Race has played a huge role in the creation of mass homeownership in the United States. Discriminatory housing practices including redlining, exclusionary zoning and whitewashing led to great disparities in home ownership among White and Black homeowners. Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, the damage had been done to communities of color an ... Show More
Jul 23
How to Use Nature to Restore Your Focus, with Marc Berman
What if the secret to restoring your focus, improving your mental health, and even reducing crime rates wasn’t found in an app or a pill, but in a tree? In this episode, we speak with University of Chicago psychologist Marc Berman, whose research on “soft fascination” and nature’ ... Show More
34m 34s
Jul 9
How to Raise Kids in the Age of AI, with Dana Suskind
As AI rapidly changes how we work, learn, and communicate, it also raises an urgent question: What does it mean to grow up in a world dominated by smart technology? From smart-baby monitors to stuffed animals embedded with LLMs, kids and parents are increasingly bombarded with AI ... Show More
33m 9s
Dec 2021
The Sunday Read: ‘How the Real Estate Boom Left Black Neighborhoods Behind’
<p>In Memphis, as in America, the benefits of homeownership have not accrued equally across race.</p><p>Housing policy in the United States has leaned heavily on homeownership as a driver of household wealth since the middle of the last century, and, for many white Americans, pro ... Show More
44m 13s
Jun 2020
How structural racism shaped LA, and what developers can do about it
Redlining, restrictive covenants, urban renewal, and building freeways through communities of color are all ways Los Angeles was shaped by structural racism. Now gentrification is a challenge. Real estate development consultant Judith Taylor explains how race has shaped place, an ... Show More
17m 27s
May 2022
Sean J. Drake, "Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2022)
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect mode ... Show More
55m 27s
May 2023
Is Racism The TRUE Cause of Inequality?
Heather Mac Donald, author of When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, joins us to discuss how the "race hustle" leads to declining standards within American institutions, how inner-city culture, which disincen ... Show More
17m 38s
Jul 2025
Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina chang ... Show More
32m 37s