EP 657 Women’s Basketball is Moving from a Cause to Cool
A must hear and read for anyone interested in women’s basketball
As podcasters go, I don’t generally insert myself into the story line like so many others do. To me, it’s about the guest, their book or their expertise. In the case of this story, I was right in the middle of helping to elevate women’s basketball in America to new heights. As the chief programming executive at Connecticut Public Television for a quarter of a century, one of the achievements I’m most proud of was bringing UConn Women’s basketball to our airwaves in 1994 and developing a franchise that would become the most successful ongoing local PBS project of all time, whether measured in viewers, membership response or underwriting. It was an absolutely amazing 17 year run. ESPN, another Connecticut media outlet, saw our success and, in a sense, the rest is history. What we point out today in this podcast is how that story continues to evolve with the women’s game getting bigger and with more media exposure on both the collegiate and professional level. Kate Fagan, a former ESPNer, along with curator Seimone Augustus and illustrator, Sophia Chang, should be rightly proud of their stunning book, “Hoop Muses: An Insider’s Guide to Pop Culture and the (Women’s)Game.” I truly enjoyed talking with her. Listen in. You will enjoy it, too.
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There is no silver bullet when it comes to fixing the crisis we have in providing affordable housing for those who need it. You can look to rising demand with limited supply, foreign ownership of properties in desirable urban areas, restrictive zoning laws, the cost and regulation put on new construction or a myriad of other factors. One thing is for certain the rents and the cost of becoming an owner of a house today are, in the words of a former candidate in New York City, ‘too damn high.’ If the rule of thumb is that 30 percent of your income should go into housing, in many cities it can be as high as 50 percent. In this podcast we can point to some initiatives to address the problem, but city by city, state by state, the problem’s origins may be different. Good housing stock that’s affordable does exist, but not necessarily in the locales people gravitate to. In fact there are some states and localities trying to coax mobile knowledge workers to move from, say, Austin, to Missouri and get a subsidy to do so. It’s a complicated housing landscape. While we might not settle on solutions in this podcast, you will come away understanding the problem better after listening to Vijay Marolia the Chief Investment Officer of Regal Point Capital.
It wasn’t so long ago that many political observers thought that the Democrats’ more centrist policies were being eclipsed by wild eyed progressives, like Sen. Bernie Sanders. In 2020, Joe Biden was written off by many after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, only to make a remarkable comeback in South Carolina which propelled him to the nomination and the presidency. Today, with the specter of a Donald Trump presidency once again emerging, Democrats of all stripes have seemingly gotten in line behind the old fashioned moderate liberal, President Joe Biden. But the philosophical fissures between the more moderate members of the party and the more progressive, as well as among the many diverse caucuses and constituencies with the Party, have not gone away. Win or lose, they will re-emerge after the 2024 elections. The Squad, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Problem-Solvers Caucus, looking for middle ground, as stand-ins for the fight to come, have not disappeared. They’ve simply set aside their differences in fighting a more dangerous enemy. In “The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party,” our guest Hunter Walker and his, co-author Luppe B. Luppen explore the personalities and the issues confronting the party going forward.
Many shelters and rescue groups have had a hard time finding canines for all the human who need and want them. As social isolation grows, frayed relationships abound and despair about the human condition intensifies, we’ve begun to turn to dogs for companionship and unconditional love. They never seem to disappoint in the way that humans do. I adopted again during the height of COVID after several years without a dog. And after a rough start because of all that Lucy went through in Tennessee, once again she is my constant companion and dear friend. However, I just have to remind anyone listening yearning for that connection that you have to be willing to put in the work. Often we’re alone at the dog park in bad conditions–one nut and one mutt–because I feel the need to get her the exercise she needs. It’s a daily responsibility. In their new book “The Purest Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection”, our guest Stacey Colino and her co-author Jen Golbeck provide us with great information, new research and insights into that furry friend and his or her behavioral traits that make them so special and, at times, challenging.
Economics, often called the ‘dismal’ science, may be less akin to science, say physics, than many want us to believe. The neoliberalism of the last forty years was best summarized by Britain’s late Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who suggested that this brand of economics(call it top down with a helping side of profit maximization)is the ONLY way. Economics has a political and moral dimension as we create a tax code, wage standards and labor policies, which all play into economic outcomes. Our guest, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, Nick Romeo, captures the possibilities for a different way of looking at economics in his new book, “The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy.” Pointing to several real-world models that show us the way, like true-pricing of consumer goods, job guarantees and gig-work platforms that operate as public utilities, he’s trying to remove the scales from our eyes so we can see that there exist new models worthy of our attention so that we can begin to address the dramatic problems we face with income inequality and growing political dissatisfaction.
