The latest on the debate to remove the Confederate flag, new stats show the number of moms aged 35 and older has increased, this week's pick for new music.
The Brood: Are the 40-something parents alright?
According to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, the number of first-time moms aged 35 and older is nine times higher now than it was in the 1970s.
Older dads are more common, too.
How's it going for 40-somethings as they take on parenthood? According to writer Emma-Kate Symons, not particularly well.
Symons joined Take Two to discuss her recent piece for Quartz titled "The fortysomething parents are not alright."
To hear the full interview with Emma-Kate Symons, click the link above.
Women on 10s: US Treasurer Rosie Rios talks putting women on money
There's been a lot of buzz recently about grass roots efforts to replace Andrew Jackson with the face of a woman on the $20 bill.
Last week, the U.S. Treasury announced it will in fact, put a woman on paper currency, but on the $10 bill, and not the 20.
The person who will be overseeing that transition is herself a woman. Rosie Rios is the 43rd Treasurer of the United States, and she joined the show to talk more about the process.
Tragedy in Charleston prompts calls to address bias, racial history
The tragedy in Charleston has prompted a lot of conversation and debate about the state of racism in this country. Authorities are still investigating what might have spurred the alleged shooter to commit such heinous acts.
According to our next guest, it was a sickness.
"This sickness," writes Joshua Dubois, "is the cancer of unacknowledged bias and supremacy."
And it is an affliction which does not merely affect one individual with a gun.
"We Need to Talk about White Culture" is the title of an essay which appears in the Daily Beast by Dubois, former head of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the White House.
Tuesday Reviewsday: new music from Adam Lambert and the band Bully
If you hate trying to keep up with the latest in music, we've got the perfect segment for you, Tuesday Reviewsday. Every week we bring in our music experts to tell you what you should be listening to. This week Shirley Halperin News Director at Billboard Magazine joins A Martinez to talk about Adam Lambert and the band Bully.
Shirley Halperin
Artist:
Album: "The Original High"
Songs: "Another Lonely Night," "Rumors”
Notes: First up, a Swedish confection courtesy of the biggest hitmaker of the last 20 years, Max Martin. In fact, he just marked a milestone 20th #1 with Taylor Swift’s "Bad Blood."And here Max takes on Adam Lambert, working with his Swedish production partner Shellback to craft a pop album for a singer whose found mainstream success tough to hold onto.
Lambert was on American Idol on season eight, where he came in second place, but he managed to walk away a true Idol favorite. Still, two major label albums later, his career had kind of stalled. Adam’s label asked him to make an '80s covers record, an idea that he says didn’t really resonate with him. Or to quote Adam directly, "I love the 90s! Just call me the new VH1 spokesperson!”
Fortunately, the '90s dance sound is everywhere these days and as always Max Martin’s pop timing in impeccable. What is it about those Swedes?
Anyway, I picked a song that may not wind up a single but really demonstrates that sweet sheen that the Swedish are so good at. It's the song "Another Lonely Night."
There are a couple of special guests on "The Original High." One is Queen guitarist Brian May, a natural collaboration considering Adam has been singing as the frontman of Queen on multiple world tours.
And when Billboard spoke to Adam about this album, he described the creative collective that’s been built around Max Martin’s arsenal of songwriters in Stockholm. It’s called Wolf Cousins and one member of the pack is the singer Tove Lo.
She’s had a nice run of success with her debut album and the song "Habits." And she lent a hand to Adam on the track "Rumors," another goodie on "The Original High."
Artist: Bully
Album: "Feels Like"
Songs: "Milkman," "Bully”
Notes: This four-piece from Nashville is a total throwback to the early '90s, straddling the timeline, if you will, between post-grunge and indie punk.
Singer Alicia Bognanno has all the moves and all the chords and you can instantly hear the nods she’s giving – from Superchunk to Fugazi to Nirvana (in fact, her scream, which is all over this record, is often compared to early Kurt Cobain). There’s no secret language here or buried messages, just the raw snarl of rock.
But I particularly admire their song "Milkman." It clocks in at two minutes, four seconds. And because of this, I'm convinced that she's a girl after my own heart because a lot of bands, especially on their first albums, don’t always know how to edit themselves. But I’ll give extra credit to Bognanno, who, after studying recording in college in Tennessee, apprenticed under Steve Albini, one of the architects of the 90s sound, at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. That’s where this album "Feels Like" was recorded and Bognanno is also credited with producing, engineering and mixing the entire thing.
Clearly she’s very talented in the studio. She may however be challenged in the naming department. Try searching for Bully and you’ll see what I mean. And it’s not helping matters that another killer track on the record is also called "Bully,"putting this band in the company of double namers like Talk Talk and Bad Company.
Support grows in South Carolina to remove Confederate flag after church shooting
In South Carolina, calls are mounting to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol.
Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Lindsay Graham both joined the growing chorus yesterday calling for the controversial flag to be taken down following the deadly shooting at Charleston's historic Emanuel AME church last week.
For more, we're joined by Andrew Knapp, reporter at The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina.
A look into the massive Nicaragua canal project, and the concerns of those in its path
The planned inter-oceanic canal across Nicaragua is so big that it's tough to wrap your mind around.
A canal 170 miles long and 90 feet deep, rivaling the 50-mile-long Panama Canal and its ability to handle the world's largest cargo ships.
The Chinese-backed project has been shrouded in secrecy, making the potential ramifications of the canal— for world trade, the environment, the livelihoods of farmers, ranchers and indigenous people— difficult to grasp as well.
