'Christ’s sacrifice in our behalf is our only hope. How should this help keep us humble and, even more important, make us more loving and forgiving of others?'

'How often do you think about just how closely tied heaven and earth are? How might you live differently if you always kept this truth alive in your heart and mind?'

'How can we draw comfort from knowing that, in the end, God and His people will be victorious?'

'Amid the pains and struggle of life, how can we draw hope and comfort from the promise of the resurrection at the end? Why, in a very real sense, does almost nothing else matter?'

'So many different writers, in so many different contexts, and yet the same God is revealed by them all. How does this amazing truth help confirm for us the veracity of God’s Word?'

'This week we will look at some foundational aspects of the origin and nature of the Bible that should impact our interpretation and understanding of it.'

'Jesus taught His disciples obedience to the Word of God and the law. There is never a hint of Him doubting the authority or relevance of Scripture. On the contrary, He constantly referred to it as the source of divine authority. '

'How do we distinguish between the Word of God and human tradition? Why is it so important that we make this distinction?'

Today on Political Rewind , reports that medical facilities are not releasing enough information on coronavirus. What information is missing, and what does this mean for the public? And, voting by mail is now a crucial but contentious tool for residents to participate in upcoming elections. What’s the latest on this form of voting?

Today on Political Rewind , president of the American Medical Association Dr. Patrice Harris joined us to discuss her observations on how medical professionals are faring as they fight the virus.

Wednesday on Political Rewind , the pandemic reveals fault lines of unequal access in our society. Health care and community leaders are highlighting a disproportionate impact of the public health crisis on black and African American communities. We look at the contributing factors in Georgia and across the country.

Thursday on Political Rewind , the ongoing public health crisis has given doctors, public officials and many Georgians a series of challenging decisions as society grapples with an unprecedented situation. On our show today, we discuss how somber decisions regarding public health such as who gets ventilators or an ICU bed, or how vaccines are tested are made.

Today on Political Rewind , Georgia agriculture takes a hit from the coronavirus. Farmers face concerns over exposure to the virus and uncertain retailers cutting demand. We heard from Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black on how the ongoing public health crisis is affecting the state’s farming businesses.

Tuesday on Political Rewind , Gov. Brian Kemp announced gyms, salons, bowling alleys and other specific indoor facilities will be able to reopen by Friday, with restaurants and theaters able to reopen next week. These businesses must comply with social distancing and other safety requirements. The move has drawn sharp criticism from elected leaders and commentators who say the move comes too soon and is not backed by enough data.

Thursday on Political Rewind , the governor says his decision to reopen the state is driven by data. What will be the consequences of Georgians going out and attempting to resume life as normal? We’ll ask two public health experts for their opinions.

Friday on Political Rewind , mayors from across the state discuss how they are handling the coronavirus pandemic. How are municipal leaders responding to Gov. Brian Kemp’s latest move and how do they think their constituency will respond?

Thursday on Political Rewind , food banks are struggling to feed the hungry as the pandemic continues. As food networks are disrupted, farmers, grocers and food banks collaborate in an effort to improve access. We talk to some of the leading food banks in Georgia to see how they are meeting the crisis.

Friday on Political Rewind , Gov. Brian Kemp lifts a shelter-in-place order for many Georgians across the state. His press secretary joins us to discuss the decision. What will the political fallout look like for officials across the country as multiple states begin easing restrictions?

Wednesday on Political Rewind , the coronavirus pandemic is complicating an already arduous budget in Georgia. The continuing cost of the state response, in addition to a loss of revenue and economic activity, has led Gov. Brian Kemp to last week call for significant cuts to all state agencies.

Thursday on Political Rewind , a metric that gives fresh perspective on how to view Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen the state: the number of new people infected by each person infected by COVID-19. That number went down during shelter-in-place orders in Georgia. How do the experts expect this rate to change now that restrictions have been partially lifted?

My [six-year-old] kid wrote a song called, "I Wonder What's Inside your Butthole" Quite honestly, it slaps. Twitter | Threadreader (Be sure to check out the remixes)

I feel like I got caught with my pants down on this SiP and I don't want it to happen again; but I also don't want to go down a rabbit hole of antisocial paranoia. Can you recommend resources for me?

So... you know what I'm talking about, right?

When this COVID stuff landed, my house was empty of baking supplies, because early spring is keto diet time for me. I had close to no freezer space, because I rarely used my freezer. Thank goodness I happened to have plenty of toilet paper; but that was a relative fluke. And then boom -- all of a sudden -- there's no f'ing flour to be had! It was not clear where or how I was going to GET toilet paper!

