The Takeaway

Recent results from a survey conducted by the Women Mayors Network indicates that nearly all mayors report experiences with threat and harassment. The problem is particularly acute for women and women of color mayors. We speak with Heidi Gerbracht, Founder and director of the Equity Agenda and Co-founder of the Women Mayors Network, about what this reveals about the health of our democracy.  

This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that they will be phasing visitations back in for people being held at their detention facilities. In-person visitations from family, friends, and advocates have been halted since the start of the pandemic based on Covid-19 concerns, according to ICE. Unlike ICE, the federal prison system allowed visitations to resume starting in October 2020. The move is a promising sign for people being held by ICE and their loves ones, but the fact that it took so long reveals the extent to which the needs of ICE detainees are often ignored by the federal government. The Takeaway speaks with Luis Romero, assistant professor in the department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University, with a focus on immigration enforcement, about the importance of visitation for those held in ICE detention and other changes that immigrant rights advocates want ICE to make.

On Thursday, May 12th, astronomers announced that they finally had proof of a super massive black hole in The Milky Way after years of speculation. The Event Horizon Telescope Team shared an image of the black hole named Sagittarius A*, which is 4 million times the mass of our sun. We speak with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, to talk about Sagittarius A* and the significance of this discovery. Music in this Segment by Sarah Mucho: (https://sarahmucho.bandcamp.com/track/black-hole-sun)

An ongoing Associated Press investigation into the Federal Bureau of Prisons is uncovering rampant employee misconduct, coverups, under-staffing and neglect across the agency's 122 prisons. We speak with The Marshall Project reporter, Keri Blakinger, and president of the AFGE Local 506 union for correctional officers, Joe Rojas, about the corruption and abuse and how that impacts the lives of employees and incarcerated people.

Since pandemic eviction moratoriums and other tenant predictions have lapsed, eviction rates have risen to nearly pre-pandemic levels.  Meanwhile, some states and cities have in place "Right to Counsel" laws, guaranteeing legal representation in court to those facing eviction.   We hear from Caroyln Headlam, organizer with the Ithaca Tenants Union in upstate New York, and Lauren Springer, tenant leader with Catholic Migration Services, as well as a member of the Steering Committee of the Right to Counsel New York City Coalition, about what they're seeing in housing courts in their areas. Then, we speak with Marika Dias, Managing Director at the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center in New York City and Ora Prochovnick, Director of Litigation & Policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative in San Francisco, about the importance of Right to Counsel rights for tenants who are facing eviction. Full Rent Stabilization Association statement: After forecasting an eviction tsunami that never materialized, the advocates are at it again – with legal services providers warning that tenants will have to represent themselves because of a shortage of public defenders. The facts tell a different story. Housing Court continues to operate in a limited capacity, with a hybrid of virtual and in-person appearances. Most housing courtrooms are hearing only 25-40 cases per day virtually, compared to about 45-60 pre-pandemic," said Joseph Strasburg, president of the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents 25,000 diverse owners and managers of more than one million apartments that house over 2.5 million New Yorkers in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. "Not all of the pending eviction cases are eligible for free legal services because not all tenants fall at or below 200% of the poverty level ($23,000 annual income for an individual, and $49,000 for a four-person household), and it is still not known how many of these cases will ultimately be discontinued based on tenants having received rental assistance or having otherwise paid the rent," Strasburg continued.   "With Housing Court operating on limited calendars and public defenders representing a fraction of the existing cases – coupled with the state's Emergency Rental Assistance Program having stayed eviction for tens of thousands of tenants – why are legal services providers failing to meet their contractual obligation with the City of New York in delivering taxpayer-funded, right-to-counsel services to needy families? Are they manufacturing this crisis to cover up their failures and clog court calendars? Or worse, further delaying proceedings that would enable tenants and owners to resolve problems, and connect families to government-funded rent assistance programs that keep them in their homes and provide owners with the rent-arrears needed to maintain their buildings and pay city property taxes?" Strasburg further stated. "Property owners have been prevented from fully asserting their rights in court for over two years. If legal services providers cannot meet their contractual obligation with New York City and provide these legal services to qualifying tenants, then New York City should reallocate funds and hire private counsel to alleviate the burden from legal services providers and ensure that New York's most financially distressed tenants have representation in court. For decades, the Assigned Counsel Plan – also referred to as 18B Panel attorneys – has provided legal services to indigent persons throughout the city by compensating private attorneys in criminal and family law matters. If legal services providers insist that they are unable to provide the free legal services New York City is paying them to provide, there is no reason why an 18B Panel could not be established for landlord-tenant matters. This would ensure that cases in Housing Court start moving again, while also ensuring that those tenants who qualify get the legal representation as required by law," Strasburg said.

Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed on May 11 while reporting on a raid in the West Bank by Israeli army forces. Her colleagues and eyewitnesses allege they were attacked by the Israeli Defense Forces while clearly identified as press. The Israeli military initially suggested that Abu Akleh might have been killed in crossfire, before walking back this stance. The United Nations and journalists and humanitarian groups around the world are calling for an independent investigation and examination of Israeli authorities' treatment of journalists. Rob Mahoney, executive director of the Committee to Project Journalists, speaks with us about the situation.

There are plans underway in Michigan to create the first spaceport in the Midwest. The Michigan Aerospace Manufacturers Association, also known as MAMA, has announced a plan to create a spaceport with three potential sites, including a vertical launch site in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on an estate known as Granot Loma which sits on the edge of Lake Superior. However, Residents who live near that proposed vertical launch site at Granot Loma are concerned about environmental effects to the area and what it would mean to have a commercial spaceflight industry in their backyards.  We spoke with David Rompf, a New Yorker contributor who wrote about the Michigan Launch Initiative in his recent article, “The Plan to Make Michigan the Next Space State.” We also spoke with local resident who is concerned about the location of the proposed launch site, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near Lake superior, Dennis Ferraro, the President of the nonprofit Citizens For a Safe and Clean Lake Superior.

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a groundbreaking resource by and for transgender, nonbinary, and gender expansive communities, is publishing a second edition. We speak with Kelsey Pacha, board president of the nonprofit Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, about the book’s impact, the increasing need for information about gender-expansive communities in the face of anti-trans policies, and how far trans representation has come in the past eight years.

WNBA star Brittney Griner has been detained by Russian authorities for more than two and a half months now. News on Griner’s situation has trickled out slowly from the U.S. State Department. And while the pace of these updates has frustrated many of Griner’s fans, last week an announcement was made that could be critical in her case. The State Department announced that they are now classifying her as “wrongfully detained.” This means that Griner’s case will now be handled by the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who will work towards her release.  The Takeaway speaks with Dani Gilbert, assistant professor of military and strategic studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, about what to expect in Griner's case going forward.

Noga Arikha, philosopher and science humanist, explored the intersection of neurology and psychiatry in her book “The Ceiling Outside: The Science and Experience of the Disrupted Mind." In her book, Arikha described the patients she observed in a neuropsychiatry unit of Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for 18 months. She joins us to discuss her findings and thoughts about memory, self-awareness, and identity.

Humor can serve as an effective tool in exposing the hypocrisy and absurdity in politics. Lizz Winstead, political satirist, co-founder of The Daily Show, and co-founder of Abortion Access Front, discusses how Abortion AF uses humor to educate and fight restrictive abortion laws in this country.

Right now, the American Southwest is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record — the past 22 years are considered the worst dry-spell in 12,000 years.  Since much of the West is experiencing this megadrought, and many Californians face water restrictions, conserving water is important step. But while conservation may mitigate water shortage, it is not a permanent solution to the problem of limited sources of water, especially in Southern California.  That means we’re going to have to get inventive here. One solution to creating a new source of drinking water could be to use recycled wastewater — recycling the water from our sinks and showers, and even toilets, to use as drinking water. And although this might seem like an unsavory solution to our water woes, this process is already being used around the world, and even in Orange County, California, which has the world’s largest wastewater recycling facility. So could could recycling wastewater be the future of our drinking water? For more, we speak with Dr. Daniel McCurry, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California.

Climate scientists and activists were cautiously optimistic when Joe Biden promised to ban new permits for oil and gas drilling on federal land during his 2020 campaign. But two years in, the Biden administration is under strong pressure to respond to rising gas prices due to the war in Ukraine. In mid-April, the Department of the Interior announced it would resume leasing federal lands to gas and oil companies for drilling—mere days after a United Nations report warned that the climate crisis is more dire than ever, and governments haven't been doing enough to stop global temperatures from rising. Zoya Teirstein, a climate policy reporter for Grist, explains why this move won't actually do much to lower gas prices for Americans in the short term, and why the Biden administration’s climate agenda is moving too slowly to prevent irreparable environmental harm.

Lake Mary Jane is on the outskirts of greater Orlando, and it, along with one human co-plaintiff, is suing for its right to exist.  The legal argument is rooted in the “Rights of Nature” movement, which centers on the idea that objects of the natural environment and ecosystems should be entitled to the rights of personhood in order to be preserved and to protect against pollution. We speak with Chuck O’Neal, an environmental activist and the co-plaintiff in the case, as well as Steven Meyers, the lawyer representing Lake Mary Jane.

As we approach 1 million Covid-19 deaths in the U.S., The Takeaway considers how Covid has changed the way our world sounds. In cities like New York, the early days of the pandemic were marked by sounds like unrelenting ambulance sirens, celebratory pot clanging to honor health care workers, and eerie silence in once-crowded places. Radio hosts Brian Lehrer, host of The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC in New York, and Austin Cross, host of mid-day All Things Considered on KPCC in Los Angeles, joined to talk about the sounds that made an impact during the pandemic.