On November 9th, will we see the return of political civility? The history of Muslims in America, plus the next steps in L.A.'s Olympic bid.
It's very clear: Political rancor is here to stay
Few would deny that the current race for the White House has been a bit contentious:
https://youtu.be/Hbh2qXBMjuY?t=12s
Today's televised tussles are enough to make some people nostalgic for a simpler time in politics.
https://youtu.be/-IW6PwJYcOc?t=5m3s
A time when candidates clashed over important issues and few blows were below the belt.
https://youtu.be/jrnRU3ocIH4?t=40s
It may be too late to change the tone of this presidential race, but it does raise a question: on November 9th, the morning after the election, will we see the return of political civility, or is this the new tone of politics?
For a look at the past, present and future of political rancor, Take Two spoke to Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
Interview highlights
I want to take a look back at civility in American politics. I know things are different this election cycle. Have politics always been so polite in this country?
Absolutely not. It's always good to get the historical context so that we don't think that we're living in times that we haven't experienced before.
All we have to do is go back to just after our founding, which we should note, was by a bloody revolution. The founders, as they walked out of Philadelphia after they wrote our new constitution, they divided into two parties, and as soon as they divided into two parties, one for the new constitution, one against, they began to be a little bit pointed in their rhetoric.
The newspapers at that time were partisan, and they'd make really nasty comments about each other including in 1800, the Federalists calling Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson an atheist and claiming that he had fathered a child with one of his slaves. We can go all the way back to our founding and find mischief in how people dealt with each other.
So what we're going through isn't new.
I wouldn't go that far.
On November 9th, will we maybe get back to some civility?
Wouldn't that be wonderful? We can dream. I'm always an optimist as a political scientist who appreciates American history and knows that we go through these bad cycles including the Civil War and that we come back to the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln called it.
I don't think that, come November 9th, we'll all wake up, and this will just seem like a bad nightmare: first of all, I think people will be exhausted, and I do hope that we'll take a long look at ourselves and say we can do better, we have done better in the past, let's make this a better system.
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
(Questions and answers have been edited for clarity.)
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How to get around LA with a kid -- but no car
The last thing I hear before going to sleep is my 13-year-old begging me to use our car again.
And then there’s what I hear each morning, which is more begging — to end my de-carification experiment, or at least cheat and take him to school in our car.
Suffice to say, my kid prefers automotive experiments when they involve a brand new Ferrari.
As the child of a motor critic, born and raised in L.A., he’s grown up with all kinds of vehicles to get him around, so weaning him off has been the biggest challenge of my car-free October. The fact that he’s on crutches is a complicating factor that eliminates public transit as an option to get back and forth to school.
Too much hobbling.
But I have enough experience with public transit now to know it would take three times as long as driving.
That's why I eased him into our personal-car-free life with somebody else’s car for the eight-mile trip back from school. We took a Lyft, which cost $11 and needed me along for the ride.
And that’s the rub that stops most L.A. parents from being able to go car free. The alternatives are cost prohibitive, time consuming, unsafe or all three.
"We started HopSkipDrive really to solve our own problem," said Janelle McGlothlin, co-founder of the L.A.-based, kid-only ride hail service, HopSkipDrive. "As busy parents, my two co-founders and myself have eight children between us. They go to five schools and they have a multitude of activities.
"We were struggling with how do we get them there both as working parents but also when two kids are going in opposite directions, so we really created HopSkipDrive to solve our problem and at the same time solve the problems of parents universally."
The ride hail service with 500 so-called care drivers launched in L.A. last year, but I’d never had occasion to use it until this month, when I downloaded the app and booked my son’s maiden journey to school on his own. And just like that, I saved myself a 45-minute round trip on the road.
For a price. HopSkipDrive pricing starts at $16 per ride. To get my son to his school cost $27. Taking my car would have cost $2.50. So, while HopSkipDrive solved one of my problems, it’s a little too rich for a public radio salary.
And then there was the bigger problem. My son didn’t like being “alone in a car with some random stranger," he told me.
