On Friday Take Two discusses how ISIS recruits women, the fear of Ebola in light of a case in NYC and an event that tackles Homer's "The Odyssey" with a group reading.
Three Colorado teenage girls among many females lured online by Islamic militant group
Reports have shared for months how women are being recruited online by the group that calls itself the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Women are called on to cook, clean and, essentially be wives to the men in the militant group.
This was capped by the report this week of three young Colorado girls who apparently left home to join the group.
Kim Ghattas, is a BBC correspondent and the author of "The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power." She says the young women ISIS is preying on online are vulnerable, often second-generation immigrants who don't know the harsh realities that their parents faced in their home countries in the Middle East before immigrating. Moreover, according to Ghattas, ISIS is presenting very idealized versions of what life will be like for these women once they join the group.
Transgender federal employee wins landmark discrimination case
Thursday marked a landmark decision for transgender Americans. The U.S. Office of Special Council determined that the Army engaged in "frequent, pervasive and humiliating" gender-identity discrimination against Tamara Lusardi.
The reportfollows an executive order signed by President Obama over the summer banning workplace discrimination against members of the LGBT community employed by the federal government.
Lusardi is a veteran and a current civilian Army software specialist who transitioned from male to female four years ago. She and Sasha Buchert, an attorney with the Transgender Law Center, joined Take Two for more on the decision.
Friday Flashback: Most expensive election ever, NFL's domestic violence PSAs
Friday Flashback recaps this week in news.
Robin Abcarian from the LA Times and Jamelle Bouie from Slate talk about:
- Ripple effects of the Canadian Parliament shooting
- The most expensive election ever
- How fear and race play into some election ads
- NFL’s new PSAs against domestic violence
Why do we fear Ebola more than the flu?
Ebola has come to the Big Apple: American Dr. Craig Spencer picked up the disease in Guinea.
Upon returning to New York, he rode the subway, took a cab and even went bowling. Some Manhattanites are understandably worried.
But when Ebola has killed only one person in the U.S., are we ignoring other, greater threats? For example, more than 1,000 people died last week from the flu.
Dan Ariely explains why we sometimes pay more attention to the dangers smaller in scope than the ones around us all the time.
He's a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, and author of several books including, "Predictably Irrational."
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
I don't usually start by asking this, but in this case, how are you feeling?
It's interesting that the fear is so high. Someone came to my office from Texas and she said everywhere she goes people are afraid of her to some degree. It could be people who know her.
If you think about this disease it's really quite strange because we know the people who are suffering and contracted it. Can you name someone who died of a heart attack yesterday? I'm sure many more people died yesterday from heart attacks and diabetes and car accidents. We can't name any of them.
Is it because it's just a few people and their names are splashed along CNN crawls? Is this why get more jittery about Ebola than we do with diabetes, heart attacks, what have you?
There are a couple things. One is called the identifiable victim effect. It's the idea that when we see one act, one instance of tragedy, our heart goes out to them and all of a sudden we know details about them, we feel their pain. It stays with our memories but also evokes our emotions in a very strong way. When we think of something big that happens to thousands of people it doesn't have the same emotional impact. You'd think something that affects 1,000 people would be 1,000 times stronger but it's actually weaker. The moment we add more people to a tragedy it actually evokes our emotion to a lower degree.
On top of that, Hollywood. Think of all the movies that have been about Ebola and diseases like this. There is a very interesting phenomenon where we remember things but we don't remember where it came from. Movies are really amazing in creating images in our brains. These images are connected to Ebola but you don’t remember they come from a movie and not reality.
With heart attacks we have a little more control (such as what we eat.)
There's lots of things in life, the feeling of control is really important. Driving is an interesting instance; we really have little control—someone could drive into us—but we feel that we're in control. Terrorism has this extra fear that comes from the idea that someone is doing it on purpose to you and it's random and I think randomness is a big part of it.
On the Ebola front, is there a silver lining? Are people taking better care of themselves with better hygiene?
