slovenian—French, Italian and German. Jordan concludes that, like Melania’s claim to have graduated from university in Slovenia, that section of her CV is likely fabricated or at least seriously exaggerated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>The Art of Her Deal \u003c/em>offers few scoops in the conventional sense; its major contribution is merely the insistence that Melania is a real person with complicated motivations. This point should be obvious: Isn’t everybody, in and out of the White House, complex, striving, conflicted, out for something? The flattening effect of political discourse, the special insipidity of the first lady role, and Melania’s own particular remoteness have allowed us either to forget that she has an inner life, or to imagine her as an elegant prisoner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Women in public life, from Hillary Clinton to Princess Diana, have a way of crystallizing attitudes about women more broadly. Melania speaks rarely and haltingly, and her face expresses emotion only through the narrowing and widening of flame-blue eyes. When she speaks, the planes of her face remain utterly undisturbed. Because of this ruthless blankness, she is better suited than almost any other woman in public to be a projecting screen. Which makes it worth asking: What is it in us that prefers a captive to a collaborator?\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27The+Art+Of+Her+Deal%27+Aims+To+Show+Melania+Trump+As+An+Influential+Collaborator&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "This List of Books, Films and Podcasts About Racism is a Start, Not a Panacea",
"headTitle": "This List of Books, Films and Podcasts About Racism is a Start, Not a Panacea | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>As of Friday, 15 of the top 20 bestselling books on Amazon were about race or racism. Earlier this week, \u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> was number one on Apple Podcasts—which, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/1268000245214035974\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">as host Gene Demby said\u003c/a>, is “dope,” but unfortunately occurred under “soul-crushing circumstances.” And \u003cem>The Help \u003c/em>is trending on Netflix (ahem, a film that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2011/08/18/139755308/the-help-draws-audiences-and-ire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">drew immediate ire\u003c/a> upon release).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’re in the middle of one of those awfully predictable news cycles—a video of police killing a black person goes viral, protests ensue and broader America suddenly realizes \u003cem>we need to talk about race. \u003c/em>Of course, while \u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/this-week-has-happened-before.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this week has happened before,\u003c/a> it’s also happening on a much larger scale than ever before, with \u003ca href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/06/03/map-protests-wake-george-floyds-death/5310149002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">demonstrations in all 50 states.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help people be better allies, lists of antiracist books, films and podcasts are being published in droves. There’s never a bad time to learn, but such a list can become erroneously prescriptive, a balm to centuries-old lacerations that cut deeper than the individual reader. \u003ca href=\"https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/anti-racist-reading-lists-what-are-they-for.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">As Lauren Michele Jackson wrote for \u003cem>Vulture,\u003c/em> \u003c/a>“The word [anti-racism] and its nominal equivalent, “anti-racist,” suggests something of a vanity project, where the goal is no longer to learn more about race, power, and capital, but to spring closer to the enlightened order of the antiracist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, with that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of books, films and podcasts about systemic racism, acknowledging that they are just books, films and podcasts. You’ll find research on how racism permeates everything from the criminal justice system to health care. We hope you spend some time with these resources (and that you listen to \u003cem>Code Switch—\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/03/26/820991385/the-very-best-of-code-switch-in-8-episodes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here’s a list of episodes\u003c/a> to get you started). Information is power—you decide what you do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Books\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/10/10/why-are-all-the-black-kids-sitting-together-in-the-cafeteria\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Beverly Daniel Tatum\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This classic text on the psychology of racism was re-released with new content in 2017, 20 years after its original publication. By providing straight talk on self-segregation and inequality in schools, Tatum shows the importance—and possibility—of cross-racial dialogues starting young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-for-profit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History, \u003cem>Race for Profit \u003c/em>chronicles how the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 failed to stop racist, exploitative mortgage lending practices. Since the policy was supposed to be a balm to the 1960s uprisings—much like the ones we’re seeing now—it serves as a reminder to remain vigilant when policymakers promise change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/07/27/745925045/book-a-terrible-thing-to-waste\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Harriet A. Washington\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From lead poisoning to toxic waste, Americans of color are disproportionately harmed by environmental hazards. This is detrimental to physical health—air pollution is linked with higher COVID-19 death rates, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/air-pollution-linked-with-higher-covid-19-death-rates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">according to Harvard researchers.\u003c/a> But Washington also argues that environmental racism is causing cognitive decline in communities of color. A deconstruction of IQ and an indictment of EPA rollbacks, \u003cem>A Terrible Thing To Waste\u003c/em> is a stirring read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979826\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Elizabeth Hinton\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The origins of mass incarceration—which disproportionately puts black people behind bars—are often pinned on Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. But Hinton argues the carceral state was erected “by a consensus of liberals and conservatives who privileged punitive responses to urban problems as a reaction to the civil rights movement.” The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plan, led to today’s police militarization. This account of history poses relevant questions for today’s land of the free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/586392678/automating-inequality-how-high-tech-tools-profile-police-and-punish-the-poor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Virginia Eubanks\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Algorithms are made by humans, so they are susceptible to human biases. From deciding which neighborhoods get policed to who gets welfare benefits, discrimination has gone digital. By scrutinizing statistical models and telling personal stories, Eubanks shows that machines do not correct racist systems—they only shift blame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/868390203/the-end-of-policing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>The End of Policing\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Alex S. Vitale\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the wake of high-profile cases of police brutality, the same ideas for reform are trotted out—implicit bias training, body cameras, police-community dialogues. But Vitale argues that this fails to get to the root of the problem—policing itself. While calls to abolish the police are often met with skepticism, academics and activists have long-discussed alternatives to addressing homelessness, domestic disputes and substance abuse. \u003ca href=\"https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A free ebook\u003c/a> of \u003cem>The End of Policing\u003c/em> is available now. (And you can read \u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> editor extraordinaire Leah Donnella’s conversation with Vitale \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here.\u003c/a>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nyrb.com/products/blackballed?variant=1094927969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Darryl Pinckney\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As young Americans take to the streets to say black lives matter, they’re often told to vote. While voting is important, it’s also important to remember how black political representation has been chipped away by voter ID laws, gerrymandering and felon disenfranchisement. \u003cem>Blackballed \u003c/em>addresses the struggle for voting rights and for racial equality more broadly, drawing on Pinckney’s own experiences and writings of civil rights leaders to create a complicated picture of black political identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/358318685/dog-whistle-politics-how-coded-racial-appeals-have-reinvented-racism-and-wrecked\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Ian Haney López\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Entitlement mentality.” “Quotas.” “Welfare queens.” From Barry Goldwater to Bill Clinton to the Tea Party, politicians have relied on racially coded language to win over white voters and decimate social programs. \u003cem>Dog Whistle Politics \u003c/em>makes the case that not only does this strategy endanger people of color, but it also hinders economic mobility for all Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ugapress.org/book/9780820354750/medical-bondage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Deirdre Cooper Owens\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The foundational knowledge of American gynecology relied on the exploitation of enslaved black women’s bodies. In \u003cem>Medical Bondage,\u003c/em> Cooper Owens centers the stories of black women that have been overshadowed by the “discoveries” of white male doctors who experimented on them. Baseless theories about black inferiority and higher pain tolerance \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">still permeate medical schools today\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/body-and-soul\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Alondra Nelson\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Black Panther Party is most remembered for its militant action, but health care was also a major pillar of its activism. The People’s Free Medical Clinics tested for hypertension and assisted with housing and employment. Its outreach also brought attention to rampant discrimination within mainstream medicine. Nelson writes that the Black Panther Party understood health as a human right, echoing today’s fight for universal health care. You can \u003ca href=\"https://manifold.umn.edu/read/body-and-soul/section/afa172a4-8eaa-4413-a403-ec76794217e6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">read \u003cem>Body and Soul\u003c/em> online for free.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Films\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>13th\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a third of U.S. prisoners are black.\u003c/a> In this infuriating documentary, director Ava DuVernay argues that mass incarceration, Jim Crow and slavery are “the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to date.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro/dp/B01MR52U7T\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>I Am Not Your Negro\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Narrated by the words of James Baldwin with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, \u003cem>I Am Not Your Negro\u003c/em> connects the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. Although Baldwin died nearly 30 years before the film’s release, his observations about racial conflict are as incisive today as they were when he made them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hulu.com/movie/whose-streets-3e8f4b7a-75d4-4484-9843-e665b60e2758\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Whose Streets?\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo. was one of the deaths that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Frustrated by media coverage of unrest in Ferguson, co-directors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis documented how locals felt about police in riot gear filling their neighborhoods with tear gas. As one resident says, “They don’t tell you the fact that the police showed up to a peaceful candlelight vigil… and boxed them in, and forced them onto a QuikTrip lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80184131\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>LA 92\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>LA 92 \u003c/em>is about the Los Angeles riots that occurred in response to the police beating of Rodney King. The film is entirely comprised of archival footage—no talking heads needed. It’s chilling to watch the unrest of nearly 30 years ago, as young people still take to the streets and shout, “No justice, no peace.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80198423\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Teach Us All\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, American schools are still segregated. \u003cem>Teach Us All \u003c/em>explains why that is—school choice, residential segregation, biased admissions processes—and talks to advocates working for change. Interspersing interviews from two Little Rock Nine members, the documentary asks how far we’ve really come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/show/black-america-mlk-and-still-i-rise/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this two-part series, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. chronicles the last 50 years of black history through a personal lens. Released days after the 2016 election, some themes of the documentary took on a deeper meaning amid Donald Trump’s win. “Think of the civil rights movement to the present as a second Reconstruction—a 50-year Reconstruction—that ended last night,” Gates said \u003ca href=\"https://www.salon.com/test2/2016/11/12/henry-louis-gates-on-trump-that-election-clearly-represented-a-backlash-against-the-progress-black-people-have-made-since-1965/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in an interview with\u003cem> Salon.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Podcasts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/floodlines/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Floodlines\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> from \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An audio documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, \u003cem>Floodlines \u003c/em>is told from the perspective of four New Orleanians still living with the consequences of governmental neglect. As COVID-19 disproportionately infects and kills Americans of color, the story feels especially relevant. “As a person of color, you always have it in the back of your mind that the government really doesn’t care about you,” said self-described Katrina overcomer Alice Craft-Kerney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>1619\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> from \u003cem>The New York Times \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In August of 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.” Hosted by recent Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, the\u003cem> 1619 \u003c/em>audio series chronicles how black people have been central to building American democracy, music, wealth and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://aapf.org/podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Intersectionality Matters! \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>from \u003cem>The African American Policy Forum\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading critical race theorist who coined the term “intersectionality,” this podcast brings the academic term to life. Each episode brings together lively political organizers, journalists and writers. \u003ca href=\"https://soundcloud.com/intersectionality-matters/15-pt-6-under-the-blacklight-covid-in-confinement\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This recent episode\u003c/a> on COVID-19 in prisons and other areas of confinement is a must-listen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Throughline \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>from\u003cem> NPR\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every week at \u003cem>Throughline, \u003c/em>our pals Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei “go back in time to understand the present.” To understand the history of systemic racism in America, we recommend “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869046127/american-police\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Police\u003c/a>,” “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/14/751126384/mass-incarceration\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mass Incarceration\u003c/a>” and “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/07/24/744884767/milliken-v-bradley\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Milliken v. Bradley\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=This+List+Of+Books%2C+Films+And+Podcasts+About+Racism+Is+A+Start%2C+Not+A+Panacea&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As of Friday, 15 of the top 20 bestselling books on Amazon were about race or racism. Earlier this week, \u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> was number one on Apple Podcasts—which, \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/1268000245214035974\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">as host Gene Demby said\u003c/a>, is “dope,” but unfortunately occurred under “soul-crushing circumstances.” And \u003cem>The Help \u003c/em>is trending on Netflix (ahem, a film that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2011/08/18/139755308/the-help-draws-audiences-and-ire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">drew immediate ire\u003c/a> upon release).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’re in the middle of one of those awfully predictable news cycles—a video of police killing a black person goes viral, protests ensue and broader America suddenly realizes \u003cem>we need to talk about race. \u003c/em>Of course, while \u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/this-week-has-happened-before.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this week has happened before,\u003c/a> it’s also happening on a much larger scale than ever before, with \u003ca href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/2020/06/03/map-protests-wake-george-floyds-death/5310149002/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">demonstrations in all 50 states.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help people be better allies, lists of antiracist books, films and podcasts are being published in droves. There’s never a bad time to learn, but such a list can become erroneously prescriptive, a balm to centuries-old lacerations that cut deeper than the individual reader. \u003ca href=\"https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/anti-racist-reading-lists-what-are-they-for.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">As Lauren Michele Jackson wrote for \u003cem>Vulture,\u003c/em> \u003c/a>“The word [anti-racism] and its nominal equivalent, “anti-racist,” suggests something of a vanity project, where the goal is no longer to learn more about race, power, and capital, but to spring closer to the enlightened order of the antiracist.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, with that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of books, films and podcasts about systemic racism, acknowledging that they are just books, films and podcasts. You’ll find research on how racism permeates everything from the criminal justice system to health care. We hope you spend some time with these resources (and that you listen to \u003cem>Code Switch—\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/03/26/820991385/the-very-best-of-code-switch-in-8-episodes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here’s a list of episodes\u003c/a> to get you started). Information is power—you decide what you do with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Books\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/10/10/why-are-all-the-black-kids-sitting-together-in-the-cafeteria\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Beverly Daniel Tatum\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This classic text on the psychology of racism was re-released with new content in 2017, 20 years after its original publication. By providing straight talk on self-segregation and inequality in schools, Tatum shows the importance—and possibility—of cross-racial dialogues starting young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://uncpress.org/book/9781469653662/race-for-profit/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History, \u003cem>Race for Profit \u003c/em>chronicles how the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 failed to stop racist, exploitative mortgage lending practices. Since the policy was supposed to be a balm to the 1960s uprisings—much like the ones we’re seeing now—it serves as a reminder to remain vigilant when policymakers promise change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/07/27/745925045/book-a-terrible-thing-to-waste\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Harriet A. Washington\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From lead poisoning to toxic waste, Americans of color are disproportionately harmed by environmental hazards. This is detrimental to physical health—air pollution is linked with higher COVID-19 death rates, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/air-pollution-linked-with-higher-covid-19-death-rates/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">according to Harvard researchers.