In 1775, half a million enslaved people had to pick a side in a war between two groups of white men who both claimed to want freedom. In this live episode of Our Ancestors Were Messy, friend of the show, Nichole Hill takes B.A. Parker and Gene Demby through the choices one man made – from a South Carolina plantation, to the British lines, to Nova Scotia, to Sierra Leone. It's a choose-your-own-adventure through history where there are no great options.
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Code Switch
The new documentary ‘You Can See Everything’ has left audiences wondering how the line between fact and fiction is drawn, and who gets to draw it. At the center of the discourse is the film’s subject,...
Comedian Julio Torres has made a career out of seeing the whimsical in the mundane, from the hidden meanings of shapes, colors, to the bureaucracy of the United States immigration system. Yet, he stil...
Being a Jewish comic who criticizes Israel right now means getting it from all sides. Ilana Glazer and Gianmarco Soresi talk to Gene about being called self-hating, getting accused of faking being Jew...
Every election season, politicians remember Black voters exist, and then lecture them, pander to them or skip their doors entirely. MS NOW’s Eugene Daniels has been reporting on Black voters in Clevel...
President Trump and Silicon Valley tech bros are obsessed with IQ, but the history of intelligence testing is full of bunk race science and eugenics. With the rise of AI's "super intelligence," should...
Are the men in your life reading? How do you convince people to check out more novels? This week, we turn to our play cousins at It's Been a Minute and their recent conversation with author Jason Reyn...
In 2020, “defund the police” was everywhere. Now, even politicians like AOC and Zohran Mamdani have turned around on it. But some proposals that fell under the defund umbrella, like unarmed crisis res...
Right-wing ideology has crept into gyms across the country. Is this a new phenomenon, or is the very idea of "fitness" ripe for politicization? Is our idea of fitness inherently fascist? We find out w...
Why do Black contestants on reality TV keep getting voted out first? Like a lot of people, B.A. Parker watches reality TV to escape. But seeing contestants of color on the receiving end of microaggres...
Zombies have roots most fans have never heard of. In Haitian Vodou, being zombified meant being enslaved even in death. B.A. Parker talks to Maya Annik Bedward, director of the new documentary Black Z...
Clarksdale, Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, has been losing people, jobs, and businesses for years. Now land there has been rezoned to make room for a hyperscale data center, a process that...
Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education, Black parents still face an impossible choice about where to send their kids. Gene talks with his twin sister about the different choices they’ve made...
The Lindsay Clancy trial captured the nation this summer, and reactions toward Clancy have been split. The case brought much needed attention to postpartum psychosis, but some question the support Cla...
When Rep. Jasmine Crockett took the stage at a Chris Brown concert to honor him, the backlash came fast. It's a familiar cycle: every few years, Brown lands back in the news, and the public relitigate...
Lots of progressive politicians eyeing runs for higher office are distancing themselves from the politics of 2020, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez declaring, "woke 1.0 was crazy." But shou...
Cubans are living through near-constant blackouts after an executive order that called the Cuban government an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and blocked their fuel impor...
The WNBA is more popular than ever, but the growth has come with a lot of unwanted attention, like protests at games and death threats directed towards players. This week, we talk with independent jou...
There’s a growing backlash to the surveillance systems that have quietly wired themselves into American neighborhoods, with concern growing among people who have never felt watched this way before. Ge...
In the 25 years since 9/11, we've seen the definition of terrorism expand. The Trump administration has called more and more groups “terrorists,” from “narco-terrorists” in Ecuador to people who prote...
Lauryn Hill is a generational voice, a cultural lightning rod, and one of music’s biggest what-ifs. Our very own B.A. Parker joined the Big Lives podcast, hosted by Kai Wright and Emmanuel Dzotsi, to...
Ads for GLP-1s are everywhere. This week, we dig into why so many of those ads seem to feature Black women with Sabrina Strings, author of “Fearing the Black Body” a book about the racial origins of...
Banana Ball is a barnstorming baseball league revived by the tremendously popular Savannah Bananas, a team with millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram — known as much for their dance routines a...
Is there a family estrangement epidemic? This week, we dig into what’s behind the no-contact movement with sociologist Rin Reczek, author of the new book, “Families We Lose.” Rin walks us through who...
In 1775, half a million enslaved people had to pick a side in a war between two groups of white men who both claimed to want freedom. In this live episode of Our Ancestors Were Messy, friend of the sh...
Last year President Trump made English the official language of the United States. Then his administration moved to zero out the federal money that teaches it. But even fully funded, those programs re...
Jay-Z says he's a business, man. He sold out Yankee Stadium for three nights, and used the stage to answer everyone calling him a sellout. The billionaire released the 30th-anniversary edition of his...
The Trump administration has been closing off nearly every pathway into the U.S. — except one. The H-2A visa is for the seasonal workers who pick the fruits and vegetables in your grocery store, and i...
Sixteen-year-old Antonio Mays Jr. traveled a thousand miles to join the racial justice movement that erupted after George Floyd's killing. Less than a week after he arrived in Seattle in the summer of...
Mahmoud Khalil is suing the Trump administration, alleging a "public-private conspiracy" to punish him for pro-Palestinian speech. The law he's using dates back to 1871 — it's called the Ku Klux Klan...
"Be vulnerable." "We love your authenticity." "Bring your full self to work." Sound familiar? In this episode, we talk to Jodi-Ann Burey, author of Authentic: The of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, a...