The Way Home
We visit two distinct projects working with food to revitalize identity and ancestry: Part one: In many Indigenous communities, there’s a gap in knowledge about growing and cooking traditional foods. On the Blackfeet Nation in rural Montana, Mariah Gladstone and Kenneth Cook are trying to change that. They launched an online cooking show called Indigikitchen and in this episode, we follow them into the field as...
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (ENCORE)
The cost of living in a city has skyrocketed. While wages have flatlined for most working-class people, rents have reached new highs, leaving most people struggling. And this, despite the economic costs of the pandemic. A one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is over $3,200 a month. But it’s not just in the US. The rising cost of living is affected the entire world. But why does the cost of housing continue to spiral upward?...
Hunger Strike! How Immigrant Taxi Drivers Took on City Hall
When Augustine Tang’s father passed away, Augustine decided to inherit his taxi medallion – the license that had allowed his father to drive a yellow taxi cab in New York City for decades. But the medallion came with a $530,000 debt trap and years of struggling to escape it. So Tang joined a push by the local taxi drivers’ union, to campaign for debt relief. And eventually, city resistance to worker demands culminated in a...
Escape to Cairo from Kerning Cultures
In October 1960, the walls were closing in for Patrice Lumumba. Months earlier, he had been celebrated as the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister after decades of brutal colonial rule. But now, he had been overthrown in a coup and was being kept under house arrest by his political opponent. With Lumumba’s life at risk, the Egyptian government under Gamal Abdel Nasser proposed a dangerous and unusual plan to have...
How to Hold Back the Ocean
As climate change melts the polar ice caps and raises sea levels, how will we adapt? We visit two locations: On Sapelo Island Georgia, the last remaining Gullah Geechee community fights to save their ancestral lands from the flood waters. Instead of leaving their land, or building a giant sea wall, they’ve chosen to use oysters to create what’s called a living shoreline. We take a look at how they’re built and...
70 Million: When “Bail Reform” Isn’t
This week on Making Contact, we look at Bail Reform in the state of Texas with the help of our podcast partners 70 Million. For conservative lawmakers and bail reform advocates have long debated what bail reform can look like for those who cannot afford to bail themselves out of jail. Image Credit: Photo by Brandon Allen Image Caption: Monique Joseph stands in front of the A. M. “Mac” Stringfellow Unit (previously...