No. My son wanted me to take him. So I have been. In Ubers and Lyfts. Leave it to a teenager to point out the idiocy of taking a ride hail when we have a car in good working order parked in the driveway.
He’s completely right, of course. There’s no better way to drain a bank account than taking Ubers and Lyfts everywhere you need to go in sprawling LA, especially when I have to be with him for the ride. Neither Lyft nor Uber officially allow solo passengers under the age of 18.
But rules were made to be broken, right?
"I’ve taken kids as young as 13 years old if they’re going to school," Uber driver Renardo Page told me the day my son and I drove to school in his Chrysler Sebring.
We weren't the first.
"I’ve taken two young people to school this morning," Page said. "Usually in the morning, it could work out to be maybe five students per day."
Those students could be taking the bus, actually, including my own son. He attends a magnet in L.A. Unified, which makes him eligible for transportation services under the district’s integration program.
Daily, LAUSD runs approximately 1,700 bus routes. That sounds like a lot, but they serve only seven percent of the 560,000 students who attend LAUSD.
Clearly I’m not the only parent who finds it a Sisyphean task just to wake up my teenager. The prospect of rousing him a half hour earlier to get him to the bus has never appealed, especially since I have to drive him to the bus stop 10 minutes away.
I’m too late to sign him up for the bus for this school year anyway. With few exceptions, parents need to sign up their kids for the bus the year prior.
Had I known, I’d be saving tons of money in daily ride hails while helping to combat L.A.’s growing traffic problem.
"For every school bus that we have out there, it would equate to 30 fewer vehicles that would be on the road," said Donald Wilkes, L.A. Unified’s director of transportation services.
Next year my car will be one of those fewer vehicles on school days.
It only makes sense. To live car free without too many sacrifices, I’m learning, is to pick the low-hanging fruit. When the better option is there, I should use it.
On The Lot: Kevin Hart's comedy special, Ava Duvernay speaks out and more
The hardest working man in Hollywood cranks out another hit, why director Ava DuVernay does not want you retweeting a clip from her new documentary and an early holiday present for Harry Potter fans.
Rebecca Keegan from the LA Times joins Take Two with more on the business of Hollywood in On the Lot.
To hear the entire conversation click on the audio embedded at the top of this post.
It's not just cell phones, e-cigarettes are exploding too
It's never nice when something that you hold next to your face catches on fire. For instance, Samsung's Galaxy Note 7. Or, as it turns out, e-cigarettes.
A group of doctors were so alarmed by the number of injuries that they saw because of exploding e-cigarettes that they decided to write about it in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The letter notes that they saw injuries from explosions, flame burns and chemical burns on patients' faces, hands, thighs and groin areas (when the e-cigarettes exploded in pockets).
Blast injuries have led to tooth loss, traumatic tattooing, and extensive loss of soft tissue, requiring operative débridement and closure of tissue defects. The flame-burn injuries have required extensive wound care and skin grafting, and exposure to the alkali chemicals released from the battery explosion has caused chemical skin burns requiring wound care.
The letter says that the explosions are related to failures of the lithium ion batteries.
Dr. Elisha Brownson is one of the authors of the letter and she joined Take Two's A Martinez with more.
To hear the entire conversation click on the audio embedded at the top of the post.
Shepard Fairey draws Trump as a demagogue in new artwork
In 2008, Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster featuring then presidential candidate, Barack Obama was huge.
"The idea of the image was to legitimize him and to look further into his policies," Fairy told Take Two's Alex Cohen. "I was more saying Obama is legitimate enough to take a look at."
Now, the artist has turned his attention to Donald Trump. He made art using an image of the Republican presidential nominee to pair with a song called "Demagogue" by Franz Ferdinand.
"I'd actually been looking for an excuse to make some art criticizing Donald Trump, but in some ways I felt like Donald Trump is this amoeba that grows with negative energy," Fairey said. "But I also think that art and music can be a really great way to engage an audience that normally wouldn't be involved in a political conversation."
DEMAGOGUE
avail. 10/18 to benefit
and in conjunction with
. Signed Ed. of 500. $60.
