Focusing On The AIDS Fight
Filed under: On Air
I primarily commute to and from work on the bus, and said bus is generally laden with public health placards. Whatever the p.o.v. of the placard in question, fear tactics are the fashion -- a round, zoned out kid playing video games headlined with "the couch kills," a circle of kids playing ring around the rosie reads something like, "When the game ends and they all fall down, everyone hops back up again except Sarah... Sarah doesn't have health insurance.*" There's one poster, however, that I remember with crystal clarity: "One in twenty D.C. residents has HIV." Holy cow -- now that's a sobering statistic. And it's been that way for years. New national HIV numbers are out, and unfortunately, the news isn't good. Turns out, the CDC has been underestimating the number of cases significantly, though the rate of infection has remained fairly constant. There's also a lot of new information on which populations are most affected. We want to know more about the people behind the numbers, specifically. Black people account for 45% of new infections, but why? And, infections are particularly high in the South -- what's going on there? NPR's Brenda Wilson and Dr. Robert Johnson, who treats HIV positive teens, join us today to get at the stories behind the numbers.
*Ok, it's probably a bit zippier than that. Forgive me -- one, I'm not in advertising, and there's a reason for that. Two, I see these placards either before I've had my coffee or at the end of a long day, so I'm doing the best I can here.
-- Sarah Handel
Tags: AIDS | CDC | HIV
1:59 PM ET
|
08- 5-2008
|
permalink
|
comments (15)
|
e-mail post
Rami Khouri, In The Flesh
Filed under: Dawn Patrol, On Air
Producer Susan Lund informs me that we've spoken with Rami Khouri twenty-one times over the past four years, but usually on a phone line from his office in Beirut. He is the Editor-at-Large of The Daily Star - which is published throughout the Middle East - and is the Director of the Islam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have a family connection there. My father once ran the Medical School at AUB, and I was born in the AUB hospital. My family also has connections to Syracuse University, which Rami attended, and it turns out that we're both devoted fans of the New York Yankees.
He's just finishing a stint as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute here in DC, and we're taking the opportunity to invite him into the studio for a longer conversation about Lebanon in particular and the Middle East in general; the challenge that Hezbollah represents to the Lebanese state and to American policy, and the ways that the obvious demographic, ethnic and religious divisions in Lebanon mirror less obvious divides in other Arab states.
And, of course, the dismal view from third place.
-- Neal Conan
Tags: Middle East | Rami Khouri
1:58 PM ET
|
08- 5-2008
|
permalink
|
comments (0)
|
e-mail post
The "New South"
Filed under: On Air
In the latest issue of Newsweek, the magazine's Paris bureau chief, Christopher Dickey, refers to the South as "the old Confederacy," "a land without closure, where history keeps coming at you day after day, year after year, decade after decade, as if the past were the present, too, and the future forever." In July, he flew back to the United States, and embarked on a driving tour of the region in which he was raised.
"Now this part of the country, where I have my deepest roots, feels raw again, its political emotions more exposed than they've been in decades," he writes. "George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language. Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task."
As someone raised in the South, I too have seen the region change. In the last few years alone, struggling farmers, facing mounting debts and losing odds, bowed to big agribusinesses and federal crop buyouts. Just outside of my hometown, military contractors became mammoth, transnational corporations, exporting equipment and security personnel to Iraq and Afghanistan. And down the street from my childhood home, a calamitous case, brought by a crooked prosecutor against Duke University's lacrosse team, exposed racial fault lines in our community that we had ignored for years.
Dickey will join us today, in our second hour, to talk about the so-called "New South." And about Southern politics. Polls tell us that, for the first time in many years, states that have been solidly Republican, red, and conservative, are in play. If you live below the Mason-Dixon Line, what does the South look like? How is it different than it was five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifty years ago? And what do you and your neighbors make of the two candidates for president?
-- David Gura
Tags: Christopher Dickey | South | election
1:57 PM ET
|
08- 5-2008
|
permalink
|
comments (19)
|
e-mail post
Sleep Away Camp As Rorschach
Filed under: On Air
Camp, circa 1967. Future movers and shakers?
Source: Potter/Express/Getty Images
Talking with my fiance the other day, I began to reminisce -- fondly -- about my days at sleep away camp. (I am convinced I went to the very best camp in the entire world.) He snorted derisively, and gave me an account of his summer Bible camp in rural Kansas (which does not sound like the very best camp in the entire world). I realized that he thinks sleep away camp is elitist -- and it does sort of represent an image of middle class happiness, in a sixties-ish sort of way. And he's got a point -- the Getty caption of the archival photo above reads, "They may be attending a summer camp run by the National Association for Gifted Children, but these two boys enjoy reading comic books just like other kids their age." But the kids that were shipped off to moldy cabins, mosquito fields, and competitive ping-pong tourneys may have felt anything but special. Timothy Noah, in a thoughtful (and hilarious) piece in Slate, dissected the emotions attached to sleep away camp, and came up with a way to use the experience as a sort of litmus test for the kind of adult you might be. Unfortunately, I might be the kid that liked camp a little too much. See where you fall on his scale.
-- Barrie Hardymon
Tags: camp | sleep away | the Parent Trap
1:56 PM ET
|
08- 5-2008
|
permalink
|
comments (6)
|
e-mail post