\u003c/a> But Washington also argues that environmental racism is causing cognitive decline in communities of color. A deconstruction of IQ and an indictment of EPA rollbacks, \u003cem>A Terrible Thing To Waste\u003c/em> is a stirring read.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674979826\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Elizabeth Hinton\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The origins of mass incarceration—which disproportionately puts black people behind bars—are often pinned on Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. But Hinton argues the carceral state was erected “by a consensus of liberals and conservatives who privileged punitive responses to urban problems as a reaction to the civil rights movement.” The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society plan, led to today’s police militarization. This account of history poses relevant questions for today’s land of the free.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/586392678/automating-inequality-how-high-tech-tools-profile-police-and-punish-the-poor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Virginia Eubanks\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Algorithms are made by humans, so they are susceptible to human biases. From deciding which neighborhoods get policed to who gets welfare benefits, discrimination has gone digital. By scrutinizing statistical models and telling personal stories, Eubanks shows that machines do not correct racist systems—they only shift blame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/868390203/the-end-of-policing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>The End of Policing\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Alex S. Vitale\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the wake of high-profile cases of police brutality, the same ideas for reform are trotted out—implicit bias training, body cameras, police-community dialogues. But Vitale argues that this fails to get to the root of the problem—policing itself. While calls to abolish the police are often met with skepticism, academics and activists have long-discussed alternatives to addressing homelessness, domestic disputes and substance abuse. \u003ca href=\"https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">A free ebook\u003c/a> of \u003cem>The End of Policing\u003c/em> is available now. (And you can read \u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> editor extraordinaire Leah Donnella’s conversation with Vitale \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here.\u003c/a>)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nyrb.com/products/blackballed?variant=1094927969\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Darryl Pinckney\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As young Americans take to the streets to say black lives matter, they’re often told to vote. While voting is important, it’s also important to remember how black political representation has been chipped away by voter ID laws, gerrymandering and felon disenfranchisement. \u003cem>Blackballed \u003c/em>addresses the struggle for voting rights and for racial equality more broadly, drawing on Pinckney’s own experiences and writings of civil rights leaders to create a complicated picture of black political identity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/titles/358318685/dog-whistle-politics-how-coded-racial-appeals-have-reinvented-racism-and-wrecked\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Ian Haney López\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Entitlement mentality.” “Quotas.” “Welfare queens.” From Barry Goldwater to Bill Clinton to the Tea Party, politicians have relied on racially coded language to win over white voters and decimate social programs. \u003cem>Dog Whistle Politics \u003c/em>makes the case that not only does this strategy endanger people of color, but it also hinders economic mobility for all Americans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ugapress.org/book/9780820354750/medical-bondage/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Deirdre Cooper Owens\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The foundational knowledge of American gynecology relied on the exploitation of enslaved black women’s bodies. In \u003cem>Medical Bondage,\u003c/em> Cooper Owens centers the stories of black women that have been overshadowed by the “discoveries” of white male doctors who experimented on them. Baseless theories about black inferiority and higher pain tolerance \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">still permeate medical schools today\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/body-and-soul\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> by Alondra Nelson\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Black Panther Party is most remembered for its militant action, but health care was also a major pillar of its activism. The People’s Free Medical Clinics tested for hypertension and assisted with housing and employment. Its outreach also brought attention to rampant discrimination within mainstream medicine. Nelson writes that the Black Panther Party understood health as a human right, echoing today’s fight for universal health care. You can \u003ca href=\"https://manifold.umn.edu/read/body-and-soul/section/afa172a4-8eaa-4413-a403-ec76794217e6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">read \u003cem>Body and Soul\u003c/em> online for free.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Films\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>13th\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a third of U.S. prisoners are black.\u003c/a> In this infuriating documentary, director Ava DuVernay argues that mass incarceration, Jim Crow and slavery are “the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to date.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Not-Your-Negro/dp/B01MR52U7T\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>I Am Not Your Negro\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Narrated by the words of James Baldwin with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson, \u003cem>I Am Not Your Negro\u003c/em> connects the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. Although Baldwin died nearly 30 years before the film’s release, his observations about racial conflict are as incisive today as they were when he made them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hulu.com/movie/whose-streets-3e8f4b7a-75d4-4484-9843-e665b60e2758\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Whose Streets?\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 2014 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo. was one of the deaths that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Frustrated by media coverage of unrest in Ferguson, co-directors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis documented how locals felt about police in riot gear filling their neighborhoods with tear gas. As one resident says, “They don’t tell you the fact that the police showed up to a peaceful candlelight vigil… and boxed them in, and forced them onto a QuikTrip lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80184131\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>LA 92\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>LA 92 \u003c/em>is about the Los Angeles riots that occurred in response to the police beating of Rodney King. The film is entirely comprised of archival footage—no talking heads needed. It’s chilling to watch the unrest of nearly 30 years ago, as young people still take to the streets and shout, “No justice, no peace.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/80198423\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Teach Us All\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, American schools are still segregated. \u003cem>Teach Us All \u003c/em>explains why that is—school choice, residential segregation, biased admissions processes—and talks to advocates working for change. Interspersing interviews from two Little Rock Nine members, the documentary asks how far we’ve really come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/show/black-america-mlk-and-still-i-rise/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this two-part series, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. chronicles the last 50 years of black history through a personal lens. Released days after the 2016 election, some themes of the documentary took on a deeper meaning amid Donald Trump’s win. “Think of the civil rights movement to the present as a second Reconstruction—a 50-year Reconstruction—that ended last night,” Gates said \u003ca href=\"https://www.salon.com/test2/2016/11/12/henry-louis-gates-on-trump-that-election-clearly-represented-a-backlash-against-the-progress-black-people-have-made-since-1965/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in an interview with\u003cem> Salon.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Podcasts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/floodlines/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Floodlines\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> from \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An audio documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, \u003cem>Floodlines \u003c/em>is told from the perspective of four New Orleanians still living with the consequences of governmental neglect. As COVID-19 disproportionately infects and kills Americans of color, the story feels especially relevant. “As a person of color, you always have it in the back of your mind that the government really doesn’t care about you,” said self-described Katrina overcomer Alice Craft-Kerney.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/podcasts/1619-podcast.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>1619\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a> from \u003cem>The New York Times \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In August of 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.” Hosted by recent Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, the\u003cem> 1619 \u003c/em>audio series chronicles how black people have been central to building American democracy, music, wealth and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://aapf.org/podcast\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Intersectionality Matters! \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>from \u003cem>The African American Policy Forum\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading critical race theorist who coined the term “intersectionality,” this podcast brings the academic term to life. Each episode brings together lively political organizers, journalists and writers. \u003ca href=\"https://soundcloud.com/intersectionality-matters/15-pt-6-under-the-blacklight-covid-in-confinement\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This recent episode\u003c/a> on COVID-19 in prisons and other areas of confinement is a must-listen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510333/throughline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cstrong>\u003cem>Throughline \u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>from\u003cem> NPR\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every week at \u003cem>Throughline, \u003c/em>our pals Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei “go back in time to understand the present.” To understand the history of systemic racism in America, we recommend “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869046127/american-police\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Police\u003c/a>,” “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/14/751126384/mass-incarceration\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mass Incarceration\u003c/a>” and “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/07/24/744884767/milliken-v-bradley\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Milliken v. Bradley\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=This+List+Of+Books%2C+Films+And+Podcasts+About+Racism+Is+A+Start%2C+Not+A+Panacea&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'Five Days' Chronicles the Baltimore Uprising After Freddie Gray's Death",
"headTitle": "‘Five Days’ Chronicles the Baltimore Uprising After Freddie Gray’s Death | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The killing of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867219130/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-homicide-by-asphyxia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">George Floyd\u003c/a> has inspired protests \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/866279321/la-county-under-state-of-emergency-amid-saturdays-george-floyd-protests\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">across the U.S.\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/866428272/george-floyd-reverberates-globally-thousands-protest-in-germany-u-k-canada\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">around the world\u003c/a>, with crowds evoking the names of other black men and women who have died in police custody — including \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/01/403629104/baltimore-protests-what-we-know-about-the-freddie-gray-arrest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freddie Gray\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2015, Gray was arrested in Baltimore, and put in a police van—shackled but with no seatbelt. At the end of what was later termed a “rough ride,” Gray was unconscious and his neck was broken. He died a week later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Author \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126370229\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wes Moore\u003c/a> chronicles the uprising that occurred in Baltimore following Gray’s death in his new book, \u003cem>Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. \u003c/em>He says that in addition to addressing inequitable policing that occurs in poor and black neighborhoods, “we also have to deal with the underlying conditions that our citizens, and oftentimes our citizens of color, are repeatedly being … forced to endure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The author says that Gray’s life and death illustrate the ways in which people of color are constrained by poverty, racism and systemic injustice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Freddie Gray was born months premature, born underweight, born addicted to heroin,” Moore says. He notes that Gray was exposed to unsafe levels of lead as a child while living in public housing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore says the deaths of Freddie Gray and George Floyd highlight injustices that go beyond police brutality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The justice that’s also being sought must be an economic justice. It must be health justice. It must be housing justice,” Moore says. “If we permit these tragedies to recede from our memory, we will risk the opportunity to change the systems that are ultimately responsible for all of these injustices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Interview highlights\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On what lessons today’s protestors can take from what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881375\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881375\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM.png\" alt=\"Wes Moore was born in Baltimore. He's now the president of the Robin Hood Foundation, a poverty-fighting organization funding schools, food pantries and shelters in New York City.\" width=\"303\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM-160x103.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wes Moore was born in Baltimore. He’s now the president of the Robin Hood Foundation, a poverty-fighting organization funding schools, food pantries and shelters in New York City. \u003ccite>(Amun Ankhra /Penguin Random House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I think it’s important for the country to understand the lessons of Baltimore, understand the lessons of what happened to Freddie Gray, understand the aftermath of what happened to Freddie Gray. … Because we’re basically reliving history right now. What we’re seeing and these are lessons that could have and should have been learned prior, because I think it’s very indicative as to both where we are now, but frankly, very indicative so as to where we’re going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think that when you’re coming on the heels of what we’re seeing in COVID-19, when you’re coming on the heels of what we’re seeing in terms of this massive and, frankly, this exacerbated level of disparity that the first part of this year has really shown us, you see and you understand how this frustration on so many levels continues to boil over. So while I share the calls for peace, I do think it’s important for people to wonder and to ask: … Where’s our collective pain supposed to go when there still is no justice? That’s the tension that we’re seeing right now on the streets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the physical and psychological damage of the 2015 protests in Baltimore\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You saw places and buildings and historic landmarks up in flames. Churches that were up in flames. You also saw a level of psychological damage … that I think in many ways the city of Baltimore has still yet to heal from. … In just these past five years, there’s just been a level of violence where the [annual] homicide rate has been over 300 in the city of Baltimore. When you look at the size of Baltimore, it’s making it literally the most violent city in America right now. … We have had a level of mistrust that is then taking place amongst elected officials. And so you’ve seen how this has shown itself, not just in the initial damage, but in terms of the quantifiable, measurable financial damage, but really how this has damaged the psyche of Baltimore for really a generation that has now felt the impact of this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the poverty and neglect that has plagued Baltimore for generations\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881376\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881376\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM.png\" alt=\"'Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City,' by Wes Moore and Erica L. Green.\" width=\"303\" height=\"459\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM-160x242.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City,’ by Wes Moore and Erica L. Green.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When … we can’t tell the difference between a building that was burned after the unrest of Freddie Gray or a building that was burned after the unrest after the riots that took place after Dr. King’s murder, versus a building that’s just been vacant because it’s dilapidated and it’s been completely ignored—what does that say about our larger society? And what does that say about our ability to be able to address human pain versus pacify it? And so I think it really does go back and highlights this bigger point, and this bigger conversation, about how we have to think bigger and holistically about what is being demanded and what is being asked, and then what exactly we have to do individually and collectively to be able to address that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the “good apples and bad apples” conversation about police officers\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing I think we saw in Baltimore—and I think it’s a complete correlation between what we’re seeing in Minnesota—is it’s impossible to have a conversation about “good apples and bad apples” if we’re not talking about systems. It’s systems that continue to be put in place that allow measures of inequitable policing. It’s systems that are in place that don’t allow for measures of accountability, and where we can put things like civilian review boards in place. … And so this is not just about “good apples” versus “bad apples.” All of us completely acknowledge that there are some absolutely remarkable officers that we have on the force, people who are committing their lives and dedicating their lives and risking their lives for the idea of public safety. We also know that we want good people to be able to perform in good systems—and that’s where the adjustment needs to happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the decision of whether or not to charge the police officers who were with Officer Chauvin when he killed George Floyd\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The way felony murder works … [is] when a murder happens, that the people who were accomplices in it, regardless of what your role was, even if [you] were not the person that actually took the life of somebody else, you can be held not just accountable, but actually end up receiving a similar type of sentence. We have to really think hard about this idea of toleration that then takes place. For nine minutes that officer [in George Floyd’s case] had his knee on a grown man’s neck while he was screaming for his life, while he was saying that he couldn’t breathe, to the point that some of the last moments that he had on this earth was a 46-year-old man calling for his mother who died two years ago. And at no point did any of the officers go and say to that one officer, “That’s enough,” or “Ease up,” or, “Hey, I got from here. Go take a walk. I got it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so there needs to be a level of accountability that people have for each other. There needs to be a level of accountability that individuals have for the people who they are working with, particularly when these types of actions are taking place. Because if there is a level of accountability that people have and they know that I will be held responsible for the actions of the people around me, then my actions are going to be different. And so we’re thinking about the type of reforms that are going to and need to and should take place, we know that when it comes to research specifically on the policing side, these are some of the actions and some of the things that we have to really think hard and really think critically about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Amy Salit and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=From+Freddie+Gray+To+George+Floyd%3A+Wes+Moore+Says+It%27s+Time+To+%27Change+The+Systems%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Author Wes Moore talks racial injustice from Gray to George Floyd. \"We're basically reliving history right now,\" he says.",