— Shepard Fairey (@OBEYGIANT)
DEMAGOGUE #ScreenPrint avail. 10/18 to benefit @popdemoc and in conjunction with @30days30songs. Signed Ed. of 500. $60. @Franz_Ferdinand pic.twitter.com/QjmDvj0aJu
— Shepard Fairey (@OBEYGIANT) October 14, 2016
The image and song are being released as part of an initiative called "30 Days, 30 Songs," a song based pro Clinton campaign.
Fairey took the time to speak with Take Two's Alex Cohen about his art, the evolution of his participation in politics and where he stands on the presidential candidates.
Fairey also opened an exhibit titled "Politically Charged," which features his work alongside artist Robbie Conal. It runs until October 19th and is located at The Infinity Room in Los Angeles.
To hear the entire conversation click on the audio link embedded at the top of this post.
The current state of LA's 2024 Olympic bid: 3 things you need to know
And then...there were three. Last week, Rome dropped out of the running to host the 2024 Summer Olympics.
That leaves Paris, Budapest and Los Angeles.
The International Olympic Committee will choose a winner at the end of September 2017. But what exactly will the chosen city win? Some think that aside from the prestige of being an Olympic city, a title L.A. has already worn twice, that winning host status only leaves cities with a big, fat bill to pay.
For more, Janet Evans, five-time Olympic medalist and Vice-Chair of athlete relations for L.A. 2024 spoke with Take Two's host A Martinez about where L.A. stands in the process of its Olympic bid.
What role do athletes play in the city's bid?
The IOC, International Olympic Committee, has made it clear that athletes need to be involved in every process of a city bid. Clearly, the president of the IOC is an Olympian, an Olympic champion from 1976 so his goal is to have athletes present and have athletes be a part of it. As an athlete, there are things that I can see in our bid plans and others that might not be caught by a business leader or an executive. So, athletes are involved in our bid at every level.
What's next on the to-do list?
Just delivered our second deliverable to the IOC just about 10 days ago and that talked about our venues, offering our locations of the venues, our world class facilities. So, we made the IOC aware of those and now we're working on our third deliverable which goes into even more detail about what our bid will be. We have an evaluation commission of the IOC coming out in the spring to look at our venues.
L.A.'s greatest strength in their bid? Existing venues
Our venues are here. There are no surprises. There are no things that need to be massively built. You think about the world class existing venues that our study has from Staples, to the Coliseum, to the Rose Bowl, Pauley Pavillion, StubHub, you name it. It makes our bid low risk. It makes it sustainable and it makes us feel like it's the right bid at the right time...
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.
Reading by Moonlight: Island of the Blue Dolphins, Get Lit Rising and more
Take Two's book critic David Kipen, founder of the Boyle Heights based lending library Libros Schmibros, joins the show with his list of literary highlights for the coming month.
David's picks
- Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins, which is this beloved Newbery winning children's book.
http://www.scottodell.com/PublishingImages/covers/islandsc.jpg
The book is about a young Native American woman marooned on San Nicolas Island off the coast of Southern California in the 18th century. The new edition carries a long introduction by a scholar to inoculate the book against its own slightly dated but fairly harmless connotations.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels - translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman
Cervantes invented the art of the modern novel, and Edith Grossman translated a bestselling Don Quixote 15 years ago, but this is from Yale University Press with some scholarly commentary, so it's part arts and part humanities.
- The Terranauts, latest of TC Boyle's ever-timelier eco-novels.
https://i.harperapps.com/covers/9780062349408/y450-293.png
The novel is set in the the old Biosphere II -- where the water may be filtered, but human emotions are anything but.
- Young LA writer anthology Get Lit Rising.
Get Lit Rising brings to life the true story of young writers and poets, it is inspiring and awe inspiring.
- Diana Wagman's novel, Extraordinary October.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/619XRV9GEhL.jpg
Wagman is a local class act who's written a few good, modest novels. She wouldn't be the first L.A. writer to find the audience she deserves among the under-20 set. See Maile Meloy, Cynthia Kadohata, Tom McNeal -- hell, see Scott O'Dell. It all comes full circle...
David Kipen is the founder of the Boyle Heights based lending library Libros Schmibros