I never want to be in that situation again.

What I'd really like is a book, or website, ideally, that will help me think through and weigh priorities about how to Be Readier, going forward; taking into account a generally normal suburban N American lifestyle. I have questions like, what are the kinds of generators, under what conditions will I be glad I had one, and what are the safety tradeoffs? What are the various options for making water drinkable? What stuff has a generally vulnerable supply chain? What are the things I might not have thought of, without which normal life will degrade significantly? (TP! Menstrual supplies! Stuff like that.)

All that said, I am not looking for instructions on how to build a bunker, you know what I'm saying...

I know there are a million prepper websites. I don't want to sift through all of them; and I know many of them will be at a "homesteading" level that is not appropriate for me. So: are there resources you'd recommend?

My wife and I love to garden, and it has become our main recreation during the lockdown. We have a jumble of tools we've bought cheap or been gifted from others, but would like to upgrade to great tools that will last many years. We're happy to pay for quality.

I bought my wife a Felco secateur for her birthday this year, and she has a nice Craftsbury stainless steel transplant spade that I think will last years. The rest of our tools are cheap (like Harbor Freight), or beat up, with a few solid enough shovels from different Home Depot type brands.

What other tools do you like for your garden? We have a small lot (~0.3 acre) and are doing a lot container (indoors and out) and raised bed gardening right now, but tend to our trees and in-ground plantings. We don't have acres and acres or big plantings--just a home hobby garden.

DJ techno/trance mixes - good. Swiss train driver pov videos - good. Swiss train driver pov videos set to techno mixes - double plus good! From Thomas H.

I have discovered a love of a genre of media I cant' really describe. In the past few weeks I've fallen in love with being intrigued/puzzled and I'm seeking more of the experience. It started with Knives Out then straight to Agatha Christie movies, took a detour through the computer games Oxenfree & Outer Wilds, Gone Girl also hit the spot and ended in a glorious late night binge last night of Russian Doll. I am seeking your recommendation for entertainment that scratches that whodunnits/whydunnits/whatdunnits itch.

The entertainment doesn't have to necessarily be who dunnits, though they can be. They don't have to tackle existential issues either, though again they can. I would prefer interesting non traditional characters, or at the very least for the women in them to not be the "prize" if it's an older movie/book. I love me an unreliable narrator. Something you can consume a second time after you've reached the end & see how it was all there all along if only you'd known what to look for. Conclusions don't have to give all the answers or even be happy, but at least end with some sense of satisfaction. Please help me find my. All suggestions appreciated but please, no horror or terror porn or gratuitous violence or gore. ie murders, if they happen, take place off screen or not in great detail.

"I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly." After climbing out of the Grand Canyon, Kim Stanley Robinson reflects on how culture is and may be changing under the impact of COVID-19, from charismatic mega-ideas to societies within societies.

(Previously) (SLNewYorker)

Four functions of markets - "The period from 2008 until now has been a kind of undead neoliberal era. Post Great Financial Crisis, neoliberal ideas have been discredited among much of the public and are actively contested even within governing elites. But, absent consensus on some new set of social heuristics, not much has actually changed. Material interests in the continuity of institutions shaped by neoliberalism remain strong."[1]

Continuity now is broken. When this pandemic is "over" (whatever that means), the undead bones of neoliberal governance may well yet again gather themselves from the chaos and reconstitute the suave, smooth-talking vampire to whose predations we have grown unhappily accustomed.[2] But they may not. We may find ourselves in a period of social experimentation and change.[3] If so, as we diminish (not eliminate!) the role of markets, it is useful I think to understand the variety of functions that markets serve, so that framers of new institutions understand what will be excised, what may sometimes need to be replaced. So. Here are four functions of markets:

1. Markets serve as Hayekian information processors
2. Markets naturalize outcomes, defusing social conflict
3. Markets "flip the incentives" surrounding resource utilization
4. Markets launder history

Obviously, the list is not exhaustive.

• Singapore is a cautionary tale - "The lesson: you can't beat this virus without taking care of your most vulnerable workers."
• 7 things we must do before we open up - "We asked American experts if they thought we could do it. Their answer? None of you are close to being ready."[4]
• GOP conflation of the public interest with corporate/investor interests - "GOP demands to immunize businesses from liability for death and injury due to workplace infection amounts to a very frank acknowledgment that re-opening endangers the life and health of workers and risks broader spread of infection... which implies a view verging on sociopathic class warfare: fatal losses to workers and communities are tolerable but financial losses to the investor class is not."