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"headline": "'Five Days' Chronicles the Baltimore Uprising After Freddie Gray's Death",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The killing of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867219130/george-floyd-independent-autopsy-homicide-by-asphyxia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">George Floyd\u003c/a> has inspired protests \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/866279321/la-county-under-state-of-emergency-amid-saturdays-george-floyd-protests\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">across the U.S.\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/866428272/george-floyd-reverberates-globally-thousands-protest-in-germany-u-k-canada\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">around the world\u003c/a>, with crowds evoking the names of other black men and women who have died in police custody — including \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/01/403629104/baltimore-protests-what-we-know-about-the-freddie-gray-arrest\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Freddie Gray\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2015, Gray was arrested in Baltimore, and put in a police van—shackled but with no seatbelt. At the end of what was later termed a “rough ride,” Gray was unconscious and his neck was broken. He died a week later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Author \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126370229\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wes Moore\u003c/a> chronicles the uprising that occurred in Baltimore following Gray’s death in his new book, \u003cem>Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. \u003c/em>He says that in addition to addressing inequitable policing that occurs in poor and black neighborhoods, “we also have to deal with the underlying conditions that our citizens, and oftentimes our citizens of color, are repeatedly being … forced to endure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The author says that Gray’s life and death illustrate the ways in which people of color are constrained by poverty, racism and systemic injustice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Freddie Gray was born months premature, born underweight, born addicted to heroin,” Moore says. He notes that Gray was exposed to unsafe levels of lead as a child while living in public housing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore says the deaths of Freddie Gray and George Floyd highlight injustices that go beyond police brutality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The justice that’s also being sought must be an economic justice. It must be health justice. It must be housing justice,” Moore says. “If we permit these tragedies to recede from our memory, we will risk the opportunity to change the systems that are ultimately responsible for all of these injustices.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Interview highlights\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On what lessons today’s protestors can take from what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881375\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881375\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM.png\" alt=\"Wes Moore was born in Baltimore. He's now the president of the Robin Hood Foundation, a poverty-fighting organization funding schools, food pantries and shelters in New York City.\" width=\"303\" height=\"195\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-11.58.39-AM-160x103.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wes Moore was born in Baltimore. He’s now the president of the Robin Hood Foundation, a poverty-fighting organization funding schools, food pantries and shelters in New York City. \u003ccite>(Amun Ankhra /Penguin Random House)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I think it’s important for the country to understand the lessons of Baltimore, understand the lessons of what happened to Freddie Gray, understand the aftermath of what happened to Freddie Gray. … Because we’re basically reliving history right now. What we’re seeing and these are lessons that could have and should have been learned prior, because I think it’s very indicative as to both where we are now, but frankly, very indicative so as to where we’re going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think that when you’re coming on the heels of what we’re seeing in COVID-19, when you’re coming on the heels of what we’re seeing in terms of this massive and, frankly, this exacerbated level of disparity that the first part of this year has really shown us, you see and you understand how this frustration on so many levels continues to boil over. So while I share the calls for peace, I do think it’s important for people to wonder and to ask: … Where’s our collective pain supposed to go when there still is no justice? That’s the tension that we’re seeing right now on the streets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the physical and psychological damage of the 2015 protests in Baltimore\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You saw places and buildings and historic landmarks up in flames. Churches that were up in flames. You also saw a level of psychological damage … that I think in many ways the city of Baltimore has still yet to heal from. … In just these past five years, there’s just been a level of violence where the [annual] homicide rate has been over 300 in the city of Baltimore. When you look at the size of Baltimore, it’s making it literally the most violent city in America right now. … We have had a level of mistrust that is then taking place amongst elected officials. And so you’ve seen how this has shown itself, not just in the initial damage, but in terms of the quantifiable, measurable financial damage, but really how this has damaged the psyche of Baltimore for really a generation that has now felt the impact of this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the poverty and neglect that has plagued Baltimore for generations\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13881376\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 303px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13881376\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM.png\" alt=\"'Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City,' by Wes Moore and Erica L. Green.\" width=\"303\" height=\"459\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM.png 303w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-04-at-12.02.04-PM-160x242.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 303px) 100vw, 303px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City,’ by Wes Moore and Erica L. Green.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When … we can’t tell the difference between a building that was burned after the unrest of Freddie Gray or a building that was burned after the unrest after the riots that took place after Dr. King’s murder, versus a building that’s just been vacant because it’s dilapidated and it’s been completely ignored—what does that say about our larger society? And what does that say about our ability to be able to address human pain versus pacify it? And so I think it really does go back and highlights this bigger point, and this bigger conversation, about how we have to think bigger and holistically about what is being demanded and what is being asked, and then what exactly we have to do individually and collectively to be able to address that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the “good apples and bad apples” conversation about police officers\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The thing I think we saw in Baltimore—and I think it’s a complete correlation between what we’re seeing in Minnesota—is it’s impossible to have a conversation about “good apples and bad apples” if we’re not talking about systems. It’s systems that continue to be put in place that allow measures of inequitable policing. It’s systems that are in place that don’t allow for measures of accountability, and where we can put things like civilian review boards in place. … And so this is not just about “good apples” versus “bad apples.” All of us completely acknowledge that there are some absolutely remarkable officers that we have on the force, people who are committing their lives and dedicating their lives and risking their lives for the idea of public safety. We also know that we want good people to be able to perform in good systems—and that’s where the adjustment needs to happen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the decision of whether or not to charge the police officers who were with Officer Chauvin when he killed George Floyd\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The way felony murder works … [is] when a murder happens, that the people who were accomplices in it, regardless of what your role was, even if [you] were not the person that actually took the life of somebody else, you can be held not just accountable, but actually end up receiving a similar type of sentence. We have to really think hard about this idea of toleration that then takes place. For nine minutes that officer [in George Floyd’s case] had his knee on a grown man’s neck while he was screaming for his life, while he was saying that he couldn’t breathe, to the point that some of the last moments that he had on this earth was a 46-year-old man calling for his mother who died two years ago. And at no point did any of the officers go and say to that one officer, “That’s enough,” or “Ease up,” or, “Hey, I got from here. Go take a walk. I got it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so there needs to be a level of accountability that people have for each other. There needs to be a level of accountability that individuals have for the people who they are working with, particularly when these types of actions are taking place. Because if there is a level of accountability that people have and they know that I will be held responsible for the actions of the people around me, then my actions are going to be different. And so we’re thinking about the type of reforms that are going to and need to and should take place, we know that when it comes to research specifically on the policing side, these are some of the actions and some of the things that we have to really think hard and really think critically about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Amy Salit and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=From+Freddie+Gray+To+George+Floyd%3A+Wes+Moore+Says+It%27s+Time+To+%27Change+The+Systems%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Larry Kramer, the playwright whose angry voice and pen raised theatergoers’ consciousness about AIDS and roused thousands to militant protests in the early years of the epidemic, has died at 84.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bill Goldstein, a writer who was working on a biography of Kramer, confirmed the news to The Associated Press. Kramer’s husband, David Webster, told \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> that Kramer died Wednesday of pneumonia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have lost a giant of a man who stood up for gay rights like a warrior. His anger was needed at a time when gay men’s deaths to AIDS were being ignored by the American government,” said Elton John in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer, who wrote \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em> and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, lost his lover to acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1984 and was himself infected with the virus. He also suffered from hepatitis B and received a liver transplant in 2001 because the virus had caused liver failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for \u003cem>Women in Love\u003c/em>, the 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel. It starred Glenda Jackson, who won her first Oscar for her performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also wrote the 1972 screenplay \u003cem>Lost Horizon\u003c/em>, a novel, \u003cem>Faggots\u003c/em>, and the plays \u003cem>Sissies’ Scrapbook, The Furniture of Home, Just Say No\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Destiny of Me\u003c/em>, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for many years he was best known for his public fight to secure medical treatment, acceptance and civil rights for people with AIDS. He loudly told everyone that the gay community was grappling with a plague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tributes from the arts community flooded in Wednesday, with Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter saying “What an extraordinary writer, what a life.” Dan Savage wrote: “He ordered us to love ourselves and each other and to fight for our lives. He was a hero.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1981, when AIDS had not yet acquired its name and only a few dozen people had been diagnosed with it, Kramer and a group of his friends in New York City founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first groups in the country to address the epidemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He tried to rouse the gay community with speeches and articles such as “1,112 and Counting,” published in gay newspapers in 1983.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake,” he wrote. “Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The late journalist Randy Shilts, in his best selling account of the AIDS epidemic \u003cem>And the Band Played On\u003c/em>, called that article “inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade” and credited it with “crystallizing the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer lived to see gay marriage a reality — and married himself in 2013 — but never rested. “I’m married,” he told The AP. “But that’s only part of where we are. AIDS is still decimating us and we still don’t have protection under the law.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer split with GMHC in 1983 after other board members decided to concentrate on providing support services to people with AIDS. It remains one of the largest AIDS-service groups in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After leaving GMHC, Kramer wrote \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em>, in which a furious young writer — not unlike Kramer himself — battles politicians, society, the media and other gay leaders to bring attention to the crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play premiered at The Public Theater in April 1985. Associated Press drama critic Michael Kuchwara called it an “angry but compelling indictment of a society as well as a subculture for failing to respond adequately to the tragedy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A revival in 2011 was almost universally praised by critics and earned the best revival Tony. Two actors from it — Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey — also won Tonys. Joe Mantello played the main character of Ned Weeks, the alter ego of Kramer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very moved that it moved so many people,” he said at the time. Kramer often stood outside the theater passing out fliers asking the world to take action against HIV/AIDS. “Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know there is no cure,” it said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play was turned into a TV film for HBO in 2014 starring Mark Ruffalo, Jonathan Groff, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello and Julia Roberts. It won the Emmy for best movie. Kramer stood onstage in heavy winter clothing as the statuette was presented to director Ryan Murphy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 1992 play \u003cem>The Destiny of Me\u003c/em> continues the story of Weeks from \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em>. Weeks, in the hospital for an experimental AIDS treatment, reflects on the past, particularly his relationship with his family. His parents and brother appear to act out what happened in the past, as does the young Ned, who confronts his older self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1987, Kramer founded ACT UP, the group that became famous for staging civil disobedience at places like the Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange and Burroughs-Wellcome Corp., the maker of the chief anti-AIDS drug, AZT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT UP’s protests helped persuade the FDA to speed the approval of new drugs and Burroughs-Wellcome to lower its price for AZT. He also battled — and later reconciled — with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been leading the national response to the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer soon relinquished a leadership role in ACT UP, and as support for AIDS research increased, he found some common ground with health officials whom ACT UP had bitterly criticized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer never softened the urgency of his demands. In 2011, he helped the American Foundation for Equal Rights mount their play \u003cem>8\u003c/em> on Broadway about the legal battle over same-sex marriage in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The one nice thing that I seem to have acquired, accidentally, is this reputation of everyone afraid of my voice,” he told The AP in 2015. “So I get heard, whether it changes anything or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of his last projects was the massive two-volume \u003cem>The American People\u003c/em>, which chronicled the history of gay people in America and took decades to write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just think it’s so important that we know our history — the history of how badly we’re treated and how hard we have to fight to get what we deserve, which is equality,” he told The AP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the 2013 Tonys, he was honored with the Isabelle Stevenson Award, given to a member of the theater community for philanthropic or civic efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months later, Kramer married his longtime partner, architect David Webster, in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center, where Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Larry Kramer, the playwright whose angry voice and pen raised theatergoers’ consciousness about AIDS and roused thousands to militant protests in the early years of the epidemic, has died at 84.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bill Goldstein, a writer who was working on a biography of Kramer, confirmed the news to The Associated Press. Kramer’s husband, David Webster, told \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> that Kramer died Wednesday of pneumonia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have lost a giant of a man who stood up for gay rights like a warrior. His anger was needed at a time when gay men’s deaths to AIDS were being ignored by the American government,” said Elton John in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer, who wrote \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em> and founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, lost his lover to acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1984 and was himself infected with the virus. He also suffered from hepatitis B and received a liver transplant in 2001 because the virus had caused liver failure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for \u003cem>Women in Love\u003c/em>, the 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel. It starred Glenda Jackson, who won her first Oscar for her performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He also wrote the 1972 screenplay \u003cem>Lost Horizon\u003c/em>, a novel, \u003cem>Faggots\u003c/em>, and the plays \u003cem>Sissies’ Scrapbook, The Furniture of Home, Just Say No\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Destiny of Me\u003c/em>, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But for many years he was best known for his public fight to secure medical treatment, acceptance and civil rights for people with AIDS. He loudly told everyone that the gay community was grappling with a plague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tributes from the arts community flooded in Wednesday, with Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter saying “What an extraordinary writer, what a life.” Dan Savage wrote: “He ordered us to love ourselves and each other and to fight for our lives. He was a hero.