When the swine flu was out a few years ago, people took the regular vaccination with higher frequency and they washed their hands to a higher degree. So I'm hoping this will happen this time as well; more people will talk about the flu, more people will take vaccination, maybe people will wash their hands more.
'The LA Odyssey Project' makes reading the Greek poem easier
Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" isn't what you call a fast read, but get a group of friends to recite a chunk each? Suddenly it's not so daunting. This is precisely what's happening this weekend as the finale to the L.A. Library Foundation's "Odyssey Project."
Ken Brecher, the Library Foundation's president and brain behind the "Odyssey Project," shares more.
Tolstoy, Dickens and Jefferson walk into a room...
Charles Dickens, Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy are all trapped in a room. Their only way out: agreeing on the meaning of life.
Not an easy task.
It's the premise of the new play, "The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord," now playing at the Geffen Playhouse.
The three find themselves together in the afterlife, and eventually they figure out what they have in common: they all wrote their own versions of the gospels.
Thomas Jefferson, for instance, created his "Jefferson Bible" late in life as a way to offer his interpretation of Christianity and faith. He made it by cutting and pasting selected verses from the King James Bible.
But now, these three men can't leave the room they're in until they agree together on a common gospel.
Playwright Scott Carter spent almost three decades working on the script. However he has a lot of experience watching people hash over big political and philosophical issues of the day: he's been the executive producer of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" since its 2003 debut.
Carter tells Take Two that the play sprung out of his own existential searching for faith after a medical emergency left him hospitalized, leading him to explore what faith meant to others.
UCLA faculty to vote on diversity course requirement
Voting begins Friday at UCLA on a proposal that would make it a requirement for all undergrads to complete a course on diversity.
Other universities, including most other UC campuses, already have similar course requirements in place, but faculty at UCLA have voted down the diversity class requirement twice before. If approved by the UCLA faculty this time, the new course requirement would take effect for all incoming freshmen next Fall.
M. Belinda Tucker, Vice Provost of the Institute of American Cultures and a co-chair of the College Diversity Initiative Committee at UCLA, joins Take Two to discuss the proposed diversity course requirement.
Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the number of times the faculty had voted down a proposal. KPCC regrets the error.
Could you get an earthquake alert on your phone?
It's been two months since a 6.0 earthquake struck Napa County.
Researchers at UC Berkeley were able to get a 10-second heads up before the shaking reached them, thanks to a prototype early warning system.
Of course, the goal isn't to warn just scientists.
Federal and state officials plan to one day send quake alerts to millions of people.
But Southern California Public Radio's Sanden Totten reports they need to address some big challenges before they can pull that off.
'Sideways' still helps Santa Ynez wine country 10 years later
The indie film "Sideways" premiered 10 years ago.
It featured Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church as a pair of middle-aged men drinking and misbehaving their way through Santa Barbara wine country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FccttA8wPqc
It was a surprise hit - grossing more than $71 million at the box office.
It was also a big boon for the fledgling wine industry of the Santa Ynez Valley.
SCPR's Brian Watt reports on the lasting economic effects of the film, which arguably changed the way Americans drink wine.
Cupcakes, kale and quinoa: 'The Tastemakers' explains how food trends take off
Ever wonder why some foods become so popular?
Foods like kale, quinoa and cupcakes, the fluffy frosted treats that got a boost thanks to those ladies on "Sex and the City," when Miranda and Carrie sit outside Magnolia Bakery. Carrie takes a bite out of a pink frosted cupcake and it looks delicious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYSsHEdWhi4
David Sax wrote a whole book on food trends. It's called "The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue." He explained how the Sept. 11 attacks and the rise of the Internet helped spark the revolution of the cupcake.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
How did a few moments on Sex in the City lead to a cupcake revolution?
It's amazing, right? Because it's a few short moments. They don't mention cupcakes. There's not even an "Mmmm." Carrie does take a bite of the cupcake but that's it. That's the only time cupcakes as far as I know appeared in SITC. It was a cameo, a walk on. So how did that launch 1,000 cupcake shops basically?
