Who will the next Justice could be and how that could reshape the High Court, how legalizing marijuana could affect kids, a look at Kendrick Lamar's GRAMMY wins.
Trade, human rights, China form backdrop at ASEAN summit
President Obama and leaders from 10 Southeast Asian nations capped a two-day summit today in Rancho Mirage, focusing on the hot-button issues of trade, security and the rising influence of China.
The group, called the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, represents more than 600 million people in Asia and countries diverse in religion, geography and industry.
It's the first such summit of its kind held here in the U.S. – and it was met on its first day with about 1,000 protesters.
"Primarily, folks with ties to some of these nations in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam," said Rosalie Murphy, reporter at the Desert Sun, from the summit's venue, an estate known as Sunnylands. Many raised human rights concerns in the home countries and questions about a pending regional trade deal that Obama has been pushing, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.
That pact could have a big impact on Southern California, said John Ciorciari, professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
"California is the state with the largest amount of trade with the ASEAN region," he said. The state has exported about $15 billion of goods and services to the region, which counts for about 90,000 jobs, said Ciorciari.
After Justice Scalia's death: A look at the important cases still on the Supreme Court docket
While President Obama meets with prominent dignitaries to talk about Asia, it would be understandable if he was feeling a bit preoccupied with some domestic issues... like what to do about the Supreme Court.
The open spot on the Supreme Court, made vacant by Justice Antonin Scalia's over the long weekend, has ignited a big debate about who the next justice could be and how that could reshape the high court.
There are also important cases still on the docket – including some with potentially some big impacts for our region – and it's uncertain how they will turn out.
Allan Ides, a former Supreme court clerk who also argued before Scalia as an attorney, is a professor of law at Loyola Law School. He joined the show to talk about how those cases may not play out.
To hear the full interview, press the blue play button above.
Denver's pot and parenting columnist on being a mom who smokes
Right now, recreational marijuana is legal in Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia.
This fall, voters in California may make it legal too. Some proponents say legalization can be great for the economy, but some critics worry about public safety. And what about its effect on kids?
Brittany Driver is the pot and parenting columnist for The Denver Post's online publication The Cannabist. She's also featured in a new documentary out this week called Rolling Papers:
Driver spoke with Take Two's Alex Cohen about the issues she's wrestled with as a parent who's an open consumer of marijuana and how The Cannabist's pot and parenting column got started.
To hear the full interview with Brittany Driver, click the link above.
New luxury apartments don't price out low-income people: study
Los Angeles – actually the whole state of California – is in the middle of a housing crisis, with too few homes to meet the demands of people wanting to live here.
Communities are trying to confront this problem by pressing for the development of affordable homes and the creation of housing subsidies to help low-income families.
That tension is playing in downtown L.A., for example, where the construction boom of luxury high-rises has angered lower-income residents who want more affordable housing.
But a new report by the state found something surprising: in areas where market-rate and luxury homes were built, low-income people were not priced out. In fact, having those fancy new neighbors helped to decrease their own rent burden.
Housing expert Raphael Bostic, professor of governance and public enterprise at USC, joins Take Two to explain.
Oscar nominated live-action shorts series: "Everything Will Be Okay"
The Oscars are less than two weeks away now.
Here on Take Two - we're going to focus our lenses on two categories - best animated film and best live-action short.
On that last front, we heard last week from the filmmakers behind the short titled "Shok."
Today, we hear from Patrick Vollrath, writer and director of "Everything will be Okay."
In this short film, a divorced father picks up his eight-year old daughter for what seems like a normal visit.
After a trip to the toy store, the nervous father takes her to a passport office and later to the airport where it becomes clear to the girl that this visit is turning into a kidnapping.
To hear the full interview, press the blue play button above.
Pope to highlight migration in visit to US-Mexico border
Pope Francis is set to wrap up a five-day visit to Mexico with a highly-symbolic visit to Ciudad Juárez, a border city still recovering from extreme drug violence and a key gateway for migrants headed north to the US.
"Ciudad Juárez is a place of deep wounds going back as far as the Mexican Revolution," said
, senior correspondent with Fronteras. "More recently, there was a turf war between two rival drug cartels that created tremendous violence like the city had never seen."
That violence took more than 10,000 lives over a four-year span and dramatically reduced people coming from the U.S. side of the border. But starting in 2012, signs of recovery began to show.
"The city has slowly been coming out of that violence and trying to go back to normal," said Uribe. "This Papal visit is a chance for the city to hold it's head up high and say, 'We're getting better.'"
The visit is expected to also highlight the risks that many migrants face in their journey north through Mexico and into the U.S. with a meeting on the border Wednesday with immigrants.
"They include women and children and asylum-seekers and they'll be waiting on the Pope and expect to receive his blessing from the Mexico side," said Uribe. "They're also looking for him to talk about immigration, to talk about drug violence and overcoming that."
The Pope has been criss-crossing Mexico for the past four days.
At a Sunday mass, he spoke in front of a massive crowd just outside Mexico City, condemning the drug trade and demanding justice for the victims of forced migration. The day before, he met with President Enrique Peña Nieto and admonished the country's Catholic bishops for being out of touch with the needs of the poor.
Today, he's in Michoacán – and tomorrow he wraps up the visit in Ciudad Juárez, near the U.S. border.
Changes in the Earth's water cycle and how they affect rate of sea level rise
It's widely understood that nature works in a cyclical manner.
What goes up must come down - things like that.
We've known for some time now that water evaporates from the ocean, then falls over land as rain or snow.
Scientists have long surmised that changes in Earth's water cycle could lead to large changes in the rate of sea level rise.
But just how much of a change? That's been a bit of a mystery.
A new report from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab sheds some light on the matter.