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1981, when AIDS had not yet acquired its name and only a few dozen people had been diagnosed with it, Kramer and a group of his friends in New York City founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, one of the first groups in the country to address the epidemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He tried to rouse the gay community with speeches and articles such as “1,112 and Counting,” published in gay newspapers in 1983.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our continued existence as gay men upon the face of this earth is at stake,” he wrote. “Unless we fight for our lives, we shall die.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The late journalist Randy Shilts, in his best selling account of the AIDS epidemic \u003cem>And the Band Played On\u003c/em>, called that article “inarguably one of the most influential works of advocacy journalism of the decade” and credited it with “crystallizing the epidemic into a political movement for the gay community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer lived to see gay marriage a reality — and married himself in 2013 — but never rested. “I’m married,” he told The AP. “But that’s only part of where we are. AIDS is still decimating us and we still don’t have protection under the law.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer split with GMHC in 1983 after other board members decided to concentrate on providing support services to people with AIDS. It remains one of the largest AIDS-service groups in the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After leaving GMHC, Kramer wrote \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em>, in which a furious young writer — not unlike Kramer himself — battles politicians, society, the media and other gay leaders to bring attention to the crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play premiered at The Public Theater in April 1985. Associated Press drama critic Michael Kuchwara called it an “angry but compelling indictment of a society as well as a subculture for failing to respond adequately to the tragedy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A revival in 2011 was almost universally praised by critics and earned the best revival Tony. Two actors from it — Ellen Barkin and John Benjamin Hickey — also won Tonys. Joe Mantello played the main character of Ned Weeks, the alter ego of Kramer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very moved that it moved so many people,” he said at the time. Kramer often stood outside the theater passing out fliers asking the world to take action against HIV/AIDS. “Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know there is no cure,” it said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play was turned into a TV film for HBO in 2014 starring Mark Ruffalo, Jonathan Groff, Matt Bomer, Taylor Kitsch, Jim Parsons, Alfred Molina, Joe Mantello and Julia Roberts. It won the Emmy for best movie. Kramer stood onstage in heavy winter clothing as the statuette was presented to director Ryan Murphy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The 1992 play \u003cem>The Destiny of Me\u003c/em> continues the story of Weeks from \u003cem>The Normal Heart\u003c/em>. Weeks, in the hospital for an experimental AIDS treatment, reflects on the past, particularly his relationship with his family. His parents and brother appear to act out what happened in the past, as does the young Ned, who confronts his older self.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1987, Kramer founded ACT UP, the group that became famous for staging civil disobedience at places like the Food and Drug Administration, the New York Stock Exchange and Burroughs-Wellcome Corp., the maker of the chief anti-AIDS drug, AZT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT UP’s protests helped persuade the FDA to speed the approval of new drugs and Burroughs-Wellcome to lower its price for AZT. He also battled — and later reconciled — with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been leading the national response to the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer soon relinquished a leadership role in ACT UP, and as support for AIDS research increased, he found some common ground with health officials whom ACT UP had bitterly criticized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer never softened the urgency of his demands. In 2011, he helped the American Foundation for Equal Rights mount their play \u003cem>8\u003c/em> on Broadway about the legal battle over same-sex marriage in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The one nice thing that I seem to have acquired, accidentally, is this reputation of everyone afraid of my voice,” he told The AP in 2015. “So I get heard, whether it changes anything or not.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of his last projects was the massive two-volume \u003cem>The American People\u003c/em>, which chronicled the history of gay people in America and took decades to write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I just think it’s so important that we know our history — the history of how badly we’re treated and how hard we have to fight to get what we deserve, which is equality,” he told The AP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the 2013 Tonys, he was honored with the Isabelle Stevenson Award, given to a member of the theater community for philanthropic or civic efforts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months later, Kramer married his longtime partner, architect David Webster, in the intensive care unit of NYU Langone Medical Center, where Kramer was recovering from surgery for a bowel obstruction.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>With retail businesses recently allowed to open for curbside pickup, bookstores all around the Bay Area began announcing their sidewalk fulfillment systems. But as any aficionado of these havens of literature knows, some of the best book purchases come from the serendipity of leisurely browsing the shelves, behavior not yet sanctioned by public health directives. And with many independent bookstores already operating on paper-thin margins, their future feels more precarious than ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The economic blow to local bookstores struck Bay Area author and event producer Charlie Jane Anders particularly hard. Faced with canceling her own long-running literary series \u003ca href=\"http://www.writerswithdrinks.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Writers With Drinks\u003c/a>, as well as the collaboratively organized Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, Anders immediately decided to channel her event curation powers into a virtual fundraising series. With her Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl co-organizers Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Jackie Risley, she started reaching out to bookstores and readers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On April 8, the first \u003ca href=\"https://welovebookstores.org/2020/04/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">We Love Bookstores\u003c/a> reading was launched. A fundraiser for Pegasus Books of Berkeley—featuring Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman—the event raised close to $3,500. A vibrant new series was born.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880963\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880963\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-800x514.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"514\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-800x514.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-768x493.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alia Volz, author of ‘Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco’ and We Love Bookstores co-organizer. \u003ccite>(courtesy of Alia Volz)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the project evolved, so did the curatorial team, which widened to include folks such as Evan Karp of Quiet Lightening and Litseen; Alia Volz, whose book \u003cem>Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco\u003c/em> was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; book publicists Lara Starr and Cristina Deptula; science writer and speculative fiction author Annalee Newitz; and science fiction author Mike Chen, who designed the series’ website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the project attracted more guest authors, some of them specified which bookstore they wanted to raise money for. For example, the fundraiser for Marcus Books attracted an all-star lineup of readers, including Chinaka Hodge, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Daveed Diggs, who had been personally inspired by the highly influential black bookstore (now celebrating its 60-year anniversary). A joint event with Volz and Armistead Maupin scheduled for June 17 will benefit Rakestraw Books in Danville—a decision, Volz says, borne from a mutual desire to raise funds for a “classic Bay Area bookstore” that has roots extending to the 1970s, an era inhabited by their respective books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880964\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880964\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"518\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-768x498.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1020x661.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1920x1244.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Armistead Maupin will read with Alia Volz on June 17. \u003ccite>(Christopher Turner)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As anyone who’s attended Writers With Drinks can attest, one of the hallmarks of the monthly series is its dynamic diversity. On any given evening audiences might hear comedy, poetry, erotica, speculative fiction, journalism, memoir, and everything in between, with equal time given to emerging local authors and international bestsellers. Set in a nightclub rather than a bookstore, the event has been a fixture of literati nightlife for almost 20 years, and never fails to draw a boisterous crowd. With Anders introducing each author with hilarious, stream-of-consciousness biographies pulled from a parallel universe, and local booksellers on hand to ensure that some of the featured books will make it home with audience members that night, Writer’s With Drinks blends disparate genres and audiences into a big frothy cocktail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing with Writers With Drinks that I always tried to do… was have variety within each event, and I feel that what we’ve been doing with this [We Love Bookstores] is more having variety between events,” Anders explains. “It’s got a little bit of Writers With Drinks flavor, a little bit of Quiet Lightning flavor, a little bit of Cliterary Salon. We’ve had some events that Maggie [Tokuda-Hall] has put together that have been kid-focused, and those have been some of my favorites.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880967\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880967\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre.jpg 1324w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Baruch Porras-Hernandez will read on June 12 for We Love Bookstores. \u003ccite>(Robbie Sweeny)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Upcoming We Love Bookstores events reflect this far-ranging diversity—including panels of poets, science fiction authors, Asian American novelists and nonfiction heavy-hitters. Emphasizing accessibility, all of the events are available to attend for free, with a sliding scale for donations supporting each featured, neighborhood bookstore. It’s an example of the kind of grassroots mutual aid that local author (and featured panelist Rebecca Solnit) references in her 2009 book on disaster response, \u003cem>A Paradise Built in Hell.\u003c/em> While some featured bookstores have launched their own fundraisers, or been granted small business loans to help keep them afloat, others are still waiting for relief. To have the community rally on their behalf is not just a financial boost, but a morale boost as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880966\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880966\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-1920x1280.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jennifer Finney Boylan will read on June 19 for We Love Bookstores. \u003ccite>(Dan Haar)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For Anders, while her many years in the world of literary event production has given her the opportunity to wrangle big-name authors into the mix, she’s especially emphatic that the purpose of We Love Bookstores is to serve the many independent bookstores that make the Bay Area such an epicenter of the literary arts—for readers, writers and booksellers alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing I keep hammering on as I endlessly promote these events is that it’s not just about ‘bookstores’… but also, a neighborhood without a bookstore is just a really sad thing to me. [And] if you like your neighborhood, and you want your neighborhood to stay awesome, you need to help out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The next We Love Bookstores event gets underway on Friday, May 29, with Gennifer Choldenko, Avi and Aimee Lucido for Towne Center Books. \u003ca href=\"https://welovebookstores.org\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>With retail businesses recently allowed to open for curbside pickup, bookstores all around the Bay Area began announcing their sidewalk fulfillment systems. But as any aficionado of these havens of literature knows, some of the best book purchases come from the serendipity of leisurely browsing the shelves, behavior not yet sanctioned by public health directives. And with many independent bookstores already operating on paper-thin margins, their future feels more precarious than ever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The economic blow to local bookstores struck Bay Area author and event producer Charlie Jane Anders particularly hard. Faced with canceling her own long-running literary series \u003ca href=\"http://www.writerswithdrinks.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Writers With Drinks\u003c/a>, as well as the collaboratively organized Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, Anders immediately decided to channel her event curation powers into a virtual fundraising series. With her Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl co-organizers Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Jackie Risley, she started reaching out to bookstores and readers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On April 8, the first \u003ca href=\"https://welovebookstores.org/2020/04/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">We Love Bookstores\u003c/a> reading was launched. A fundraiser for Pegasus Books of Berkeley—featuring Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman—the event raised close to $3,500. A vibrant new series was born.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880963\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880963\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-800x514.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"514\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-800x514.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-160x103.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author-768x493.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Alia-Volz-courtesy-the-author.jpg 1020w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alia Volz, author of ‘Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco’ and We Love Bookstores co-organizer. \u003ccite>(courtesy of Alia Volz)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As the project evolved, so did the curatorial team, which widened to include folks such as Evan Karp of Quiet Lightening and Litseen; Alia Volz, whose book \u003cem>Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco\u003c/em> was recently published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; book publicists Lara Starr and Cristina Deptula; science writer and speculative fiction author Annalee Newitz; and science fiction author Mike Chen, who designed the series’ website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the project attracted more guest authors, some of them specified which bookstore they wanted to raise money for. For example, the fundraiser for Marcus Books attracted an all-star lineup of readers, including Chinaka Hodge, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Daveed Diggs, who had been personally inspired by the highly influential black bookstore (now celebrating its 60-year anniversary). A joint event with Volz and Armistead Maupin scheduled for June 17 will benefit Rakestraw Books in Danville—a decision, Volz says, borne from a mutual desire to raise funds for a “classic Bay Area bookstore” that has roots extending to the 1970s, an era inhabited by their respective books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880964\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880964\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"518\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-800x518.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-768x498.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1020x661.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner-1920x1244.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Armistead-Maupin-by-Christopher-Turner.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Armistead Maupin will read with Alia Volz on June 17. \u003ccite>(Christopher Turner)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As anyone who’s attended Writers With Drinks can attest, one of the hallmarks of the monthly series is its dynamic diversity. On any given evening audiences might hear comedy, poetry, erotica, speculative fiction, journalism, memoir, and everything in between, with equal time given to emerging local authors and international bestsellers. Set in a nightclub rather than a bookstore, the event has been a fixture of literati nightlife for almost 20 years, and never fails to draw a boisterous crowd. With Anders introducing each author with hilarious, stream-of-consciousness biographies pulled from a parallel universe, and local booksellers on hand to ensure that some of the featured books will make it home with audience members that night, Writer’s With Drinks blends disparate genres and audiences into a big frothy cocktail.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing with Writers With Drinks that I always tried to do… was have variety within each event, and I feel that what we’ve been doing with this [We Love Bookstores] is more having variety between events,” Anders explains. “It’s got a little bit of Writers With Drinks flavor, a little bit of Quiet Lightning flavor, a little bit of Cliterary Salon. We’ve had some events that Maggie [Tokuda-Hall] has put together that have been kid-focused, and those have been some of my favorites.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880967\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880967\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Baruch-Porras-Hernandez-by-Robbie-Sweeny-for-Epic-Party-Theatre.jpg 1324w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Baruch Porras-Hernandez will read on June 12 for We Love Bookstores. \u003ccite>(Robbie Sweeny)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Upcoming We Love Bookstores events reflect this far-ranging diversity—including panels of poets, science fiction authors, Asian American novelists and nonfiction heavy-hitters. Emphasizing accessibility, all of the events are available to attend for free, with a sliding scale for donations supporting each featured, neighborhood bookstore. It’s an example of the kind of grassroots mutual aid that local author (and featured panelist Rebecca Solnit) references in her 2009 book on disaster response, \u003cem>A Paradise Built in Hell.\u003c/em> While some featured bookstores have launched their own fundraisers, or been granted small business loans to help keep them afloat, others are still waiting for relief. To have the community rally on their behalf is not just a financial boost, but a morale boost as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880966\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-13880966\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar-1920x1280.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Jennifer-Boylan-by-Dan-Haar.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jennifer Finney Boylan will read on June 19 for We Love Bookstores. \u003ccite>(Dan Haar)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>For Anders, while her many years in the world of literary event production has given her the opportunity to wrangle big-name authors into the mix, she’s especially emphatic that the purpose of We Love Bookstores is to serve the many independent bookstores that make the Bay Area such an epicenter of the literary arts—for readers, writers and booksellers alike.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The thing I keep hammering on as I endlessly promote these events is that it’s not just about ‘bookstores’… but also, a neighborhood without a bookstore is just a really sad thing to me. [And] if you like your neighborhood, and you want your neighborhood to stay awesome, you need to help out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The next We Love Bookstores event gets underway on Friday, May 29, with Gennifer Choldenko, Avi and Aimee Lucido for Towne Center Books. \u003ca href=\"https://welovebookstores.org\">Details here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Finding Love—And Feeling Worthy Of It—In 'Felix Ever After'",
