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88: The Great Migration May 14, 2015

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In Baltimore it was Freddie Gray. In Ferguson it was Michael Brown. on Staten Island it was Eric Garner.
And in many other places, poor black men and boys have died in confrontations with police. On this week’s DecodeDC podcast, we talk with author, journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson, who says the social unrest we’ve seen in some of these places shouldn’t be shocking at all—it’s absolutely predictable.
“What we’re seeing right now when we look at Ferguson or we look at Baltimore in this moment, we have to remind ourselves that this is a screenshot at the end of a very long running movie that is still not over,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson spent 15 years researching and writing her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” The book is among the most important ethnographies of the 20th century experience, which is the story of nearly 6 million African Americans who migrated out of the South.
Wilkerson’s book describes the Great Migration and the families who sought lives and opportunities they thought would be more readily available outside the grip of the South’s rigid Jim Crow caste system. But Wilkerson says that in some ways, African Americans found a mutation in the North of the resistance and hostilities they experienced in the South.
“We still live with the after effects of assumptions and stereotypes of structural inequalities that grew out of that era,” Wilkerson said.
Wilkerson says we have to take a hard look at the lessons from the Great Migration, or we’re bound to repeat history, and the social unrest will continue.

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87: The New Wild May 08, 2015

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For the past 20 years, Dr. M Sanjayan has devoted his life to environmental policy and the protection of wildlife. After decades in the environmental movement, Sanjayan has come to realize that you can’t separate humans from the natural environment around them.
That’s a pretty radical idea in the environmental movement and a theme that pervades his new PBS series, "Earth: A New Wild." On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook speaks with Sanjayan about his television series, his views on preservation and what Washington can and must do about its environmental policy.
“When I started in the environmental movement I thought my whole goal was to take things back to some point in the past. Then, during graduate school I thought my whole plan was to stop the train wreck and leave enough pieces that something could be rebuilt,” Sanjayan tells DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook. “Now I think my whole purpose is to really remind people that we’re part of nature and start to explain and understand all the ways in which nature materially impacts our lives.”
Sanjayan says that when it comes to making policy about nature, there are two big challenges to good decision-making. First, we consistently undervalue the role nature plays in our lives, the way it affects our jobs, the economy, even our security. And second, people who are closest to the problem often feel like policy decisions are made far from them and their concerns. That sets up a conflict situation that’s often difficult to overcome.
What would the noted environmentalist do if he was in charge? Surprisingly, Sanjayan says that environmentalists and advocates have to make a case for valuing nature beyond a love of natural beauty.
“Love alone is not enough. And I think that after spending half my life working to try to convince people why nature is so beautiful, I kind of threw my hands up and said I’m not a good enough story teller,” he says. “I would love it if there comes a day where people value nature just because it ought to exist right alongside of us. We’re nowhere near there.”

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86: A Brief History of Humankind Apr 30, 2015

Show notes

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari is a book that has more ideas per rectangular page than anything I have read in years. I was lucky enough to have a long conversation with Harari for this week’s podcast.
Harari is a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Sapiens” was published in Hebrew in 2011 and has since been translated into 26 languages. It is a challenging, serious book, and it is a best seller all over the world. I suspect that is because the questions Harari asks are so unlike the traditional ones in history.
Harari isn’t so concerned with the rise and fall of civilizations, wars, great figures and discoveries but with how it all affected or changed the well-being of homo sapiens – not the species as a whole, but the daily lives and contentment of us humans. Did the invention of planting actually improve life? What about bridges, gunpowder or antibiotics?
These are weird questions for historians and they are what make “Sapiens” such an incredibly fun, almost mischievous book. It is a genre buster. I hope this podcast gives a good feel for this strikingly original thinker.
-Dick Meyer
Special thanks to Itzik Yahav and Eilona Ariel from Professor Harai's team, to Tina, Katherine and Amanda from HarperCollins and to Ryan & Ben Martinez and Austin Madert for original music in this piece.
Yuval Noah Harari's website is http://ynharari.com

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Bonus: Marriage Goes to Court Apr 29, 2015

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No matter where you stand on the issue of same-sex marriage, Tuesday's historic oral arguments at the Supreme Court represented the next step in what will be an unprecedented moment to define - or redefine - the institution of marriage.
On a special episode of DecodeDC, host Andrea Seabrook examines the most powerful moments from the hearing.

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85: The Changing Face of Marriage Apr 23, 2015

Show notes

A little thing called marriage is about to have a big day in court. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on state bans against same-sex marriage. This is such a huge case that DecodeDC recently teamed up with the Scripps television station in Cincinnati, WCPO, for a multi-platform event to explore the changing face of marriage.
On this week’s DecodeDC podcast, we bring you highlights from that event, from the incredible history of marriage to the dramatic shifts in public opinion about same-sex couples to the legal arguments that are now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

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84: Nerd Prom Apr 16, 2015

Show notes

When someone asks what the most important event in Washington is every year, you’d hope that the answer would involve a key piece of civic action or an instance of Americans making their voices heard.
In reality, D.C’s biggest event is an altogether different affair - a weeklong extravaganza of lavish parties where journalists rub shoulders with the very people they’re supposed to hold accountable.
It all leads up to one night in particular, the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, or as it has come to be known within insider circles — Nerd Prom.
As a reporter for Politico, Patrick Gavin used to cover those insiders. Now, after 10 years of covering the dinner and Washington politics he’s made a documentary about the correspondents dinner, “Nerd Prom: Inside Washington’s Wildest Week”.
On this week’s podcast, DecodeDC goes inside Nerd Prom with Gavin to figure out what the dinner is really for. Host Andrea Seabrook and producer Rachel Quester take you to the film’s premiere and speak with Gavin about the event he says Washington doesn’t want you to see.

