Music

The Stakes

The Stakes is your look at the week’s news, without the filler of talking heads and clickbait. Every week, MTV’s Holly Anderson and her team of writers — including Ana Marie Cox and Jamil Smith — guide you through the week’s news, social justice issues, and culture stories through a mix interviews, essays, special reporting, and poetry. The Stakes is investigative, thoughtful, and BS-free.

Latest Episodes:

The Stakes After Dark (SAD!): Tweet Me In St. Louis Oct 10, 2016

Show notes

Welcome back to “The Stakes: After Dark” (SAD!), the occasional late-night version of our semi-political podcast. We’re coming to you tonight from our Los Angeles studio, with Holly Anderson, Marcus Ellsworth, and Mukta Mohan mulling over whatever the hell it was we just watched.

Ava DuVernay Makes The Case For Prison Abolition Oct 07, 2016

Show notes

Welcome to “The Stakes,” MTV’s relentlessly political podcast. Coming up on the show today:

- Jamil Smith sits down with Ava DuVernay to talk about 13th, her new documentary about mass incarceration.

- Kaleb Horton and Ana Marie Cox reflect on their summer at the Republican and Democratic conventions, and what they tell us about the coming election.

- Julie Zeilinger talks to author Jessica Luther about her new book on the relationship between college sports culture and how sexual assault against women is silenced.

- We close out our show with a piece of poetry by MTV News writer and tireless social activism correspondent Marcus Ellsworth. This one is called “A memory of self care through an afternoon with a dear friend.”

Thanks for being with us on this journey, internet. We’ll be back at you on Sunday night, following the presidential debate, with another installment of “Stakes After Dark (SAD!).”

The Stakes After Dark (SAD!): Actually Quite Unironically Sad Oct 05, 2016

Show notes

Fitter. Happier. Engaged with the day's political news.

Protecting and Serving Sep 30, 2016

Show notes

Welcome back to "The Stake," MTV's relentlessly tangential political podcast. Coming up:

- Artist and activist Bree Newsome joins MTV News senior national correspondent Jamil Smith to contextualize protests in Charlotte that have sprung up in the wake of the police shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott.

- Continuing our Charlotte coverage, MTV News political writer and spoken word artist Marcus Ellsworth talks with Ashley Williams of Charlotte Uprising.

- Comics journalist Sarah Glidden, author of the forthcoming graphic novel Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq, pairs up with MTV News Style editor Haley Mlotek to discuss what her watercolors capture that traditional journalism doesn’t.

- Marcus Ellsworth dons his resident poet hat to bring us a meditation on shame and justice.

Thanks for being with us on this journey, internet. We'll be back at you on Tuesday night, following the vice presidential debate, with another installment of Stakes After Dark (SAD!).

The Stakes After Dark (SAD!): Half The Story Sep 27, 2016

Show notes

Welcome back to “The Stakes: After Dark” (SAD!), the occasional late-night version of our semi-political podcast. We're bicoastal for this post-presidential-debate episode, as Holly Anderson in Los Angeles and Julianne Ross in New York break down whatever the hell we all just watched.

Alive and Aware Sep 23, 2016

Show notes

Welcome to “The Stakes,” where we’re coming to you from a terribly familiar position. Over the summer, we found ourselves on something of an editorial hamster wheel on more than one occasion, as we struggled to put together a weekly magazine show that couldn’t keep up with the sheer volume of shooting deaths in this country. We open our show this week by parsing that tension as best we can. Coming up:

- Our political writer Jaime Fuller speaks with Carlos Watson, host of a new show on PBS called The Contenders: 16 for ’16, about the presidential campaigns in history that can help put even this shit show into context.

- Podcast producer Mukta Mohan talks to Adi Rajkovic, one of the young artists featured in a virtual reality protest art show MTV is curating as part of its Elect This campaign.

- Courtney Martin, author of a new book called The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, tells MTV Founders’s deputy editor Julie Zeilinger what that reinvention looks like.

- We end our time together down in Tennessee, with a piece by MTV News’s resident poet/journalist Marcus Ellsworth.

Get Up, Stand Up Sep 16, 2016

Show notes

Welcome to "The Stakes," the soothing cup of tea for your aggravated scratchy throat that you may have gotten from yelling at whatever news item of the week made you personally angry this week.

Coming up on the show today:

Part 1 - Jamil Smith talks to Symone Sanders, former press secretary for Bernie Sanders (no relation), about her voter mobilization efforts targeted at black millennials, #WeVote.

Part 2 - Doreen St. Félix gets an insider’s view of the prison strikes taking place across the country.

Part 3 - Marcus Ellsworth talks to Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environmental Network, about the pipeline in North Dakota that could destroy sacred Native American sites and contaminate local water sources.

You're Projecting Sep 09, 2016

Show notes

This week on The Stakes: Part 1: Our podcast czar Michael Catano speaks with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior staff attorney Mitch Stoltz, and learns why wireless earbuds are also a clever way to stop music piracy. Part 2: Jane Coaston sits down with Adam Holz, senior associate editor for a conservative Christian entertainment blog, about how he studies pop culture. Part 3: Teo Bugbee explores the America first ideology in movies like the upcoming Snowden, with film critic Matt Zoller Seitz. Part 4: Our poet-in-residence Marcus Ellsworth shares a piece about the pitfalls of having a savior complex when you genuinely want to help others.

Raw Hearts Sep 02, 2016

Show notes

This week on The Stakes: Part 1: Ana Marie Cox speaks with Ron Honberg, senior policy advisor at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, about Hillary Clinton’s new platform dedicated to mental health reform. Part 2: Jamil Smith talks to Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, about a new project dedicated to putting the voices of women of color on the agenda this election year. Part 3: Mukta Mohan interviews a terror expert on the psychology of the false security alarms that threw JFK and LAX airports into panic this summer. Part 4: Marcus Ellsworth presents a poem about the contradictory nature of faith, and its ability to breed both hate and compassion.

L8r America Aug 26, 2016

Show notes

Welcome to "The Stakes," our serenade to politics and social justice. Coming up on the show today: Part 1: Jane Coaston and Belinda O'Donnell speak with Zimbabwean Pastor Evan Mawarire, who helped trigger his country's #ThisFlag protest movement with a YouTube video. Part 2: Jamil Smith talks with Jonathan Katz, a journalist who lived in Haiti during the current cholera epidemic, about why it took the UN so long to admit to its role in the outbreak. Part 3: Julie Zeilinger sits down with Caia Hagel, the editor-in-chief of Sofa -- a new digital trends magazine that tries to figure out just what it is that Gen-Z is thinking. Part 4: Our poet-in-residence Marcus Ellsworth gives us his poetic take on the Supreme Court’s empty chair.

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