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"content": "\u003cp>It feels political these days, just to exist. That’s especially true if you’re a black, transgender, queer teenager on a scholarship at an elite Brooklyn high school for the arts—and in competition for one slot at Brown University. As if adolescence wasn’t tricky enough already!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we meet the eponymous protagonist in \u003cem>Felix Ever After\u003c/em>, he has been out as trans for several years and found himself a squad comprising other LGBT youth of ethnic backgrounds mixed up in various ways. (This is set in modern-day New York, after all.) But lest all this sound like too idealized a cast, the propelling mystery of this tightly-written YA novel surrounds who at school is behind a traumatizing transphobic act against Felix. The quest to find out takes us, and Felix, on an emotional roller coaster to explore his own identity and his relationships with his friends at the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, of course, there’s love. “Young love. What else is there to say?” one adult character remarks, halfway through the book. It turns out there’s plenty left to say in this rendering, because it is complicated by layers and layers of identity work. Felix’s fumbling attempts to figure out what love means and what it’s supposed to feel like—while learning he’s worthy of it—make for the novel’s most anxious and heart-warming bits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Witnessing a romance come alive as we read text back-and-forth reminds me of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/594964035/stumbling-and-texting-toward-love-in-emergency-contact\">the work of Mary H.K Choi\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/711377704/personal-demons-and-class-differences-complicate-love-in-normal-people\">Sally Rooney\u003c/a>, and author Kacen Callender deepens a central epistolary relationship deftly, making us feel like we’re let in on something so authentic and quietly groundbreaking that we shouldn’t be watching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what can compete with the intensity of that age—when you’re discovering who you really are, finding first love and learning that you’re worth it? The emotional journey of young love gives the novel a universal feel, despite the multiple identity labels that make life for Felix so challenging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s grappling with gender identity, which the book skillfully tackles. Readers will likely come away with new understanding and empathy for those who don’t—or didn’t—have labels for how they identified, until a few years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And class comes into play, as Felix lives on the poverty line while his friends enjoy \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750872902/succession-mogul-money-mogul-problems\">\u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>-level wealth \u003c/a>in New York, complete with extra homes and caterers on call. But the book leaves the potentially interesting area of Felix’s race—he’s black—untouched.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of those boxes Felix checks, in addition to being abandoned by his mother early on, can make the character hard to believe if you’re in parts of the country where white is still the dominant racial group and boy and girl binaries are the only socially acceptable options.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But today’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/668106376/generation-z-is-the-most-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-yet\">teens are part of the most mixed\u003c/a>, gender-bending generation ever, and they \u003cem>should\u003c/em> get the spotlight in more stories. And ultimately, Felix’s empowerment by the book’s cinematic end wouldn’t feel so hard-won and well-earned without all of his complicated identity issues. [aside postid='arts_13877670']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How do we find and cultivate pride for each other and ourselves when we’re in a world that seems like it doesn’t want us to exist?” Felix asks, early in the novel. One approach goes: You can’t be what you can’t see. In a foreword, Callender—who is nonbinary—says that something changed for them when they saw a transgender character for the first time, on the show \u003cem>Degrassi: The Next Generation\u003c/em>. “He made me realize, suddenly, that though he’d been assigned female at birth, he’d been able to become who he really was,” Callender writes. “That episode changed my life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now they hope this kind of tale, one that centers around characters who aren’t the cisgender, heterosexual kids previous generations found in the library, can reach readers who yearn to be seen, trying to better understand themselves and realize new possibilities. As one character says in the novel, “The issue is that we’ve never really gotten to see our own stories … We have to make those stories ourselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becoming and unbecoming. Discovering ourselves and compassion for ourselves. It’s the work we all do throughout our lives, regardless of how we identify. In that sense, \u003cem>Felix Ever After\u003c/em> may be classified as “young adult,” but its central themes are very adult, indeed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It feels political these days, just to exist. That’s especially true if you’re a black, transgender, queer teenager on a scholarship at an elite Brooklyn high school for the arts—and in competition for one slot at Brown University. As if adolescence wasn’t tricky enough already!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we meet the eponymous protagonist in \u003cem>Felix Ever After\u003c/em>, he has been out as trans for several years and found himself a squad comprising other LGBT youth of ethnic backgrounds mixed up in various ways. (This is set in modern-day New York, after all.) But lest all this sound like too idealized a cast, the propelling mystery of this tightly-written YA novel surrounds who at school is behind a traumatizing transphobic act against Felix. The quest to find out takes us, and Felix, on an emotional roller coaster to explore his own identity and his relationships with his friends at the same time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, of course, there’s love. “Young love. What else is there to say?” one adult character remarks, halfway through the book. It turns out there’s plenty left to say in this rendering, because it is complicated by layers and layers of identity work. Felix’s fumbling attempts to figure out what love means and what it’s supposed to feel like—while learning he’s worthy of it—make for the novel’s most anxious and heart-warming bits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Witnessing a romance come alive as we read text back-and-forth reminds me of \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/594964035/stumbling-and-texting-toward-love-in-emergency-contact\">the work of Mary H.K Choi\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/711377704/personal-demons-and-class-differences-complicate-love-in-normal-people\">Sally Rooney\u003c/a>, and author Kacen Callender deepens a central epistolary relationship deftly, making us feel like we’re let in on something so authentic and quietly groundbreaking that we shouldn’t be watching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what can compete with the intensity of that age—when you’re discovering who you really are, finding first love and learning that you’re worth it? The emotional journey of young love gives the novel a universal feel, despite the multiple identity labels that make life for Felix so challenging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s grappling with gender identity, which the book skillfully tackles. Readers will likely come away with new understanding and empathy for those who don’t—or didn’t—have labels for how they identified, until a few years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And class comes into play, as Felix lives on the poverty line while his friends enjoy \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750872902/succession-mogul-money-mogul-problems\">\u003cem>Succession\u003c/em>-level wealth \u003c/a>in New York, complete with extra homes and caterers on call. But the book leaves the potentially interesting area of Felix’s race—he’s black—untouched.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of those boxes Felix checks, in addition to being abandoned by his mother early on, can make the character hard to believe if you’re in parts of the country where white is still the dominant racial group and boy and girl binaries are the only socially acceptable options.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But today’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/668106376/generation-z-is-the-most-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-yet\">teens are part of the most mixed\u003c/a>, gender-bending generation ever, and they \u003cem>should\u003c/em> get the spotlight in more stories. And ultimately, Felix’s empowerment by the book’s cinematic end wouldn’t feel so hard-won and well-earned without all of his complicated identity issues. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How do we find and cultivate pride for each other and ourselves when we’re in a world that seems like it doesn’t want us to exist?” Felix asks, early in the novel. One approach goes: You can’t be what you can’t see. In a foreword, Callender—who is nonbinary—says that something changed for them when they saw a transgender character for the first time, on the show \u003cem>Degrassi: The Next Generation\u003c/em>. “He made me realize, suddenly, that though he’d been assigned female at birth, he’d been able to become who he really was,” Callender writes. “That episode changed my life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now they hope this kind of tale, one that centers around characters who aren’t the cisgender, heterosexual kids previous generations found in the library, can reach readers who yearn to be seen, trying to better understand themselves and realize new possibilities. As one character says in the novel, “The issue is that we’ve never really gotten to see our own stories … We have to make those stories ourselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becoming and unbecoming. Discovering ourselves and compassion for ourselves. It’s the work we all do throughout our lives, regardless of how we identify. In that sense, \u003cem>Felix Ever After\u003c/em> may be classified as “young adult,” but its central themes are very adult, indeed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 \u003ca href=\"http://npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Porochista Khakpour's ‘Brown Album’ Confronts a Troubling Duality in the Iranian American Diaspora",
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"content": "\u003cp>Porochista Khakpour was not trying to be a spokesperson for the Iranian American diaspora. The author tells me over the phone that she’s a fiction writer — a novelist with a love for “lush, maximalist or baroque” sentences that go against the style guides of many mainstream publications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that is hard for people to hear, that you have a book of personal essays out [but] that you don’t necessarily feel passionate about the form,” she says the week before her fourth book, \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em>, is set to be released.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who have followed Khakpour’s many pieces on being Iranian in post-9/11 America over the past decade, this fact may come as a shock. From “\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/opinion/09khakpour-barbie.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Islamic Revolution Barbie\u003c/a>,” published in 2009 at the New York Times, to “\u003ca href=\"https://catapult.co/stories/how-to-write-iranian-america\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay\u003c/a>” in 2017 from Catapult, it seems impossible to separate the 42-year-old writer from texts about \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/arts/television/the-persian-ness-of-shahs-of-sunset-on-bravo.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Shahs of Sunset\u003c/a>\u003c/em> — a Ryan Seacrest-produced reality TV show that follows a group of young, wealthy Iranian Americans in Beverly Hills — or the alienation that comes from being a young brown immigrant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880921\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-1020x1482.jpg\" alt=\"Porochista Khakpour.\" width=\"640\" height=\"930\" class=\"size-large wp-image-13880921\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-1020x1482.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-160x232.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-800x1162.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-768x1116.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Porochista Khakpour. \u003ccite>(Maria Nova)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525564713\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Brown Album\u003c/a>\u003c/em> doesn’t aim to dispel confusion, either. Released May 19, the book compiles Khakpour’s popular essays into one long-form contemplation on living in America as an Iranian. It also begins with a short passage in which the writer states: “[The essays in \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em>] are a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the reason for repeatedly finding herself in the middle of such discomfort?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think [the essays] had some sort of benefit for the larger audience — Iranian Americans in one sense, but also just largely immigrants,” Khakpour tells me over the phone. “And that audience really needed visibility. These essays were not necessarily revelations in their topics, but they were published in major mainstream venues. And so I think, for my audience, [it] was that visibility that really mattered.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of Khakpour’s writings, one of the biggest forms of representation of Iranian American culture in American mainstream media is Bravo’s \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>, where stereotypes of the “Persian prince or princess” with their Mercedes-Benz cars and designer clothing flourish. But, as the writer notes throughout the book, such material excess is less about Iranians than it is about how immigrants assimilate to meet America’s values in money, materials and all things pro-capitalism. Khakpour instead hones in on what it means to be Iranian in America through the show and its stars’ use of “Persian” as an identifier instead of Iranian. (The country changed from Persia to Iran in the 1930s.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the book’s first essay “A New Persian Empire,” she recalls an interview with \u003cem>Shahs\u003c/em> cast member Reza Farahan, who Khakpour asked about the decision. The reality star replied: “Food is Persian, rugs are Persian, cats are Persian, people are Persian. It’s not because I’m ashamed or embarrassed. Mind you, I am very much more Cyrus and Darius than I am Islamic Republic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His reference to long-dismantled dynasties from the Persian Empire is a weighted one, especially considering Farahan was born just a handful of years before Khakpour in Tehran, and just six years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Monarchies of a bygone era — of a time when the dying religion of Zoroastrianism reigned — color Farahan’s explanation, showcasing his perceived divide between Iran’s storied history and the country as it presently stands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the TV star and writer were raised in Los Angeles in the years after Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic of Iran — an important similarity to note considering the different vision of Iranian America Khakpour writes in \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> than is seen in \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>. But rather than hiding behind Farahan and other wealthy “royalists” in “Tehrangeles,” Khakpour’s writings about Iranian America also indict her own state of mind as a budding teen on the outskirts of the more-wealthy Iranian American community. In the same essay where she quotes Farahan, she mentions hiding “inside the American costumes [she] wore — punk, cowgirl, starlet — and took on Persian only when [she] had to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though not entirely incorrect (Persian is, after all, one of many ethnicities in Iran), the confusion around her identity from those unable to find Persia on a map led Khakpour to anxiety. In the essay, she continues as her fractured, former self to those who may have asked “what is Persian”: “\u003cem>It’s the label for Islamic Republic-disliking Iranians! It’s what Iranians who used to be fancy prefer!\u003c/em>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880919\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 778px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"778\" height=\"1200\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880919\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1.jpg 778w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1-160x247.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1-768x1185.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 778px) 100vw, 778px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Brown Album.’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here at the heart of the “Persian vs. Iranian” issue — and arguably \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> on the whole — is a chasm within many Iranians abroad: There remains a longing for a pre-Islamic Republic Iran, one that risks glorification of the “\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/uncategorized/politics-and-the-press-in-iran-under-the-pahlavis/2536/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">modernization\u003c/a>” efforts under the Pahlavi dynasty, and in turn, hosts a lot of internalized xenophobia and racism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You kind of have to do your own work,” Khakpour said. “I really had to discover Iran again for myself in many ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that work for Khakpour was finding and understanding her place among the diaspora. She and her family lived outside of Beverly Hills in modest South Pasadena, more specifically in a condo she calls a “dingbat.” To explain the structure, she recalls a quote in the 1998 film \u003cem>Slums of Beverly Hills\u003c/em>, in which Natasha Lyonne’s character explains the term as “a two-story apartment [building] featuring cheap rents and fancy names. They promise the good life but never deliver.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sitting outside of the community of Iranian Americans in Tehrangeles, Khakpour was neither accepted as a part of the wealthy diaspora, nor in her predominantly white town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All my first memories are from Iran,” she said. “Much of my formative experiences as a child were around the trauma of being new to America. So it’s really hard for me to feel American. Feeling Iranian is much more … me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Struggling to find her footing among her people throughout the early essays in the book, Khakpour’s “The King of Tehrangeles” showcases the divide between her family and the Iranian American diaspora. In the piece, she writes of a job she once had along the glitzy street of Beverly Hills’s famed Rodeo Drive, in a boutique that sold handbags that “cost well over the highest annual income [she] had made at that point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Down the way and across the street was House of Bijan, a flagship store from the Iranian American designer known for being the man behind the most expensive shop in the world. Recalling the fashion mogul, Khakpour writes: “Bijan beat Americans at their own game … He embodied American overindulgence to the maximum.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Khakpour and her family members were “the anomaly of anomalies in L.A.: the poor Iranian[s].” Unpermitted into the appointment-only space, the writer recalls how her parents were both interested in Bijan as a cultural touchstone but horrified by his lavishness. Similarly, in another essay, she notes that while many Iranian Americans of Southern California boasted a level of inherent conservatism that comes with, as she tells me, being “an extreme capitalist,” her parents were wishy-washy in their relations to American politics. Her father, she writes, even bounced from “a love of Reagan to a love of Sanders.