0:08 – Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan who held the office longer than anyone else, was killed on Friday while speaking in the city of Nara. We are joined by Kristin Surak (@KristinSurak), professor at the London School of Economics where she teaches about Japanese politics, to discuss the political impact of the assassination. She is the author of Making Tea, Making Japan: Cultural Nationalism in Practice.
0:33 – Yosemite is aflame. Dubbed the Washburn Fire, the National Park is threatened alongside its natural wonders, including its well known giant Sequoias. We speak with Garrett Dickman, a forest ecologist, botanist and biologist with Yosemite National Park, who champions ecosystem resiliency and giant sequoia persistence within the park. Then we’re joined by Stanley Bercovitz, a Public Information Officer with the Forest Service, the point of contact for firefighting the Washburn Fire.
0:46 – San Francisco has a new District Attorney after Chesa Boudin was voted out in a recall election last month. The new DA, Brooke Jenkins, was appointed by the city’s Mayor, London Breed, last week. Reports suggest that people working in the DA’s office are unhappy with the new appointee. We speak with Joe Eskinazi (@EskSF), managing editor and columnist at Mission Local, about the impact of the new appointment.
1:08 – We spend the second hour of today’s show with author Robert Jones Jr, more commonly known as Son of Baldwin on his blog and social media. We speak with him about his novel The Prophets – the brutal and nuanced story of two men who were in love and enslaved on the same antebellum plantation – as well as his own diagnosis of and experience with multiple sclerosis and subsequent recent decision to leave social media behind.