Researchers have just published the results of 13 years of research in a paper called, 'A decade of sea level rise slowed by climate-driven hydrology'.
It reveals wetland areas around the world are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier. The paper also offers a clearer picture of the current rates of the sea level rise and finds that some of it has been offset by water absorbed within the continents.
Jay Famiglietti, the paper's principal investigator, joined the show to help us make sense of the findings.
To hear the full interview, press the blue play button above.
Marta Kauffman, from 'Friends' to Netflix's 'Grace and Frankie'
Recently two longtime TV comedy writers, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, received and award from the Writers Guild of America West for their contributions to television.
The two are best known for the 90s mega-hit, "Friends."
Alex Cohen talked to Kauffman about the award and her career in television, plus what she's doing now — writing a novel new show for Netflix called "Grace and Frankie."
Tuesday Reviewsday: La Santa Cecelia, Rokia Traoré and the songs of Blind Willie Johnson
This week on Tuesday Reviewsday, our weekly new music segment, Take Two contributor and music journalist
joins guest host Deepa Fernandes with a list of new songs.
La Santa Cecilia - Buenaventura
It’s not like La Santa Cecilia has lacked recognition. The Los Angeles band’s “Treinta Dias” album won the 2014 Grammy Award for best Latin rock, urban or alternative album. Here's a song from that album, "Ice El Hielo."
Steve says the new album, Buenaventura, has the feel of a band fully coming into its own, rising to the kind of cultural/regional leadership position associated with a band to which it is inevitably, if misguidedly compared: Los Lobos.
The band carries the Los Angeles legacy of Latino culture, embodied in bilingual approaches to a range of pop and Latin American folk styles, accordion and all. “Pan-American” is a term the band prefers. But the sound and range of this album is La Santa Cecilia’s all its own — and not just because of the forceful voice and presence of singer Marisol Hernandez, a.k.a. La Marisoul.
“Nunca Mas,” for all the breezy beats, is a serious song about migrants’ search for justice, for belonging, for dreams and possibilities, as such a strong follow-up to 2013’s powerful portrayal of the plight of undocumented immigrants, “Ice El Hielo.” Such community perspectives thread through the album as a whole, poetically not polemically.
Rokia Traoré - “Né So”
The album title, “Ne So,” means “home” in Rokia Traoré’s native Malian language, Bambara. The spoken-sung title song, though — pointedly in Bambara, French and English — is about the millions of people who in recent years have had to leave their homes for life as exiles or refugees. Not to mention those who did not survive the journeys.
The whole album is something of an examination of the concept, or concepts, of home. That involves love and fear, roots and restlessness, belonging and, well, longing, in some places as broadly reaching as the title song, in other places to the intimate extreme of a relationship.
And that’s in the music as well as the lyrics, the sounds rooted in West Africa, but reaching around the world — reflected in the mix of musicians, some from Mali and neighboring countries, but also contributions from such esteemed figures as Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, American artist Devandra Banhardt and thew album’s producer, England’s John Parish, best known for his many collaborations with P.J. Harvey.
Home, both as a physical location and artistic base, is something Traoré has grappled with throughout her 20-year recording career, as she’s become an international presence both as a performer and resident, relocating from Bamako to Europe in the early years of that. A lot of that came into play when she moved back to Bamako in 2009 with her young son, only to find the divisions and strife that would explode into full civil war in Mali a few years later.
Various Artists - God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson
So many rock, blues and folk artists have taken on or borrowed from Blind Willie Johnson songs — Led Zeppelin’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” perhaps the most prominent — that it’s perhaps too easy to overlook the fact that Texas-born Johnson, who recorded only 30 songs in sessions between 1927 and 1930, wasn’t so much a bluesman as a fiery, singing street preacher, and that his songs were Christian gospel through and through.
There’s no overlooking that on this vibrant tribute. Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi, Cowboy Junkies, Blind Boys of Alabama, Sinead O’Connor, Luther Dickinson, Maria McKee and Rickie Lee Jones all firmly embrace the true religion power of these songs — no irony or obfuscation, no secularization. The results, brought together by album producer Jeffrey Gaskill, are both powerful and personalized statements, true to tributee and tributors at every turn.
Kendrick Lamar’s ‘unapologetically black’ performance at the Grammys
Taylor Swift may have won the top prize at the Grammy Awards Monday night, but it was Compton-born rapper Kendrick Lamar who stirred things up on social media with a fiery performance, rife with racial imagery.
Lamar was up for 10 Grammys heading into the event. He went on to win five, including Best Rap Album and Best Rap Performance, for his work on, "To Pimp a Butterfly."
Lamar's album serves a searing commentary about the black experience in America, touching on concepts not often heard in mainstream music. His performance comes on the heels of Beyoncé’s politically charged Super Bowl halftime show. Both displays have been billed as “unapologetically black” by music commentators. Do these instances of musical activism indicate the start of a new chapter in popular music?
Music supervisor and Take Two contributor, Morgan Rhodes, was at the Grammys and weighed in.
How was [Kendrick Lamar’s performance] received in the room?
“I looked around at that … I could look around the room and see that there were some people that were just sitting in their seats sort-of looking like ‘wow,’ almost trying to take it in — almost trying to understand it.”
I think that goes to the heart of possibly why he didn’t win ... If you’re comparing Kendrick Lamar’s album to Taylor Swift’s album, they’re very, very, very different, and the people who are voting clearly maybe understand one and not the other.
“Right. There are only two rap albums that have won album of the year … And you figure for a genre like hip-hop that’s been around for forty years and has had outstanding performances and albums during those forty years — that’s not a good thing. Certainly there should be more hip-hop artists recognized at the very highest levels: song of the year and album of the year. So I think the Grammys do have a little bit of a problem in how they see hip-hop and its importance in a larger canon of music.”