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I get, more than anything from Iranian American readers, when they’re like: ‘Thank you for speaking out about being a poor Iranian,’” she said. “There’s just no representation with that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, Khakpour “doesn’t feel connected to a lot of [Iranian American] people,” especially those that fit more closely to the \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em> narrative. But her book points out at least one common idea among Iranians in America, a thread that can be found despite differences in class and politics, in lifestyles and area codes. Between “A New Persian Empire” and Khakpour’s self-described “manifesto” or the title essay that closes out the book, \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> denounces a long-time fable, believed by the Iranian diaspora and those outside the community, that Iranians are the original Aryans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My father talked about that ugly myth occasionally with something like half pride, when he felt Americans were being racist,” Khakpour recalls in her essay, even remembering a time when he told her at the dinner table: “We’re Caucasian, face it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she also remembers him telling her at a young age to choose Asian on census reports, or saying: “We are gandom-gan … which means wheat-colored, the equivalent of brown in Farsi.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the truth?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tale of Iranians as the original Aryans has roots that extend far beyond the Iranian Revolution, even before Persia was renamed Iran in the 1930s. According to Reza Zia-Ebrahimi in a piece for \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/08/post-2.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Tehran Bureau via PBS’s \u003cem>Frontline\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, the Islamophobia in Iran, rooted in a deep racism against Arabs, has followed Iranians for centuries. But it was around the 1860s when Iranian intellectuals began searching for a way to distance themselves from Islam, resulting in “self-Orientalization [which] involves an element of shame over traditional Iranian customs and features,” or a “dislocation, the attempt to dislodge Iran from its … Islamic reality and force it into a European one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Echoing the sentiment in a contemporary context, Khakpour said: “One of the issues I have with my parents is that even though they’re Muslim, they’re kind of ashamed of being Muslim, and they don’t really feel connected to Islam … I sort of challenge them on that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This internalized xenophobia and racism rises above the Iranian diaspora, pulling Iranian Americans together in spite of the community’s classes, ethnicities and religions. Are Iranians brown or white? Are we Iranian or are we Persian? Unanimity around these complex questions does not exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of the diaspora’s spokespeople, like Khakpour, who take up a stance in an effort to bring these difficult conversations to light? To do so is to further alienate oneself from the community. She writes at the start of the final piece: “This is the essay arising from the tweets that resulted in death threats … This is the essay many of my own people would tell me to go kill myself for because I deny the whiteness they claim.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Understandably, herein lies the anxiety and discomfort that may come from being seen as a spokesperson for an underrepresented community: When you write your own story, you inherently alienate someone else in their own ideas and emotions tied to the homeland and the host country. At the end of the day, one must remember that \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> is a book of personal essays, emphasis on the personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The problem we have with all these Iranian American memoirists — and I mean, they’re everywhere — but they’re all women of a certain privilege,” Khakpour said when asked about entering a canon of Iranian American memoirs. “I just got very sick of that one image, because I didn’t fit into it at all. And so, I don’t think there is total solidarity, but I don’t think there should be either. It’s fine to be diverse in that sense.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultimately, maybe what it comes down to is not to see Khakpour — or \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>, or other Iranian American memoirists — as a spokesperson for the Iranian American diaspora, but rather, to see \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> as a pillar within the multitude of individual stories that showcase Iranian diasporic identities. Maybe it comes down to allowing more space in mainstream media for these stories to be told, in order to paint a broader picture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Khakpour sums it up well: “What is authentic Iran? I mean, there is no such thing. If you feel like you’re caught between different cultures, I think that’s a very legitimate sentiment that you should feel free to express.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Brown Album’ is out May 19 and can be ordered \u003ca href=\"https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525564713\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>. More information about the author and the book \u003ca href=\"https://porochistakhakpour.com/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Porochista Khakpour was not trying to be a spokesperson for the Iranian American diaspora. The author tells me over the phone that she’s a fiction writer — a novelist with a love for “lush, maximalist or baroque” sentences that go against the style guides of many mainstream publications.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that is hard for people to hear, that you have a book of personal essays out [but] that you don’t necessarily feel passionate about the form,” she says the week before her fourth book, \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em>, is set to be released.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who have followed Khakpour’s many pieces on being Iranian in post-9/11 America over the past decade, this fact may come as a shock. From “\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/opinion/09khakpour-barbie.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Islamic Revolution Barbie\u003c/a>,” published in 2009 at the New York Times, to “\u003ca href=\"https://catapult.co/stories/how-to-write-iranian-america\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay\u003c/a>” in 2017 from Catapult, it seems impossible to separate the 42-year-old writer from texts about \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/arts/television/the-persian-ness-of-shahs-of-sunset-on-bravo.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Shahs of Sunset\u003c/a>\u003c/em> — a Ryan Seacrest-produced reality TV show that follows a group of young, wealthy Iranian Americans in Beverly Hills — or the alienation that comes from being a young brown immigrant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880921\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-1020x1482.jpg\" alt=\"Porochista Khakpour.\" width=\"640\" height=\"930\" class=\"size-large wp-image-13880921\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-1020x1482.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-160x232.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-800x1162.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1-768x1116.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Porochista_Khakpour-2020-copy-1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Porochista Khakpour. \u003ccite>(Maria Nova)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525564713\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Brown Album\u003c/a>\u003c/em> doesn’t aim to dispel confusion, either. Released May 19, the book compiles Khakpour’s popular essays into one long-form contemplation on living in America as an Iranian. It also begins with a short passage in which the writer states: “[The essays in \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em>] are a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the reason for repeatedly finding herself in the middle of such discomfort?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think [the essays] had some sort of benefit for the larger audience — Iranian Americans in one sense, but also just largely immigrants,” Khakpour tells me over the phone. “And that audience really needed visibility. These essays were not necessarily revelations in their topics, but they were published in major mainstream venues. And so I think, for my audience, [it] was that visibility that really mattered.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of Khakpour’s writings, one of the biggest forms of representation of Iranian American culture in American mainstream media is Bravo’s \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>, where stereotypes of the “Persian prince or princess” with their Mercedes-Benz cars and designer clothing flourish. But, as the writer notes throughout the book, such material excess is less about Iranians than it is about how immigrants assimilate to meet America’s values in money, materials and all things pro-capitalism. Khakpour instead hones in on what it means to be Iranian in America through the show and its stars’ use of “Persian” as an identifier instead of Iranian. (The country changed from Persia to Iran in the 1930s.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the book’s first essay “A New Persian Empire,” she recalls an interview with \u003cem>Shahs\u003c/em> cast member Reza Farahan, who Khakpour asked about the decision. The reality star replied: “Food is Persian, rugs are Persian, cats are Persian, people are Persian. It’s not because I’m ashamed or embarrassed. Mind you, I am very much more Cyrus and Darius than I am Islamic Republic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His reference to long-dismantled dynasties from the Persian Empire is a weighted one, especially considering Farahan was born just a handful of years before Khakpour in Tehran, and just six years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Monarchies of a bygone era — of a time when the dying religion of Zoroastrianism reigned — color Farahan’s explanation, showcasing his perceived divide between Iran’s storied history and the country as it presently stands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the TV star and writer were raised in Los Angeles in the years after Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic of Iran — an important similarity to note considering the different vision of Iranian America Khakpour writes in \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> than is seen in \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>. But rather than hiding behind Farahan and other wealthy “royalists” in “Tehrangeles,” Khakpour’s writings about Iranian America also indict her own state of mind as a budding teen on the outskirts of the more-wealthy Iranian American community. In the same essay where she quotes Farahan, she mentions hiding “inside the American costumes [she] wore — punk, cowgirl, starlet — and took on Persian only when [she] had to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though not entirely incorrect (Persian is, after all, one of many ethnicities in Iran), the confusion around her identity from those unable to find Persia on a map led Khakpour to anxiety. In the essay, she continues as her fractured, former self to those who may have asked “what is Persian”: “\u003cem>It’s the label for Islamic Republic-disliking Iranians! It’s what Iranians who used to be fancy prefer!\u003c/em>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13880919\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 778px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"778\" height=\"1200\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880919\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1.jpg 778w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1-160x247.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/brownalbum-1-768x1185.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 778px) 100vw, 778px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">‘Brown Album.’\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Here at the heart of the “Persian vs. Iranian” issue — and arguably \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> on the whole — is a chasm within many Iranians abroad: There remains a longing for a pre-Islamic Republic Iran, one that risks glorification of the “\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/uncategorized/politics-and-the-press-in-iran-under-the-pahlavis/2536/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">modernization\u003c/a>” efforts under the Pahlavi dynasty, and in turn, hosts a lot of internalized xenophobia and racism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You kind of have to do your own work,” Khakpour said. “I really had to discover Iran again for myself in many ways.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of that work for Khakpour was finding and understanding her place among the diaspora. She and her family lived outside of Beverly Hills in modest South Pasadena, more specifically in a condo she calls a “dingbat.” To explain the structure, she recalls a quote in the 1998 film \u003cem>Slums of Beverly Hills\u003c/em>, in which Natasha Lyonne’s character explains the term as “a two-story apartment [building] featuring cheap rents and fancy names. They promise the good life but never deliver.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sitting outside of the community of Iranian Americans in Tehrangeles, Khakpour was neither accepted as a part of the wealthy diaspora, nor in her predominantly white town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All my first memories are from Iran,” she said. “Much of my formative experiences as a child were around the trauma of being new to America. So it’s really hard for me to feel American. Feeling Iranian is much more … me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Struggling to find her footing among her people throughout the early essays in the book, Khakpour’s “The King of Tehrangeles” showcases the divide between her family and the Iranian American diaspora. In the piece, she writes of a job she once had along the glitzy street of Beverly Hills’s famed Rodeo Drive, in a boutique that sold handbags that “cost well over the highest annual income [she] had made at that point.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Down the way and across the street was House of Bijan, a flagship store from the Iranian American designer known for being the man behind the most expensive shop in the world. Recalling the fashion mogul, Khakpour writes: “Bijan beat Americans at their own game … He embodied American overindulgence to the maximum.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Khakpour and her family members were “the anomaly of anomalies in L.A.: the poor Iranian[s].” Unpermitted into the appointment-only space, the writer recalls how her parents were both interested in Bijan as a cultural touchstone but horrified by his lavishness. Similarly, in another essay, she notes that while many Iranian Americans of Southern California boasted a level of inherent conservatism that comes with, as she tells me, being “an extreme capitalist,” her parents were wishy-washy in their relations to American politics. Her father, she writes, even bounced from “a love of Reagan to a love of Sanders.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I get, more than anything from Iranian American readers, when they’re like: ‘Thank you for speaking out about being a poor Iranian,’” she said. “There’s just no representation with that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the end, Khakpour “doesn’t feel connected to a lot of [Iranian American] people,” especially those that fit more closely to the \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em> narrative. But her book points out at least one common idea among Iranians in America, a thread that can be found despite differences in class and politics, in lifestyles and area codes. Between “A New Persian Empire” and Khakpour’s self-described “manifesto” or the title essay that closes out the book, \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> denounces a long-time fable, believed by the Iranian diaspora and those outside the community, that Iranians are the original Aryans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My father talked about that ugly myth occasionally with something like half pride, when he felt Americans were being racist,” Khakpour recalls in her essay, even remembering a time when he told her at the dinner table: “We’re Caucasian, face it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she also remembers him telling her at a young age to choose Asian on census reports, or saying: “We are gandom-gan … which means wheat-colored, the equivalent of brown in Farsi.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the truth?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tale of Iranians as the original Aryans has roots that extend far beyond the Iranian Revolution, even before Persia was renamed Iran in the 1930s. According to Reza Zia-Ebrahimi in a piece for \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/08/post-2.html\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Tehran Bureau via PBS’s \u003cem>Frontline\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, the Islamophobia in Iran, rooted in a deep racism against Arabs, has followed Iranians for centuries. But it was around the 1860s when Iranian intellectuals began searching for a way to distance themselves from Islam, resulting in “self-Orientalization [which] involves an element of shame over traditional Iranian customs and features,” or a “dislocation, the attempt to dislodge Iran from its … Islamic reality and force it into a European one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Echoing the sentiment in a contemporary context, Khakpour said: “One of the issues I have with my parents is that even though they’re Muslim, they’re kind of ashamed of being Muslim, and they don’t really feel connected to Islam … I sort of challenge them on that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This internalized xenophobia and racism rises above the Iranian diaspora, pulling Iranian Americans together in spite of the community’s classes, ethnicities and religions. Are Iranians brown or white? Are we Iranian or are we Persian? Unanimity around these complex questions does not exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of the diaspora’s spokespeople, like Khakpour, who take up a stance in an effort to bring these difficult conversations to light? To do so is to further alienate oneself from the community. She writes at the start of the final piece: “This is the essay arising from the tweets that resulted in death threats … This is the essay many of my own people would tell me to go kill myself for because I deny the whiteness they claim.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Understandably, herein lies the anxiety and discomfort that may come from being seen as a spokesperson for an underrepresented community: When you write your own story, you inherently alienate someone else in their own ideas and emotions tied to the homeland and the host country. At the end of the day, one must remember that \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> is a book of personal essays, emphasis on the personal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The problem we have with all these Iranian American memoirists — and I mean, they’re everywhere — but they’re all women of a certain privilege,” Khakpour said when asked about entering a canon of Iranian American memoirs. “I just got very sick of that one image, because I didn’t fit into it at all. And so, I don’t think there is total solidarity, but I don’t think there should be either. It’s fine to be diverse in that sense.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultimately, maybe what it comes down to is not to see Khakpour — or \u003cem>Shahs of Sunset\u003c/em>, or other Iranian American memoirists — as a spokesperson for the Iranian American diaspora, but rather, to see \u003cem>Brown Album\u003c/em> as a pillar within the multitude of individual stories that showcase Iranian diasporic identities. Maybe it comes down to allowing more space in mainstream media for these stories to be told, in order to paint a broader picture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Khakpour sums it up well: “What is authentic Iran? I mean, there is no such thing. If you feel like you’re caught between different cultures, I think that’s a very legitimate sentiment that you should feel free to express.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Brown Album’ is out May 19 and can be ordered \u003ca href=\"https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525564713\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>. More information about the author and the book \u003ca href=\"https://porochistakhakpour.com/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Journalist Who Helped Break Snowden's Story Reflects on His High-Stakes Reporting",