• The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 - "Shore up the markets, sure, but don't stop there. It's time for Congress and the White House to do things that have been unthinkable since JFK's moonshot. It's time to go big."
• Plutocratic grift - "We'll need to reform our political economy of public private parasitism."
• Productive Public-Private Partnering In Times Of Public Crisis - "The American economy has always been 'mixed,' partnering public with private ownership and control. In times of crisis the public role both has to and always grows larger. Here's how to do it now."[5,6] (via)

• Satya Nadella: crisis requires co-ordinated digital response - "We need citizens and customers to demand partnership across sectors."
• See No Evil - "Software helps companies coordinate the supply chains that sustain global capitalism. How does the code work—and what does it conceal?" (via)
• Will the Coronavirus Create a More Progressive Society or a More Dystopian One? - "A progressive turn is certainly possible, but so is its antithesis: a further upsurge in right-wing populism, and the strengthening of antidemocratic forces." (via)

• The Class Politics of the Dollar System - "Managing an international public good." (via)
• Fixing the Bailout Scammers: The Ten Percent Solution - "No one in policy circles actually believes in the market... The people in power believe in using the government to give themselves as much money as possible. Usually they can do this through structuring the market so that money flows upward."[7] (via)
• Workers need financial security and bargaining power - "The fact that progressive policymakers don't automatically and intuitively appreciate the immense advantage of enhanced UI over a paycheck guarantee speaks volumes about their level of awareness of the real lives of low wage workers. These extra dollars will change lives... Left-leaning policymakers should fully leverage enhanced UI to extract maximum financial assistance and maximum bargaining power for lower wage workers as they confront a severe economic downturn, a predatory labor market and rampant disregard for worker health and safety... What workers need now is economic security, financial flexibility and institutional advantages that will allow them to drive a hard bargain."[8]

Terri Windling (03/2020), "Once upon a time in Paris...": "As the vogue for fairy stories evolved in the 1670s and '80s, Madame d'Aulnoy emerged as one of the most popular raconteurs in Paris ... she soon formed a glittering group around her of nonconformist women and men, as well as establishing a highly successful and profitable literary career ... So how, we might ask, did Perrault become known as the only French fairy tale author of note?" Elizabeth Winter (12/2016), "Feminist Fairies and Hidden Agendas": "the term contes de fées ... was coined by ... d'Aulnoy in 1697, when she published her first collection of tales." Volker Schröder (2018-2019): this collection "is often described as 'lost' or 'untraceable'" and its "sequel has become just as scarce"; but d'Aulnoy's tales are available online, and mixed reviews such as those of the Brothers Grimm may call to mind her childhood marginalia: "if you have my book and ... don't appreciate what's inside, I wish you ringworm, scabies ... and a broken neck."

A couple of articles that are free to read online break down specifics of d'Aulnoy's stories. In "A Transformed Woman," part of her occasional column On Fairy Tales at Tor.com, Mari Ness discusses Madame d'Aulnoy's "The White Cat," a story that has also been recommended previously on Metafilter. And in "Early Modern French Feminine Narratives: Subverting Gender Roles and Sexual Identity in Mme d'Aulnoy's Beauty or the Fortunate Knight (1698)," [PDF] Harold Neeman discusses the story also known as "Belle-Belle" (likewise recommended previously on Metafilter).

More general thematic analyses of work by d'Aulnoy and her peers include Bronwyn Reddan's "Scripting Love in Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-century French Women Writers" [PDF] and "Thinking Through Things: Magical Objects, Power, and Agency in French Fairy Tales" [PDF] (the latter available temporarily from Project MUSE) and also Meghan Kort's "Imagining Girlhood in Seventeenth-Century Female-Authored Fairytales."