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83: Terms of Surrender in the Culture War Apr 09, 2015

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Unless you’ve been trapped in a monastery over the past month, you’ve witnessed the fire and brimstone storms over so-called religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas. Coverage of the push for these religious freedom laws tends to focus on how they have emerged as pushback against gay marriage.
They are that, but the backstory is more complicated. These laws deserve some serious decoding and on this week’s podcast, we turn to Robert Jones, the director of the Public Religion Research Institute, for help.
Jones is a sociologist and a scholar of public attitudes about religion. At the Public Religion Research Institute, he and his colleagues conduct large polls to track changes in religious attitudes about public issues.
Jones traces this conflict of values at the center of ‘religious freedom laws’ back to the late 1970s, when the Christian right organized itself into a real political powerhouse.
Groups epitomized by Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority pushed an aggressive agenda that was conservative, anti-abortion and anti-gay rights. They had enormous clout with the Republican Party and were a prominent voice in all the big national debates.
But the political might of those groups has waned dramatically; their agenda has become less reaching and more defensive.
For many religious conservatives, the Supreme Court has opened a path to new interpretations of existing religious freedom laws that fit their agenda.
“White protestant conservative Christians who had a hold on the country's moral center, feel that slipping away, and so this is a way of trying to find leverage ,” Jones says.
Legislators in Indiana and Arkansas argued the laws could protect religious business people from being sued if they chose not to serve at a gay wedding or provide health insurance coverage for women’s birth control.
At the same time, the percentage of white Protestant evangelicals in the American population has declined sharply – and the percentage of people with no religious affiliation has increased. The country has come to accept changes, like gay marriage, that seemed revolutionary and outlandish just a decade ago.
This has left religious conservative searching for civic refuge, for some protection from all this change and for some political “wins.”
They almost got those wins in Indiana and Arkansas, but not quite.

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82: Lessons from LBJ and the Great Society Apr 02, 2015

Show notes

The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. Medicare. Vietnam. The 1960s were a transformational time for America and at the center of much of it was Lyndon B. Johnson. This year marks the 50th anniversary for landmark legislation that would not have been possible without one of Washington’s most heralded legislators.
On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits down with Julian Zelizer, author of “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society.” Zelizer says yes, Lyndon Johnson was an incredible legislator. But in order to really understand how he was able to move massive change through Congress, we have to look at the broader social and political context of the time.
It’s this bigger picture, says Zelizer, that can give us clues on how to break through today’s Washington gridlock.

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81: The ultimate insider's tour of the U.S. Senate Mar 26, 2015

Show notes

For spring break, we are going to take you on the ultimate insider’s tour of the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. Your guide: Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who will retire in May after nearly 40 years in the Senate Historical Office.
The office serves as the Senate's “institutional memory,” according to its Website, collecting information on important dates, precedents and statistics. But it is so much more. Movie set designers, mystery writers and biographers have depended on Donald Ritchie to answer the serious and the trivial questions about everything from carpet color to whether this is actually the most do-nothing Congress.
We asked Ritchie for a tour of some of his favorite places in the Senate – and some of our's too – such as:
--Lyndon Johnson’s Senate office, nicknamed “the Taj Mahal” for its ornate decorations.
--The Old Senate Chamber, where the Senate met from 1810 to 1859. When senators first gathered there, there were 32 of them. By the time they moved out in 1859, there were 64 -- and no more room. It also is the room where abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner was severely beaten by a Southern lawmaker during the pre-Civil War debates over slavery.
--The original Library of Congress – a small room that started as a law library. When the British set the Capitol on fire in 1814, they used the books in this library as fuel for the blaze. Thomas Jefferson sold his private book collection to the federal government to restock the facility and the rest is, well, library history.
--The Senate bathtubs tucked deep in the Capitol. Marble soaking tubs date back to the 1850s and were a pleasure -- and hygienic necessity -- when senators would arrive after long, hot carriage rides.
So come behind the scenes with guest host Todd Zwillich and Senate historian Donald Richie on this week’s DecodeDC podcast.
And for a look at the some of the sites we visited, check out the slideshow below from our staff photographer, Matt Anzur. You also can see full size versions of the images on the Scripps Washington bureau Flickr page.

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80: U.S., Russia and Ukraine: A web of complexity Mar 19, 2015

Show notes

It isn’t every day that Democrats and Republicans are on the same side of anything, so it may come as a surprise that the nation of Ukraine has not only brought them together, but brought them together in opposition to the White House.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle feel the United States should send lethal weapons to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia. The White House does not.
Only minutes before the 113th Congress was about to adjourn in December, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act passed unanimously. Four days later President Barack Obama signed it into law, authorizing $350 million in lethal and nonlethal military assistance to Ukraine. But while the bill allowed the United States to send weapons to Ukraine, it didn’t force the administration to send them – and it hasn’t. Ukraine is still waiting.
The U.S.-Russian relationship is complicated – real complicated. On the one hand, there are disagreements and clashes between the two countries over Ukraine’s sovereignty. On the other hand, they need to work together on things such as a nuclear deal with Iran. And that may mean that even though Congress has overcome its usual gridlock on this one issue, the former member of the Soviet bloc may never get its weapons.
On this week’s podcast, guest host Todd Zwillich decodes the web of foreign policy issues around sending – or not sending – weapons to Ukraine. It’s a story that reaches from Washington to Moscow to Berlin to Tehran.
Want to keep up with all the latest DecodeDC stories and podcasts? Sign up for our weekly newsletter at decodedc.com/newsletter.

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