That was the cultural touchstone moment but there were a few other factors that went into it that really helped spread this thing into what I like to call the first viral food trend of the 21st century. And one of them was Sept. 11. This episode aired in 2000 or 2001. But after Sept. 11 there was this tremendous movement toward American comfort food. During times of recession or stress we tend to go toward things that are comforting and hold more memories.
But the Internet was the final factor that really changed things. Prior to that, trends were spread organically through word of mouth and maybe dining sections of newspapers and the few magazines that appealed to people who were interested in food. So you had the emergence of cupcake blogs and cupcake bloggers and bakery bloggers and people who would share photos and recipes and trips from places like Magnolia Bakery. And it would inspire other people to open their own bakeries and try their own recipes and post their own cupcakes. It spread virally. So you had people in countries far, far from New York and Los Angeles and other cities where cupcakeries existed who read about these things online and decided to open their own cupcake shops and base their recipes on what they saw on cupcake blogs and designs on what they saw from photos people had taken of these stores.
You write about chefs and their role in this, including Sang Yoon, the LA-based chef you note can be credited for the birth of the gourmet hamburger. Can you talk more about that?
Sang Yoon was cooking at a number of restaurants, a well-trained chef and he opened this restaurant in Santa Monica called Father's Office. Basically he took over a dive bar, started making Spanish-style tapas in the back. His friend said you should make a burger and, being the obsessive chef he was, he went about—I think he had a spreadsheet of like 40 different categories (meatiness, texture, bun size)—until he constructed what he felt was the perfect burger and claimed this was the first gourmet burger. Then Daniel Boulud had his burger in New York stuffed with short rib and foie gras. You had this explosion of a burger bull market of luxury, high-end burgers coast to coast and internationally. That's the influence great chefs and influential chefs can have in starting trends.
But this can be a double-edged sword, right? If you come up with the next big thing in food that can really make a chef's career but it can pigeon-hole you. You talk about this with Roy Choi of Kogi fame.
Roy Choi, for everything that he's done, he's still the Korean taco guy. That's how he's known. So for someone who has a lot of talent and creativity when you do create a trend you're known by it. It's like being the Steve Miller band standing up on stage playing something from your new album and everyone's like, 'Play The Joker!' And it's frustrating and Roy Choi said eventually he came around to it and owned it and embraced his success. Most chefs would kill for the kind of success and influence that someone like Roy Choi has had around his tacos. It increases the pressure for 'What's the next thing you're going to make?'
You did all sorts of research for this book. You went to a bacon convention and the big Fancy Food Show. Did it affect how you made choices about how you eat?
I don't think so. As I went through the research and writing for the book I came to see that food trends, while they may have moments of overreach and can be somewhat annoying, food trends are a symptom of this wonderful culture of eating and food and innovation that we have. Which has only made our choice of food richer, more varied and more open than ever before. If you think about the flavors and things that we are open to today and are sort of mainstream—things like Kimchi—you realize there's never been a better time to eat. And food trends are the drivers behind that; they are pushing us toward the next thing and next flavor.
Uncovering the secrets of pumpkin spice
Right now, one of the biggest food trends is seasonal.
The pumpkin spice latte is always an autumnal treat.
But where does this flavor come from?
As part of his annual Spooks Tour, LA Magazine's Chris Nichols will be stopping by a flavor factory in Commerce this weekend to get the secrets of the season's spice.
Weekend on the cheap: Halloween food fest in K-Town, the Brewery Art Walk, and more
Got some free time on your hands? Good!
Southern California Public Radio's social media producer, Kristen Lepore, writes a weekly column on cheap things to do in LA.
What 'Dear White People' hopes to accomplish
A vote begins today on the UCLA campus on the possibility of requiring all undergrads to take a course in diversity.
Such a class would definitely come in handy on the campus of the prestigious and quite racially diverse Winchester University.
It's not a real university, but it is the setting of the new film "Dear White People."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJhmqLU0so
That title refers to a campus radio show hosted by a young biracial woman named Sam, who's part Lisa Bonet, part Angela Davis.
"Dear White People" was written and directed by Justin Simien who spoke to Take Two from Austin, Texas about the film.