Works by several other authors writing in French from the 17th C. to the 19th C. illuminate d'Aulnoy's connections and her legacy (often via the collection Four and Twenty Fairy Tales, which is also at Gutenberg):

• Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier (Wikipedia): "The Discreet Princess; or The Adventures of Finetta," as discussed in Mari Ness's "Enchantment and Distrust." L'Héritier has also been credited as the co-author of the queer and/or trans (avant la lettre) romantic fairy tale, "Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville," along with Perrault and L'Abbé de Choisy ("Une Collaboration Inattendue au XVIIe Siècle").
• Catherine Bernard (Wikipedia): Inès de Cordüe, which contains the story "Riquet à la houppe," which would later be retold by Perrault in a version available in English.
• Henriette-Julie de Murat (Wikipedia): "Perfect Love"; "Anguillette"; "Young and Handsome"; "The Palace of Revenge"; "The Prince of Leaves"; and "The Fortunate Punishment." Notes. See also Mari Ness's "Imprisonment and the Fairy Tales of Henriette Julie de Murat."
• Catherine Durand (Wikipedia.fr): Les petits soupers de l'esté, ou avantures galantes, avec l'origine des fées, which may only be available in English from Black Coat Press--one of many translations there by science fiction author Brian Stableford.
• Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (Wikipedia): "Fairer Than a Fairy"; and "The Good Woman." Notes.
• Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (Wikipedia): "The Story of Beauty and the Beast." Notes. But see also Andrea H. Everett's thesis, Villeneuve's "La belle et la bête" (1740): An Annotated Edition in English. Incidentally, both translations include the surprising second half of the story in which Beauty and the Beast turn out to be cousins.
• Marguerite de Lubert (Wikipedia): "The Princess Camion"; "Princess Lionette and Prince Coquerico." Notes.
• Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (Wikipedia): "The Prince Désir and the Princess Mignone"; "Prince Chéri"; "The Widow and Her Two Daughters"; "Prince Fatal and Prince Fortuné." Notes.
• Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur (Wikipedia): "Blondine, Bonne-Biche, and Beau-Minon"; "Good Little Henry"; "History of Princess Rosette"; "The Little Gray Mouse"; and "Ourson." See also Claire-Lise Malarte-Feldman's "La Comtesse de Ségur, a Witness of Her Time" [PDF] ("the adult reader today will find more than the dark sadomasochist that some critics have found"), available temporarily from Project MUSE.
• George Sand (Wikipedia): Légendes rustiques, available at Gutenberg in French, purports to tell local legends in a realist mode, but it also references fairies, ogres, and the fairy tale tradition in France. The version at Gallica features amazing illustrations by her son, e.g. "Les Demoiselles" or "Les Lavandières ou Laveuses de Nuit."

The silver lining of social distancing is that reduced carbon emissions have led to a resurgence of wildlife in human settlements as diverse as London,
Chicago,
Manhattan,
Buffalo,
Indianapolis,
Peterborough,
New Jersey,
Japan,
Scandinavia,
Athens,
Antarctica,
cabbage farms, and
Toronto. Nature is also totally healing on
the Thames,
the Hudson,
other urban rivers,
the ocean floor, and
Crystal Lake. Reduced air pollution means you can even get a better view of
the Moon, or
Zoom. Maybe we were the virus all along?

MeFite odinsdream recently came across some old abandoned police sketch software for Macintosh systems from the 1980s, then wrapped it up in a web-based emulator, and now you can play with it in your browser! Make your own face sketches. [via mefi projects]

So you're trying to spice up your video conferences and looking into custom backgrounds (Zoom tutorial; Microsoft Teams guide; Skype guide), but what image to pick? Studio Ghibli shared 8 suitable movie backgrounds [via Spoon Tamago and Mltshp], or you can get official Star Wars scenery [via Mltshp]. Or you could browse through One Perfect Shot, a Twitter account from Film School Rejects [also via Mltshp]. Or get artistic and pick up something from the The British Museum's "major revamp" of its digital collection, with nearly 1.9 million images free to use for anyone under a Creative Commons 4.0 license [via Open Culture, who link to more interesting and educational resources; via Mltshp].

When I got back home and was trying to write about Jah B., doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska... Did someone think that up?

[many links may be NSFW]

In his inaugural food column, Beowulf Thorne included recipes for gingerbread pudding, Thai chicken curry, and vanilla poached pears, plus a photo of a naked blond man spread-eagled in a pan of paella. Eat your cereal with whipping cream, he advised readers, and ladle extra gravy onto your dinner plate. "Not only does being undernourished reduce your chances of getting lucky at that next orgy, it can make you much more susceptible to illness, and we'll have none of that," Wulf wrote.

"Get Fat, Don't Die," the first cooking column for people with AIDS, ran in every issue of Diseased Pariah News, the AIDS humor zine that Wulf started and edited from 1990 to 1999.

Some archival collections, while technically separate, produce more meaning when viewed in tandem. Although they are housed on opposite ends of the vault, I have always felt this way about the papers of Arion Stone and his friend Beowulf Thorne, who until his 1999 death was an editor of the AIDS humor zine Diseased Pariah News.

