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KMUD News: Kate Wolf Music Festival Celebrates Community Through Music

June 6, 2019 by Sam Anderson

Jan 7, 2019 by Sam Anderson

As marijuana legalization inches forward in New Jersey, a coalition of mayors, law enforcement, and town councils are working to ensure that dispensaries never open up shop in their towns. Read more…

By Sam Anderson, January 12, 2018

The Latin Kings have often been called one of the most violent street gangs in America. But what many people don’t know is that for a period of time in the late 1990’s, one man transformed this gang into something else: a non-violent street organization. That man was Antonio Fernandez.

The Latin Kings started out in Chicago in the 1950’s, with the original stated purpose of protecting Puerto Rican immigrants from racial violence and discrimination. Over time, however, the gang morphed into a criminal enterprise. By the 1980’s, a man named Luis Felipe, aka King Blood, was running the show while in prison for murder. Felipe was introducing young Latino inmates to the idea that Latinos are strong and should be proud of their heritage and he penned a manifesto laying out the rules of what he thought it meant to be a Latin King.

One of the people who became influenced by King Blood was Antonio Fernandez, a young man from East New York who was doing time on Riker’s Island. Fernandez became so inspired by King Blood and his manifesto that when he got out of jail, he resolved to change the organization from within. Fernandez wanted to get the Latin Kings to renounce violence, stop dealing drugs, and stand up against what he saw as the oppression of Latinos. But to do this, he would go up against some of the most powerful institutions in America —the police, the FBI, and the criminal justice system— as well as his fellow Latin Kings.

This is the story of how Antonio Fernandez became King Tone, and how King Tone transformed the Latin Kings into something beyond a street gang.

January 19, 2017

What makes a person a hunter? Sam Anderson lives in New York City, and for most of his life, it never occurred to him to go hunting. But last year, at his father's request, he decided to give it a try.  Sam had no idea whether he'd actually be able to bring himself to pull the trigger. And he wondered: if he did manage to take the life of an animal, what would that say about him? How would it change him. On this episode, he shares his story.

This World of Humans is a science podcast focusing on life and social science. Each episode features a new finding with relevance to our shared human experience and explores that discovery with the principal scientist behind it, illuminating and probing the actual process of research and how science works in practice. Hosted by Nathan Lents and produced by Sam Anderson.

This episode of TWOH explores the relationship between LGBT-targeted hate crimes in a given neighborhood and suicide among LGBT adolescents in that same neighborhood. Joining us is Dr. Dustin Duncan, a spatial epidemiologist from New York University, who explains the science of how this kind of public health research is carried out. Dr. Duncan and his colleagues hypothesized that high prevalence of hate crimes directed at the LGBT population would cause an increase in suicide attempts and suicidal ideation and then conducted a groundbreaking study in Boston, MA that confirmed that hypothesis.

This episode of TWOH focuses on when, how, and why children tell lies. We all begin life as perfectly honest little babies, but as our brains develop more complexity, we discover that we don’t always have to tell the truth. Our guest is Dr. Angela Crossman, chair of the Psychology Department at John Jay College and a developmental psychologist who focused on truthfulness in children. While she often focuses specifically on how to best prepare children for honest eyewitness testimony in court, she also studies lying and truthfulness more generally. Her research group recently published an article that looks at lying and its connection to other problem behaviors as well as how different parenting styles do and don’t correlate with lie-telling and that’s what we discuss in this episode.

This episode of TWOH discusses a new technique designed to detect spots in our genome that have been under recent natural selection. The human lineage and the chimpanzee lineage split around 7 million years ago and, during that time, we have accumulated very few genetic differences despite our very big physical and mental differences. Therefore, discovering and exploring the few genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees is key to understanding what makes us human. Helping us make sense of this complicated work is one of the authors of the study, Dr. Michael C. Campbell from Howard University.

This episode features a recent meta-study combining the results of many individual studies analyzing the effect of immigration on crime rates. Joining us are Dr. Charis Kubrin from the University of California at Irvine and Dr. Daniel Stageman from John Jay College (CUNY).

This episode features a new study examining the value of social relationships in Rhesus monkeys as they age. This work was published by a group of animal behavior scientists including Dr. Angelina Ruiz-Lambides from the University of Puerto Rico and Dr. Lauren Brent from the University of Exeter. This research took place at the Caribbean Primate Research Center on Cayo Santiago, off the coast of Puerto Rico. Since this interviewed was recorded, the CPRC, like the rest of Puerto Rico, suffered devastating damage and is now struggling to rebuild. Please help if you can.

This episode features a recent study showing that air pollution from automobiles can cause shortening of telomeres, the extreme ends of chromosomes, in children and adolescents. This work was published by Professor John Balmes from the University of California at San Francisco and was conducted on children and adolescents in Fresno, California.

This episode features a recent study linking the working conditions of low-wage healthcare workers and the health outcomes of their patients. TWOH host Nathan Lents interviews one of the main authors of this study, Dr. Grace Sembajwe of the CUNY School of Public Health. Professor Sembajwe explains why providing family-supportive and flexible policies for healthcare workers actually improves health outcomes for the patients they serve.

This episode of This World of Humans features an interview with Professor Dan Graur, from the University of Houston, who has just published a new article estimating that at least 75% of our DNA has no function whatsoever. The issue of so-called “Junk DNA” is a controversial one, with scientists passionately disagreeing about exactly which parts of our genome do function, and how, and which parts do nothing at all. TWOH host Nathan H. Lents interviews Dan Graur, a leading expert on genome evolution, about junk DNA and his recent paper.