McClatchy reporter Tim Johnson traveled through Nicaragua and spoke with some of the people living in the path of the canal for a new four-part series on the project.
#ISeeChange: Are there more sphinx moths in the high desert lately?
A moth that Enrique Vergara saw in his mother’s Victorville back yard for the first time ever may not signal a shift in range for the creatures due to changing climate. But scientists say the moth’s presence may be a consequence of the drought’s impacts on the surrounding high desert, those impacts in part due to climate change.
As part of our ongoing I See Change project, we’ve been asking people to tell us whether they’ve been seeing changes in their environment. Enrique Vergara did, and this is his story.
Vergara started to take pictures in his mother’s backyard, around potted flowers, because he noticed a humming sound. He saw beating wings, a few inches across, and a long nose into the plants.
At first he thought it was a hummingbird. Then he realized it was a moth. A big one.
“I had never ever seen one in my whole life. And when I asked my mother about it, she indicated that a couple of years ago they started to come in the springtime,” he said. “But it wasn't quite the number we've seen lately. This was more like a dozen even more of these hummingbird moths.”
Vergara wondered whether the moths were new to the altitude; Victorville is in the high desert, San Bernardino County, at an elevation of 2900 feet. And he wondered why they started showing up in his mother’s back yard, so many years after she started living there. “Are they supposed to be here?” he asked.
A Common Moth, with Useful Skills
The moths Enrique Vergara saw were actually White-lined Sphinx Moths (hyles lineata). They’re pretty common, and unlike some moths, they get around when it comes to what they eat.
“They eat so many plants. So even if one of their host plants was doing poorly, they could easily switch to another plant,” says Lila Higgins, who directs citizen science projects at the Natural History Museum.
Higgins looked up data on iNaturalist, and found it’s common enough to see these moths at elevation in the western United States. In fact, sphinx moths have an expansive range, from Mexico, to the Southwestern and Western United States, even to Canada.
They’re also natural pollinators on the night shift. Sphinx moths are very active after dark, hovering and unfurling a proboscis into the nectaries of plants.
“If we have this major pollinator leave this area and looking for other places to inhabit, who's going to take over the role that it's playing in the environment?” asks Heidy Contreras, a biology professor at the University of Laverne.
Contreras says sphinx moths are important to pollinating a lot of different plants, including rare California native plants, like the lemon lily.
Even if it’s not surprising they’re in Victorville, is a changing climate affecting these moths?
In a Changing Climate, Humidity May Matter
In California, climatologists have predicted longer, more intense, more humid heat waves as a result of warming. Heidy Contreras and other scientists interested in moths don’t know exactly how sphinx moths will respond to that – but they’re trying to figure out.
Sphinx moths have a hygroreceptor to sense humidity, and it turns out that, in Arizona, they use it, particularly around the monsoon season.
“That change in humidity is a really strong cue for the moths to be able to use to determine that in fact it's the season where if they emerge they'll be able to find the food that they need in order to fly and find mates.
But, confoundingly, California moths live a little differently.
“There's not really this big drastic change, humidity is not a strong enough cue to be able to determine whether in fact flowers will be present for these moths to come out and feed off of.”
Contreras says understanding what cue is most significant to moths is a huge part of her ongoing work. She’s working on more studies to nail down more answers about these and other moths.
The Hypothesis: Drought
As for why Enrique Vergara and his mother are seeing a lot of moths lately, Contreras and Higgins can only offer a guess. But they offer the same one: and it’s the drought.
“What I'm thinking is there's probably not enough flowers for all of the moths that are coming out,” Contreras says, laughing. “So yes, Enrique probably has some really delicious flowers that he's watering and keeping really nice.”
In other words, what Enrique saw is a climate-change related observation, in a way. Scientists say above average temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions are worsening California's drought, and high desert flowers around Enrique's mom's house are probably affected by those changes.
#ISeeChange is a national effort to track how climate change is affecting our daily lives.
Notice any bugs in your backyard lately? Wondering why you're seeing coyotes where you don't expect? Seen changes in your favorite tide pool? Snap a picture and tag it @KPCC and #ISeeChange on Twitter or Instagram, let us know through our Public Insight Network, or post your questions on www.iSeeChange.org. Then see what others have found and observed in their environment.
Homeowners not happy when hiking apps make trails more popular
Want to go for a hike? Put away that map and paper guide: You can just take out your phone!
But some residents in Rancho Palos Verdes say online guides, GPS and social media have made trails near them so popular that it's become a problem.
At a city council meeting last week, residents complained about slamming car doors early in the morning and trash scattered on the road side. As a result, the council voted to cut back on parking nearby as a way to discourage more hikers from coming.
Casey Schreiner, founder of Modern Hiker (which has its own guide to the trail in Rancho Palos Verdes), says fights like these aren't limited to Rancho Palos Verdes.
"In Turnbull Canyon in Whittier it's particularly terrible," he says. The trailhead only has a handful of parking spots. Most hikers then have to park about a mile away.
"On a whole, L.A. is finally realizing that you need to have public space and access to public space," Shreiner adds. "Most other places that have developed trailheads put in the resources that are needed to maintain those trails, keep them clean and to have enough parking at the trailheads."
Southern California is "park poor" he says, and online resources like Modern Hiker can help make public trails more accessible.
However, these frustrations will continue to grow as more hikers take to the outdoors, and nearby homeowners realize that they didn't bank on increasing crowds out their doors.