Vice: There's been a lot of response to the new DPN online archive. Why do you think people remember it so fondly?
Tom Ace: I think the impression that people got from our magazine is not something you forget.

What was your target audience?
Gay men like us who were living with HIV and AIDS at the time. Tom Shearer, in the first issue, wrote, "Our editorial policy does not include the concept that AIDS is a Wonderful Learning Opportunity and Spiritual Gift From Above. Or punishment for our Previous Badness."

Wulf used to say that the magazine was "A combination of Spy and Good Housekeeping, for the HIV set." From the start, DPN set out to be sensible. We saw AIDS as a disease, and our essential element was humor. We didn't seek advertising. I used to cite Mad and Consumer Reports as our two main inspirations.

What To Check Before Taking Your Machine To The Shop

Can you read your grandma's handwritten recipe cards, or your great-grandfather's old letters? Turn your cursive skills to something useful -- help an archivist transcribe a document! The United States National Archive's "Citizen Archivist" initiative seeks volunteers to help out with documents from a wide range of areas, from correspondence from job-seekers at the Schyuylkill Arsenal during the US Civil War to the 1975 trial of Leonard Peltier: https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist But if these topics don't interest you, there are lots more projects under the fold.

Libraries and archives are turning to volunteers to help out with transcribing handwritten documents, tagging them, and adding comments to existing transcriptions. All of these activities help make often inaccessible historical documents available to the public, both by making them readable and by making them easier to find in online catalogs and search engines.

Help the Smithsonian Institute make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible by transcribing field notes, diaries, ledgers, logbooks, currency proof sheets, photo albums, manuscripts, biodiversity specimens labels, and more. (previously, previously, previously)

The Library of Congress has several transcription campaigns going on right now. If your Spanish is good, they're in particular need of people to help transcribe documents written in Spanish, Latin, and Catalan between 1300 and 1800, and open the legal history of Spain and Spanish colonies to greater discovery.

If your Spanish is good and you've got some paleography skills, Neogranadina offers opportunities for students, researchers, and history buffs to contribute to the cataloging of thousands of digitalized documents from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries held by Colombian archives.

Volunteer with the Boston Public Library to turn its collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.

Freedom on the Move is a transcription project that draws on an archival collection housed at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted "runaway ads" to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property. Transcribers can help transform the ads into a searchable database. (previously)

Chicago's Newberry Library seeks help in transcribing letters and diaries that reveal everyday life in the 19th and 20th century. Areas include family life in the Midwest, American Indian history, and U.S. western expansion.

University College London's project to transcribe original and unstudied manuscript papers written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the great philosopher and reformer, has won multiple awards.

Interested in colonial US history? Harvard's libraries need volunteers to help transcribe 18th-century handwritten materials from its North America Collection.

The Library of Virginia has a plethora of transcription projects, from private papers and business records that contain biographical details of enslaved people, to petitions, court records, summonses, patents, accounts, proceedings, returns, grants, proclamations, and more from Virginia's colonial past.

Help transcribe "Information Wanted" advertisements taken out by former slaves searching for long lost family members. The ads taken out in black newspapers mention family members, often by name, and also by physical description, last seen locations, and at times by the name of a former slave master.

Phillips Academy seeks volunteers to help transcribe legal documents, letters, books, and original works of several members of the Phillips family including Samuel Phillips (founder of Phillips Academy Andover) and his uncle John Phillips (founder of Phillips Exeter Academy).

The United Kingdom's National Archives "Africa Through a Lens" project aims to improve knowledge of colonial period Africa photographs. They seek volunteers who might recognize anything or anyone in the photographs, or can help identify inaccuracies in the descriptions and help us to map the images for which they don't have locations.

Stanford University has multiple transcription projects up and running, including materials related to the 1906 earthquake, the papers of railroad mogul/robber baron Leland Stanford, and more.

The Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) is a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitize, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library (UK) relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837.

The papers of the War Department, which burned in 1800, recorded not just the military history of the early United States, but Indian affairs, veteran affairs, naval affairs (until 1798), as well as militia and army matters. Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, an innovative digital editorial project, seeks to reconstruct this lost archive through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public.

From the Page, a software for transcribing documents and collaborating on transcriptions, has a impressive list of transcription projects that may be of interest.

"Firing whistleblowers isn't just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It's evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison." Tim Bray, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, resigns.