The issues that seem difficult for health care providers everywhere in the US–access, coverage, staffing, cost and quality–are often magnified in rural settings. And rural providers may not be able to provide the whole suite of services that are available in large urban centers. Primary care and women’s health needs are two of the areas that are most difficult for many rural communities to adequately staff. What’s happening in rural health care is often described as a crisis as consolidation, mergers and acquisitions can lead to communities being absent a hospital at all. Given how hospitals are generally there largest employers in small towns and pillars of communities the loss can be profound. George Pink, PhD. is the Deputy Director of the North Carolina Rural Research Program, Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joins us to have a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges facing those providing and seeking health care in sparsely populated locations around the country.
It seems as if everyone is screaming out for attention in this era given the ease with which people can find audiences for their meanderings, political views, loves and pet peeves. Just jump on line and wail away, with photos, videos and all manner of content. Given this new reality, and everyone living in their own communications bubble, you can only imagine how challenging it can be for a company or service provider in this era to decide how to go about the process of finding their audience. Does television still work? Does anyone listen to the radio or only podcasts? How do I find my audience on line…is it through Tik Tok or Facebook? The choices are endless. Yet budgets and resources to go audience shopping are not. Ray Sheehan, Founder of Old City Media, a North American event production and experiential marketing agency, joins us to discuss how he goes about the process of marketing today and the need to make it ‘experiential.’ He’ll define that term and tell us what he thinks is the most effective marketing campaign he sees today in this environment.
America was born in rebellion over taxes. Remember the Boston Tea Party? And then hundreds of years later in the 2010’s came the TEA Party, which stood for Taxed Enough Already. However, that has been the mantra of the Republican Party for the last 50 years beginning with Proposition 13 in California, a property tax cap that Ronald Reagan hailed as “a second American Revolution.” And while Republicans have been most identified with the continuing attempts to provide tax cuts, often to the rich, or make the IRS the villiain in many political scenarios, the Democrats, fearing backlash, have been timid in pushing back fearing voter anger in opposing Republican dogma. And while neither party cuts spending while in office and both put more things on the federal credit card, evidenced by Donald’s Trump ballooning the national debt by $7 trillion, while saying he would erase it, that is how we have arrived at an unsustainable $32 trillion in debt. And much of it, unlike a similar debt laden period after WWII, is owned by foreign interests. Our guest, Michael Graetz, a professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School and a leading authority on tax politics and policy, and the author of “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America” feels that the modern anti-tax movement is the most overlooked social and political movement in recent U.S. history.
America has more than a rooting interest in wars taking place in places like Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere around the globe. If we go back to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s, we were led to believe it was the ‘end of history’ and that our ideas about a liberal democratic political framework and a capitalist economic system had prevailed and the rest of the world would do well to emulate us. Yet, by virtue of a world in conflict, it seems as if that message was not received in the way we had hoped. The big question is: did America overplay its hand when we strode across the globe as the only superpower? Could we have embraced a different framework, one our guest calls ‘charter internationalism’ more fundamentally than an adherence to ‘liberal internationalism’? In his compelling book “The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War,” Richard Sakwa explains how America erred in wanting other powers, most importantly China and Russia, to adopt our governing philosophy when it would have been more advantageous to have them simply accept a rules based order. How this overreach played out is the source of much of the turmoil we see today and the basis for his book and our discussion.
Just because humans stride atop the animal kingdom doesn’t mean that what affects us doesn’t affect other species on this earth or that the impact on them by things like climate breakdown doesn’t turn around and affect our lives. Naturalist Adam Welz tries and succeeds in driving this point home in his book, “The End of Eden,” which stands as a stark warning about the “intimate ecological breakdowns” which imperil all of life of Earth. And while we can design technologies and mitigate the consequences of our actions, flora and fauna remain helpless in the face of a rapidly deteriorating climate crisis. Let’s take for instance the issue of heat. While he reminds us we do not see birds falling out of the sky, if you keep your eyes open you will see many bird species pausing for much longer periods in the shade to regather their strength. Or you might live in Maine and notice that the ticks that would go south for the winter are now able to stay in the north longer and have harmful impacts on the moose population. And so it goes. Perhaps an appreciation for the impacts of climate ‘weirding’, as he calls it, on overlooked species might capture the imagination of many who tend to look away otherwise.