"headTitle": "Journalist Who Helped Break Snowden’s Story Reflects on His High-Stakes Reporting | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>In 2013, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/authors/760121931/edward-snowden\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Edward Snowden\u003c/a>, a contractor with the National Security Agency, rocked the world when he \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/09/18/223523622/officials-edward-snowdens-leaks-were-masked-by-job-duties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">leaked\u003c/a> thousands of classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barton Gellman, a former \u003cem>The Washington Post \u003c/em>reporter\u003cem>,\u003c/em> was one of three journalists—including filmmaker \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127238681\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Laura Poitras\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/11/190670954/he-broke-the-nsa-leaks-story-but-just-who-is-glenn-greenwald\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Glenn Greenwald\u003c/a> of \u003cem>The Guardian—\u003c/em>with whom Snowden chose to share the documents. Gellman says initially Snowden was skeptical of him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He thought that \u003cem>The Washington Post\u003c/em> would be afraid to publish or would bow down to government pressure,” Gellman says. “It took a lot of convincing for him, just as it took a lot of convincing for me that he was for real.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden shared information about surveillance programs previously unknown to the American public, including the fact that the government was keeping records of private citizens’ phone calls, and that the NSA was harvesting data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gellman reached out to \u003cem>The Washington Post, \u003c/em>the paper he’d left three years earlier, which went on to publish a series of articles based on Snowden’s classified information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a new book, \u003cem>Dark Mirror, \u003c/em>Gellman writes about his relationship with Snowden and the high-stakes reporting that ultimately garnered him, Poitras and Greenwald a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/14/303002434/pulitzer-prizes-are-out-washington-post-the-guardian-win-for-nsa-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Pulitzer Prize\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. government charged Snowden with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/06/28/534682231/once-reserved-for-spies-espionage-act-now-used-against-suspected-leakers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">espionage\u003c/a>, but Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, maintains that he acted as a whistleblower in sharing the classified documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gellman says that no matter your opinion about Snowden, one things is clear: “Ed Snowden succeeded beyond the wildest ambitions that he could plausibly have had. … Even the biggest critics of Snowden—not all of them, but some of them—… all say he started a debate that the public needed to have about the limits of surveillance in a democratic society.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the same time,” Gellman adds, “most of the programs that he exposed continue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Interview highlights \u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the terms Snowden agreed upon with Gellman, Poitras and Greenwald \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880753 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"305\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM.png 305w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM-160x244.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 305px) 100vw, 305px\">I told Snowden that … I would make my own judgment about the news value and that I would give the government an opportunity to tell me about damage they foresaw, if the story was published. And so I had that conversation with the government every time. Snowden at first seemed a little skeptical about this and worried that it simply meant I was going to give the government veto power over an article. And in fact, he saw it as potential evidence of a cowardly approach by \u003cem>The Washington Post\u003c/em>. Later, he came to see the value and the importance of trying to avoid avoidable harm in the publication of these stories. And he began to insist that that was what he wanted all along. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden absolutely wanted us to make our own judgments about newsworthiness. He absolutely did not want us to dump the entire archive online. If he wanted that, he could have done it himself. I mean, the guy knows how to work the Internet. He wanted the credibility of journalists behind the disclosures. He wanted us to check the facts and set the context. And he wanted us to decide what was newsworthy and what was harmful. So he essentially relinquished all the close judgment calls to me and my fellow journalists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the importance of checks and balances on the government’s surveillance power \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were people in 2013 and ’14 and ’15 who told me they didn’t worry about the enormous power of this surveillance machinery because they trusted the people who were running it. They trusted themselves. They trusted the inspector general to call out and prevent bad behavior. They trusted supervisors. They trusted, fundamentally, the president and the presidency. And they trusted Democrats and Republicans. They trusted George W. Bush and Barack Obama equally to use this stuff with the right motives and with the right kinds of limits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But so much of what is done under authority of the NSA is done based on norms and traditional understandings of what terms mean and on legal interpretations. When Trump came to power—a guy who is allergic to norms, a guy who is at war with every institution of accountability, whether it’s the press, whether it’s inspectors general, whether it’s courts—when that kind of person has his hands on the enormous power that is granted by the ability to look into [and] see into anything that travels across the Internet, then they’re worried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So people who surprise me—people like \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/04/17/602849276/james-comey-to-fresh-air-the-fbi-isnt-on-anybodys-side\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jim Comey\u003c/a>, and people like Gen. [James] Clapper, who had been the director of national intelligence, these were people who had ardently defended the surveillance powers and the checks and balances held on them—they were no longer so confident about those checks and balances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his tense relationship with Snowden\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden wanted advocates on his side. He wanted a pure and clear message of dissent against the way the NSA was behaving. And he wanted nothing that would raise any doubts or questions about him or get into his personal life or anything like that. I continued to ask questions the way a journalist should ask questions. And so we would have these tense exchanges in which he would say, for example, “Are you purposely asking me things you know I won’t answer just to piss me off?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first time he got angry at me he was right to be angry. In an early profile of him, I inadvertently exposed an online handle—an anonymous handle—that he was still using for communications. And that caused him some trouble as he tried to change handles and encryption keys on the fly. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He quit talking to me for several months after that. And we started up again because he believed I was handling these stories seriously, that I was diving into the subject in a way that was exposing truths that weren’t being exposed anywhere else, because this wasn’t just a question of opening the documents, reading and writing your story. The documents were incomplete, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, very hard to understand. They required external reporting with sources in the government and out of the government. They required interpretation and discovery. And I was putting things together in a way that he thought was important. And so he got over his personal anger at the way I behaved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the cybersecurity precautions he took when he visited Snowden in Moscow in Dec.2013\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t like to be dramatic or self-important, but I thought, yeah, there’s a pretty good chance that if an American journalist who is writing about secret American intelligence programs comes over to interview a former intelligence officer, Ed Snowden, that that would probably be worth their diversion of a little bit of surveillance to themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I assumed that my devices and my telephone calls would be monitored, and so to begin with, I didn’t bring any data over with me. I wasn’t gonna bring classified U.S. documents to a country where they could possibly read them and directly expose American secrets to a foreign power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I didn’t log onto any of my accounts, I didn’t bring my actual computer or my usual telephone, I brought empty ones. But I still had the puzzle of how I was going to interview Snowden, take notes, take photographs, make recordings, and then bring those back to the United States while crossing an international border and not hand over those documents, those recordings and so on to either government. I didn’t want the U.S. government to hear everything I’d said with Snowden. I didn’t want the Russian government to have access to all that information either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the House Intelligence Committee report, which was very critical of Snowden\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there were particular harms done by particular disclosures, that fact itself would be classified. … And so I can’t argue with an assertion that’s made in the dark, and there may be legitimate reasons to keep that classified. On the other hand, I would have to say that, not to put a fine point on it, that House Intelligence Committee report was garbage. It was a political document. It was basically a long screed about Ed Snowden, and it was filled with facts or assertions of fact that were plainly rebuttable, that they were simply wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the simple question of calling Ed Snowden, “a high school dropout.” He had earned his GED at the same time that his class graduated with top, top scores. They knew that he had advanced computer security and computer science credentials. Or, for example, they said there’s no evidence that Ed Snowden actually was injured in the Army. And so he was lying about the reasons for the end of his Army service. Well, Army records made it very clear. I’ve seen the records. He broke both legs in training and for the House Intelligence Committee, which had privileged access to government records, to say things like that gives you a decent flavor of the more complicated untruths in the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On being a target for international hackers \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not paranoid if people are really trying to get you. I knew from the first time I saw the documents before I published a story that this was going to paint a big target on my back. It’s advertising that you have something special and secret and advertising pretty quickly that I was not going to publish all of it. So I knew that I would be a subject of interest to hackers, to the U.S. government and to foreign intelligence agencies. And I gradually accumulated considerable evidence that this was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Someone tried to break into my Gmail accounts, where I did not store sensitive documents. But nevertheless, Google warned me, a big flashing pink bar on my screen said, “Warning! We believe that state-sponsored attackers are trying to break into your device or your account.” I found out later that that was the government of Turkey. Turkey was unexpected and bad news for me, because I thought there were a substantial number of likely candidates and more capable candidates coming after me. So if Turkey also was joining the party, that suggested the threat landscape was broader than I would have liked to think.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My iPad was hacked right in front of my eyes as I was holding it. The screen gutted out of the static and then white letters started marching across the screen with technical commands in a language called Unix. If that had worked as expected, as intended, it would have happened while I slept or wasn’t looking at the machine. And after a couple of minutes of fooling around like that, the hacker would have complete control of the device. And what worried me about that was that remotely hacking an iPad is not a beginners’ hack. It’s quite difficult and quite expensive to break through Apple’s considerable security remotely without physically connecting to the device. It’s a million-dollar hack, that is, say that data brokers or surveillance brokers pay million-dollar bounties for what’s called an untethered hack of the iPad operating system. I did not want to be worth that kind of effort. I did not want to be worth that kind of expense. But I was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram\u003c/em> \u003cem>produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Journalist+Who+Helped+Break+Snowden%27s+Story+Reflects+On+His+High-Stakes+Reporting&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In 2013, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/books/authors/760121931/edward-snowden\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Edward Snowden\u003c/a>, a contractor with the National Security Agency, rocked the world when he \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/09/18/223523622/officials-edward-snowdens-leaks-were-masked-by-job-duties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">leaked\u003c/a> thousands of classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Barton Gellman, a former \u003cem>The Washington Post \u003c/em>reporter\u003cem>,\u003c/em> was one of three journalists—including filmmaker \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127238681\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Laura Poitras\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/06/11/190670954/he-broke-the-nsa-leaks-story-but-just-who-is-glenn-greenwald\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Glenn Greenwald\u003c/a> of \u003cem>The Guardian—\u003c/em>with whom Snowden chose to share the documents. Gellman says initially Snowden was skeptical of him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He thought that \u003cem>The Washington Post\u003c/em> would be afraid to publish or would bow down to government pressure,” Gellman says. “It took a lot of convincing for him, just as it took a lot of convincing for me that he was for real.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden shared information about surveillance programs previously unknown to the American public, including the fact that the government was keeping records of private citizens’ phone calls, and that the NSA was harvesting data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gellman reached out to \u003cem>The Washington Post, \u003c/em>the paper he’d left three years earlier, which went on to publish a series of articles based on Snowden’s classified information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a new book, \u003cem>Dark Mirror, \u003c/em>Gellman writes about his relationship with Snowden and the high-stakes reporting that ultimately garnered him, Poitras and Greenwald a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/14/303002434/pulitzer-prizes-are-out-washington-post-the-guardian-win-for-nsa-stories\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Pulitzer Prize\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. government charged Snowden with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/06/28/534682231/once-reserved-for-spies-espionage-act-now-used-against-suspected-leakers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">espionage\u003c/a>, but Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, maintains that he acted as a whistleblower in sharing the classified documents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gellman says that no matter your opinion about Snowden, one things is clear: “Ed Snowden succeeded beyond the wildest ambitions that he could plausibly have had. … Even the biggest critics of Snowden—not all of them, but some of them—… all say he started a debate that the public needed to have about the limits of surveillance in a democratic society.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“At the same time,” Gellman adds, “most of the programs that he exposed continue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Interview highlights \u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the terms Snowden agreed upon with Gellman, Poitras and Greenwald \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880753 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"305\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM.png 305w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-20-at-11.27.08-AM-160x244.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 305px) 100vw, 305px\">I told Snowden that … I would make my own judgment about the news value and that I would give the government an opportunity to tell me about damage they foresaw, if the story was published. And so I had that conversation with the government every time. Snowden at first seemed a little skeptical about this and worried that it simply meant I was going to give the government veto power over an article. And in fact, he saw it as potential evidence of a cowardly approach by \u003cem>The Washington Post\u003c/em>. Later, he came to see the value and the importance of trying to avoid avoidable harm in the publication of these stories. And he began to insist that that was what he wanted all along. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden absolutely wanted us to make our own judgments about newsworthiness. He absolutely did not want us to dump the entire archive online. If he wanted that, he could have done it himself. I mean, the guy knows how to work the Internet. He wanted the credibility of journalists behind the disclosures. He wanted us to check the facts and set the context. And he wanted us to decide what was newsworthy and what was harmful. So he essentially relinquished all the close judgment calls to me and my fellow journalists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the importance of checks and balances on the government’s surveillance power \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were people in 2013 and ’14 and ’15 who told me they didn’t worry about the enormous power of this surveillance machinery because they trusted the people who were running it. They trusted themselves. They trusted the inspector general to call out and prevent bad behavior. They trusted supervisors. They trusted, fundamentally, the president and the presidency. And they trusted Democrats and Republicans. They trusted George W. Bush and Barack Obama equally to use this stuff with the right motives and with the right kinds of limits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But so much of what is done under authority of the NSA is done based on norms and traditional understandings of what terms mean and on legal interpretations. When Trump came to power—a guy who is allergic to norms, a guy who is at war with every institution of accountability, whether it’s the press, whether it’s inspectors general, whether it’s courts—when that kind of person has his hands on the enormous power that is granted by the ability to look into [and] see into anything that travels across the Internet, then they’re worried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So people who surprise me—people like \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/04/17/602849276/james-comey-to-fresh-air-the-fbi-isnt-on-anybodys-side\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jim Comey\u003c/a>, and people like Gen. [James] Clapper, who had been the director of national intelligence, these were people who had ardently defended the surveillance powers and the checks and balances held on them—they were no longer so confident about those checks and balances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On his tense relationship with Snowden\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Snowden wanted advocates on his side. He wanted a pure and clear message of dissent against the way the NSA was behaving. And he wanted nothing that would raise any doubts or questions about him or get into his personal life or anything like that. I continued to ask questions the way a journalist should ask questions. And so we would have these tense exchanges in which he would say, for example, “Are you purposely asking me things you know I won’t answer just to piss me off?