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With Good Reason: Weekly Hour Long Episodes (Series)

Produced by With Good Reason

Most recent piece in this series:

Dividing Lines (hour/no bb or bed)

From With Good Reason | Part of the With Good Reason: Weekly Hour Long Episodes series | 52:00

Playing: Dividing Lines (hour/no bb or bed)
From: With Good Reason

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In 1990s South Africa, there were violent clashes between Xhosa and Zulu people. And the main way they understood how to define the other group–language. But Jochen Arndt says that 300 years earlier, Xhosa and Zulu didn’t even exist as distinct languages. And: Sudan experienced decades of violent conflict in the ‘90s and ‘00s, including the genocide in Darfur. When we tell the history of those conflicts, it’s usually numbers and dates. Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina recorded oral histories with Sudanese people about what it was like to actually live through those years and what justice after the violence would look like.

Later in the show: For centuries, Jewish and Muslim people co-existed in Algeria and other parts of Northern Africa. When French colonial rule took power there, things soured and many Jewish North Africans left for France. But they brought Muslim Arab musical cultures with them. Jonathan Glasser says we can learn a lot about the relationships between Algerian Jews and Muslims by looking at their musical collaborations and connections.

view all pieces in this series

Skeptic Check: Pandemic Fear

From Big Picture Science | Part of the Big Picture Science series | 54:00

Contagion aside, coronavirus is a powerful little virus. It has prompted a global experiment in behavior modification: elbow bumps instead of handshakes, hand sanitizer and mask shortages, a gyrating stock market. Pragmatism mixes with fear and panic as we react. Can we identify when we’re acting sensibly in the face of COVID-19, or when fear has hijacked our ability to think rationally and protect ourselves?

Playing: Skeptic Check: Pandemic Fear
From: Big Picture Science

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Contagion aside, coronavirus is a powerful little virus. It has prompted a global experiment in behavior modification: elbow bumps instead of handshakes, hand sanitizer and mask shortages, a gyrating stock market.

Pragmatism motivates our behavior toward the spread of this virus, but so do fear and panic. In 1918, amplified fear made the Spanish Flu pandemic more deadly.

Can we identify when we’re acting sensibly in the face of COVID-19, or when fear has hijacked our ability to think rationally and protect ourselves?

Guests:

Peter Hall - Professor of public health and health systems at the University of Waterloo
David DeSteno - Social psychologist and professor of psychology at Northeastern University
David Smith - Virologist and Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, University of California, San Diego
John Barry - writer, adjunct faculty at the Tulane School of Tropical Medicine and author of The Great Influenza; The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History