News and Happenings

Dan Harris knows all about how to cope with everyday stressors and anxiety. In 2004, he was filling in for a news anchor on Good Morning America when he experienced a panic attack on air. He joins us this week to talk about how his televised panic attack led him to embrace meditation, and how this mental health routine developed into the Ten Percent Happier books and podcast. With a year like 2020 behind us, we could all use some tips on how to take a breath and practice mindfulness!

With the launch of the hit Netflix show, “Queer Eye,” Jonathan Van Ness became a personal grooming guru for unkempt Americans across the country. But JVN has engaged audiences in so much more than better hygiene practices – a year after the show launched, JVN wrote a memoir that helped to demystify living with HIV and what “undetectable equals untransmittable” (or U=U) actually means.

With the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris less than a week away, Rep. Pressley and Mayor London Breed of San Francisco join us to talk about the long process of healing and reconstruction necessary for our country. The two influential leaders discuss how to reimagine our criminal legal system and housing affordability, and the importance of building a representative, inclusive economy after a year of reckoning with racial injustice.

From his humble beginnings as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont to his seat in the Senate, Demoractic Socialist Bernie Sanders has consistently backed the working class, universal health care and taxing the wealthiest Americans. The Vermont Senator joins us this week to talk about the future of Trumpism, priorities for the new administration, and what this upcoming shift in power could mean for transformative, inclusive change.

Foster care youth experience disproportionate rates of homelessness, incarceration, food insecurity, and trauma. The pandemic has only made things more uncertain. With the odds so stacked against them, how can we ensure that foster youth will be able to build a sustainable future for themselves once they transition out of the system and are no longer eligible for the benefits they previously relied on? Franco Vega and Amber Baker of the RightWay Foundation join us on this week’s episode to address these questions and share the extreme hurdles they overcame as foster youth themselves.

Martin Macias and his wife, Tomasita, crossed the border from Mexico into the United States back in the ‘80s with the dream of starting a family. They had their son Jose, and together they became community leaders in the fight for immigrant rights and workers’ benefits. But their journey is marked with unimaginable loss – of a job, their home, and the family’s matriarch. This week, we’re talking about the life and death consequences of what happens when workers are denied basic benefits like paid time off. The father-son activist duo talk about Tomasita’s lasting impact, and what it’s going to take to make economic progress for undocumented immigrant families in our country.

In 2012, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention, Julián Castro described the American Dream as a relay. In the first episode of Our America, we dig into the Castro family’s backstory. We follow the baton passing from one generation to the next, starting with Julián’s grandmother immigrating to the US nearly 100 years ago. Julián and his twin brother, Congressman Joaquin Castro, talk about their journey from the segregated West Side of San Antonio to the national stage. We also meet their mom, Rosie, an activist in her own right, who highlights raising her sons with a strong sense of Mexican-American identity and how that helped shape their life’s trajectory.

Below the iconic Las Vegas Strip, another reality exists in stark contrast to the gambling and entertainment excesses. This week, Louis Lacey of HELP of Southern Nevada paints the picture of homelessness in the city’s drainage tunnels, and how his personal experience with homelessness has influenced his community outreach work. We also talk with Emily Paulsen of the Nevada Homeless Alliance about solutions to homelessness and the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

With the presidential election at the forefront of everyone’s minds, we’re unpacking the 2020 election results and Latino voter turnout with Joaquin Castro, who recently won his own reelection to Congress. We talk about what the Democratic win actually means for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and what still needs to happen to restore and sustain democracy in our country and around the world.

After nearly a decade in the military, Jason Kander had grown accustomed to the demands of deployment in Afghanistan — but it was his return to civilian life that presented the biggest challenges for him and his family. Today, Kander talks about life during and after service, the career shift into politics that led him to seek treatment for his PTSD, and the dangers of thinking of trauma as “unearned.”