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first time he got angry at me he was right to be angry. In an early profile of him, I inadvertently exposed an online handle—an anonymous handle—that he was still using for communications. And that caused him some trouble as he tried to change handles and encryption keys on the fly. …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He quit talking to me for several months after that. And we started up again because he believed I was handling these stories seriously, that I was diving into the subject in a way that was exposing truths that weren’t being exposed anywhere else, because this wasn’t just a question of opening the documents, reading and writing your story. The documents were incomplete, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, very hard to understand. They required external reporting with sources in the government and out of the government. They required interpretation and discovery. And I was putting things together in a way that he thought was important. And so he got over his personal anger at the way I behaved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the cybersecurity precautions he took when he visited Snowden in Moscow in Dec.2013\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t like to be dramatic or self-important, but I thought, yeah, there’s a pretty good chance that if an American journalist who is writing about secret American intelligence programs comes over to interview a former intelligence officer, Ed Snowden, that that would probably be worth their diversion of a little bit of surveillance to themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I assumed that my devices and my telephone calls would be monitored, and so to begin with, I didn’t bring any data over with me. I wasn’t gonna bring classified U.S. documents to a country where they could possibly read them and directly expose American secrets to a foreign power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I didn’t log onto any of my accounts, I didn’t bring my actual computer or my usual telephone, I brought empty ones. But I still had the puzzle of how I was going to interview Snowden, take notes, take photographs, make recordings, and then bring those back to the United States while crossing an international border and not hand over those documents, those recordings and so on to either government. I didn’t want the U.S. government to hear everything I’d said with Snowden. I didn’t want the Russian government to have access to all that information either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On the House Intelligence Committee report, which was very critical of Snowden\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there were particular harms done by particular disclosures, that fact itself would be classified. … And so I can’t argue with an assertion that’s made in the dark, and there may be legitimate reasons to keep that classified. On the other hand, I would have to say that, not to put a fine point on it, that House Intelligence Committee report was garbage. It was a political document. It was basically a long screed about Ed Snowden, and it was filled with facts or assertions of fact that were plainly rebuttable, that they were simply wrong.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the simple question of calling Ed Snowden, “a high school dropout.” He had earned his GED at the same time that his class graduated with top, top scores. They knew that he had advanced computer security and computer science credentials. Or, for example, they said there’s no evidence that Ed Snowden actually was injured in the Army. And so he was lying about the reasons for the end of his Army service. Well, Army records made it very clear. I’ve seen the records. He broke both legs in training and for the House Intelligence Committee, which had privileged access to government records, to say things like that gives you a decent flavor of the more complicated untruths in the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>On being a target for international hackers \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not paranoid if people are really trying to get you. I knew from the first time I saw the documents before I published a story that this was going to paint a big target on my back. It’s advertising that you have something special and secret and advertising pretty quickly that I was not going to publish all of it. So I knew that I would be a subject of interest to hackers, to the U.S. government and to foreign intelligence agencies. And I gradually accumulated considerable evidence that this was true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Someone tried to break into my Gmail accounts, where I did not store sensitive documents. But nevertheless, Google warned me, a big flashing pink bar on my screen said, “Warning! We believe that state-sponsored attackers are trying to break into your device or your account.” I found out later that that was the government of Turkey. Turkey was unexpected and bad news for me, because I thought there were a substantial number of likely candidates and more capable candidates coming after me. So if Turkey also was joining the party, that suggested the threat landscape was broader than I would have liked to think.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My iPad was hacked right in front of my eyes as I was holding it. The screen gutted out of the static and then white letters started marching across the screen with technical commands in a language called Unix. If that had worked as expected, as intended, it would have happened while I slept or wasn’t looking at the machine. And after a couple of minutes of fooling around like that, the hacker would have complete control of the device. And what worried me about that was that remotely hacking an iPad is not a beginners’ hack. It’s quite difficult and quite expensive to break through Apple’s considerable security remotely without physically connecting to the device. It’s a million-dollar hack, that is, say that data brokers or surveillance brokers pay million-dollar bounties for what’s called an untethered hack of the iPad operating system. I did not want to be worth that kind of effort. I did not want to be worth that kind of expense. But I was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram\u003c/em> \u003cem>produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Journalist+Who+Helped+Break+Snowden%27s+Story+Reflects+On+His+High-Stakes+Reporting&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' is a Lackluster Prequel to 'The Hunger Games'",
"headTitle": "‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ is a Lackluster Prequel to ‘The Hunger Games’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>With her \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> novels, Suzanne Collins harnessed a combination of twisty plots, teen romance, dystopian worldbuilding and subtle intimations of cannibalism to sell more than 100 million books around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The premise was unbeatable: Authoritarian regime forces children to fight to the death on live TV; rebellion ensues. But much of the series’ appeal came from the spiky charisma of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, the sharpshooting teenager who wins the games and starts a revolution while choosing between two boys who are as alike in cuteness as they are different in \u003cem>Weltanschauung\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The series has a distinct Roman imperial vibe—far-flung districts sending their harvests to the glorious and corrupted Capitol, feasts complete with vomitoria, gladiatorial contests to the death (but for kids!). The country is called Panem, after the Latin phrase “panem et circenses,” or bread and circuses—what the Roman satirist Juvenal identified as the formula for quieting a restive population. (In \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>, George Orwell calls this substance “prolefeed.”) The hunger games, of course, are the circenses, the Capitol’s way of controlling the proles through the twin mechanisms of entertainment and terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880727 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"304\" height=\"461\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM.png 304w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM-160x243.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 304px) 100vw, 304px\">Collins’ new novel, \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, \u003c/em>is a baggy, meandering prequel to the events of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em> that tells the story of Katniss’ nemesis and Panem’s authoritarian ruler, Coriolanus Snow. With his Roman tyrant’s name, surgically altered face and breath smelling of blood and roses, Coriolanus appeared as a distant villain throughout most of \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> series. It’s only the last installment that gives him a touch of mystery—in its final pages, sentenced to public execution, he instead dies laughing, choked on his own blood. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how did he get there? Why was he laughing? What’s with the blood? \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes \u003c/em>opens on teenage Coriolanus at home, making a cabbage soup that fills “the kitchen with the smell of poverty.” Once prosperous, the Snows have fallen on hard times. Coriolanus has been chosen to mentor one of the tributes for the hunger games, a charming waif named Lucy Gray, after William Wordsworth’s ballad. In helping her to victory, he sees a chance at social redemption and a coveted scholarship to the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inevitably, he falls for her. But the love story is tinged with self-interest from the start. At first, saving her means helping himself, but eventually, he has to choose between her and his glorious political future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Collins’ persistent questions in the first three books is: To what extent is character warped and corrupted by circumstances? Is anyone, to quote Corionalus’ Shakespearean namesake, really “author of himself”? Characters throughout the series find themselves altered by drugs (“morphling” is the opiate of choice) and poison (tracker jacker wasp venom, which drives humans insane with fear and bloodlust), along with the more quotidian influences of poverty, deprivation and war. No one comes out of the games with clean hands. It’s just about, as one of the contestants says, keeping as much of yourself intact as you can. [aside postid='arts_13873545']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The question of how much of character is innate, how much formed, becomes a more explicit—okay, painfully obvious—theme in \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>. The novel is a plinth for two opposing worldviews. The cruel Hobbesian Gamemaster tells Coriolanus that the hunger games are a reminder that people are monsters kept only in check by strong rule: “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed. … That’s mankind in its natural state.” Meanwhile, in spite of the cruelty she suffers in the arena, Lucy Gray believes that there is “a natural goodness built into human beings.” The debate matters, the Gamemaster says, “[b]ecause who we are determines the type of governing we need”—a republic or a tyranny.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Readers who loved the moral ambiguity, crisp writing and ruthless pacing of the first three books might be less interested in an overworked parable about the value of Enlightenment thinking. That’s not to say Collins can’t or shouldn’t work serious moral and political questions into her novels: It’s the sheer obviousness that drags, the way that we know what the right answer is supposed to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coriolanus is just a flat, wily sociopath. In contrast, Katniss was allowed contradictions: She was a wounded, vicious, plotting, independent, ferocious rebel—willing, at various points, to murder, steal and betray her loved ones for a larger goal. As a protagonist, there was something gloriously undidactic about her. She was a monster, she was a killer, and she was also a principled and intractable author of herself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, are we selfish animals or rational beings, capable of altruism and self-governance? \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> tells us what we should think. But \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em> allowed for both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=%27The+Ballad+Of+Songbirds+And+Snakes%27+Is+A+Lackluster+Prequel+To+%27The+Hunger+Games%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>With her \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> novels, Suzanne Collins harnessed a combination of twisty plots, teen romance, dystopian worldbuilding and subtle intimations of cannibalism to sell more than 100 million books around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The premise was unbeatable: Authoritarian regime forces children to fight to the death on live TV; rebellion ensues. But much of the series’ appeal came from the spiky charisma of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, the sharpshooting teenager who wins the games and starts a revolution while choosing between two boys who are as alike in cuteness as they are different in \u003cem>Weltanschauung\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The series has a distinct Roman imperial vibe—far-flung districts sending their harvests to the glorious and corrupted Capitol, feasts complete with vomitoria, gladiatorial contests to the death (but for kids!). The country is called Panem, after the Latin phrase “panem et circenses,” or bread and circuses—what the Roman satirist Juvenal identified as the formula for quieting a restive population. (In \u003cem>1984\u003c/em>, George Orwell calls this substance “prolefeed.”) The hunger games, of course, are the circenses, the Capitol’s way of controlling the proles through the twin mechanisms of entertainment and terror.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13880727 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"304\" height=\"461\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM.png 304w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-19-at-4.12.40-PM-160x243.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 304px) 100vw, 304px\">Collins’ new novel, \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, \u003c/em>is a baggy, meandering prequel to the events of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em> that tells the story of Katniss’ nemesis and Panem’s authoritarian ruler, Coriolanus Snow. With his Roman tyrant’s name, surgically altered face and breath smelling of blood and roses, Coriolanus appeared as a distant villain throughout most of \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> series. It’s only the last installment that gives him a touch of mystery—in its final pages, sentenced to public execution, he instead dies laughing, choked on his own blood. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how did he get there? Why was he laughing? What’s with the blood? \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes \u003c/em>opens on teenage Coriolanus at home, making a cabbage soup that fills “the kitchen with the smell of poverty.” Once prosperous, the Snows have fallen on hard times. Coriolanus has been chosen to mentor one of the tributes for the hunger games, a charming waif named Lucy Gray, after William Wordsworth’s ballad. In helping her to victory, he sees a chance at social redemption and a coveted scholarship to the university.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inevitably, he falls for her. But the love story is tinged with self-interest from the start. At first, saving her means helping himself, but eventually, he has to choose between her and his glorious political future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Collins’ persistent questions in the first three books is: To what extent is character warped and corrupted by circumstances? Is anyone, to quote Corionalus’ Shakespearean namesake, really “author of himself”? Characters throughout the series find themselves altered by drugs (“morphling” is the opiate of choice) and poison (tracker jacker wasp venom, which drives humans insane with fear and bloodlust), along with the more quotidian influences of poverty, deprivation and war. No one comes out of the games with clean hands. It’s just about, as one of the contestants says, keeping as much of yourself intact as you can. \u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>With concert venues shuttered during shelter-in-place, it’s impossible not to miss everything about live music. The bands, the crowd camaraderie, the merch and—particularly for Fillmore regulars—the poster art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The release of \u003ca href=\"https://chucksperry.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chuck Sperry\u003c/a>‘s new book is a perfectly timed pick-me-up, then. \u003cem>Color x Color\u003c/em> gathers together more than 800 pieces of work by the San Francisco artist, including the wealth of music posters he’s created over the years for the likes of Pearl Jam, the Black Keys, The Who and, yes, The Fillmore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13879973\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 225px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13879973\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck Sperry, 2011.\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300-160x213.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chuck Sperry, 2011.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Naturally, Sperry’s retrospective also includes his powerful political work, like his posters for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13077335/rock-poster-artist-chuck-sperry-turns-focus-to-science-march\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Day\u003c/a> and the Women’s March, as well as the banner (pictured at right) that he made for the Occupy movement. It was the image protesters were carrying when Occupy shut down the Port of Oakland in 2011. Sperry printed and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/76003/occupyart-posters-that-make-the-movement-pop\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">distributed\u003c/a> 1,500 of the posters himself—a move characteristic of his DIY sensibilities and passion for grassroots movements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS97cGHVyxE&t=665s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2013 interview\u003c/a>, Sperry said: “I feel like I can take unexpressed ideas and express them in art. And maybe make something that helps people move from Point A to Point B.” There’s a good chance this collection will help music and art lovers through shelter-in-place too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Color x Color’ will be available May 15 through \u003ca href=\"https://chucksperry.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sperry’s site\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>With concert venues shuttered during shelter-in-place, it’s impossible not to miss everything about live music. The bands, the crowd camaraderie, the merch and—particularly for Fillmore regulars—the poster art.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The release of \u003ca href=\"https://chucksperry.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chuck Sperry\u003c/a>‘s new book is a perfectly timed pick-me-up, then. \u003cem>Color x Color\u003c/em> gathers together more than 800 pieces of work by the San Francisco artist, including the wealth of music posters he’s created over the years for the likes of Pearl Jam, the Black Keys, The Who and, yes, The Fillmore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13879973\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 225px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13879973\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Chuck Sperry, 2011.\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300.jpg 225w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/OurCIty-225x300-160x213.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chuck Sperry, 2011.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Naturally, Sperry’s retrospective also includes his powerful political work, like his posters for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13077335/rock-poster-artist-chuck-sperry-turns-focus-to-science-march\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Earth Day\u003c/a> and the Women’s March, as well as the banner (pictured at right) that he made for the Occupy movement. It was the image protesters were carrying when Occupy shut down the Port of Oakland in 2011. Sperry printed and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/76003/occupyart-posters-that-make-the-movement-pop\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">distributed\u003c/a> 1,500 of the posters himself—a move characteristic of his DIY sensibilities and passion for grassroots movements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS97cGHVyxE&t=665s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2013 interview\u003c/a>, Sperry said: “I feel like I can take unexpressed ideas and express them in art. And maybe make something that helps people move from Point A to Point B.” There’s a good chance this collection will help music and art lovers through shelter-in-place too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Color x Color’ will be available May 15 through \u003ca href=\"https://chucksperry.net/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sperry’s site\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
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