Video Program: Wide Angle

Some two hundred years ago, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote presciently, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Which begs the question: what truths of tomorrow are we currently resisting as blindly ignorant? In this episode, Peter is joined by Dr. Richard Moskowitz, who believes that a healthy skepticism surrounding vaccination is one such truth.

Most parents are well-aware that, for their 14 to 18 year old children, “long-term decisions” are those dealing with the weekend, or maybe the prom and the like. So when military recruiters visit Arlington High School and invite our teens to make the potentially life-and-death decision to join the military, parents should take notice.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” a Faulkner character famously said. No issue in American life reveals the profound truth of that quote more than race, and no decade in our history so deeply shaped our modern conception of that notion, as well as the direction of a movement around it, as the 1960s.

From its inception, our media has offered both promise and peril. In this encore presentation, Peter joins two previously separate interviews on this common theme.

Joining Peter to discuss such questions of geography is Prof. Rashad Shabazz, associate professor at Arizona State University and author of the book, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago.

Few Supreme Court decisions in recent memory have so captured the attention of the American public as Citizens United. To help me explore the road to Citizens United, as well as consider the potential paths leading beyond it, is Timothy Kuhner, associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law. Professor Kuhner’s scholarship has been cited in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, and the American Journal of Comparative Law, and he is most recently the author of Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution.

Joining Peter to discuss such questions is Les Leopold, co-founder and director of the Labor Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that designs programs on occupational health and safety, the environment and economics for unions and community groups. He is also the author of four books, most recently Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice.

Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the incarceration rate in this country skyrocketed some 400%, far outpacing any other industrialized democracy. And for some time since, scholars have so thought they understood why that happened it has become almost an unquestioned truth. But are truths always true? Turns out to be something of a whodunnit, actually, with the principal detective being my guest today.

Viewers of almost any age are likely familiar with Charlie Brown and one of his standard refrains: “Good grief!” When I first heard it as a young boy, it’s contradictory quality didn’t strike me. But today, even though I’ve searched its etymology and know better, I ponder it: ‘good grief.’ As in, grief that’s good? That serves a purpose? That might lead us to live more fully for having experienced it?

The Black Lives Matter movement, one of the most engaging in recent decades, is nonetheless dogged by a persistent if seemingly innocuous rebuttal: All lives matter. And of course they do. But the experience of African-Americans in this country has been and continues to be so markedly different than that of their white counterparts that we need to put a spotlight on that unique history–to provide a context that can make sense of the often senseless.