He talks about (archive link in case his blog is down) the power dynamics that led to his resignation:

The victims weren't abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. I'm sure it's a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

...

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don't like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don't need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

Don't say it can't be done, because France is doing it.

...

Amazon Web Services (the "Cloud Computing" arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.

Of course, its workers have power. The average pay is very high, and anyone who's unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.

Spot a pattern? At the end of the day, it's all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they're gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.

173 years ago, the Choctaw Nation extended great generosity to the Irish people by donating famine relief during the Irish Potato Famine, despite having only recently survived the Trail of Tears themselves (previously). Today, the Irish people are paying that generosity forward by donating to the Navajo and Hopi nations en masse to support their struggles against the current coronavirus.

Every week, for a quarter of a century now, WEMU's David Fair has delivered "Issues of the Environment," which has brought information involving our community's environmental health. He has welcomed numerous guests to discuss matters, such as managing food waste, monitoring climate change, and fighting hazardous chemicals like PFAS. This week, David welcomes Washtenaw County water resources commissioner Evan Pratt for a look back at 25 years of "Issues of the Environment."

Last year, the City of Ann Arbor declared a "climate emergency." Now, the city aims to be carbon neutral by the year 2030. Missy Stults, City of Ann Arbor's Sustainability and Innovations Manager, provides further details on the plan with WEMU's David Fair in this week's "Issues of the Environment."

A number of Americans have difficulty paying their energy bills, which can be very dangerous to a person's health during the winter months. Dr. Tony Reames, an assistant professor at the U-M's School for Environment and Sustainability, is now researching ways to better understand the correlation between environmental health and income. Dr. Reames discusses his work with WEMU's David Fair for this week's "Issues of the Environment."

Pollution found in our air and water can lead to serious health issues. A new report from the Children’s Environmental Health Network explored such risks, especially for children. Michigan Environmental Council program director Tina Reynolds discusses the report with WEMU's David Fair in this week's "Issues of the Environment."

The 1,4 dioxane plume emanating from the old Gelman Sciences facility on Wagner Road in Scio Township continues to expand through groundwater in the greater Ann Arbor area. At a recent public forum, the federal Environmental Protection Agency said it would take decades to get the contamination designated as a Superfund site and clean-up could take decades beyond that. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," WEMU's David Fair talks to Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners chair Jason Morgan about what is happening now to better address the environmental threat.

PFAS contamination continues to threaten Michigan's environment, as well as the health of its citizens. Over the past month, action at the state level has been taken to fight this problem. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," Rebecca Esselman, executive director of the Huron River Watershed Council, discusses progress and challenges with WEMU's David Fair.

By all accounts, electric vehicles are the future. Right now, EV’s comprise a small percentage of the automotive marketplace. A new study from the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor shows the electric vehicles owners are paying far more in taxes and fees and that can serve as a disincentive to purchase. The center’s Charles Griffith joined WEMU’s David Fair for this week’s "Issues of the Environment" to share the study’s findings and discuss the need to create policy that will create tax parity for EV vehicles.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer recently released the latest Michigan state budget, and it includes funding for a number of environmental programs. And, it builds on the initiatives launched in her first budget cycle as governor. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," WEMU's David Fair talks over environmental priorities, progress, and challenges with State Senator Jeff Irwin.

In an attempt to reduce its carbon footprint, the University of Michigan has pledged to freeze its investments in fossil fuel companies. This move has drawn praise from such activist groups as the U-M's Climate Action Movement (CAM). But it also says the school needs to go much further. CAM member and U-M doctoral student Noah Weaverdyck discusses it all with WEMU's David Fair on this week's "Issues of the Environment."

Since President Donald Trump took office, 58 environmental protection policies have been rolled back or rescinded. 37 more are in the process of being taken off the books. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," WEMU's David Fair checks in with 12th District Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dingell about efforts to thwart federal policies that threaten environmental health and sustainability.

A series of "energy freedom" bills, which would allow customers to diversify energy generation and usage is before the Michigan Legislature. For this week's "Issues of the Environment," WEMU's David Fair talks with Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, about a new strategy to move the measures forward.

Many services have felt the sting of the coronavirus outbreak. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," Kathy Sample, founder/owner of Argus Farm Stop, joins WEMU's David Fair for a conversation about the importance of local food during this unprecendented time.

The coronavirus pandemic has lead to major changes for homes and businesses, including more frequent use of chemicals and disinfectants. While they do help, some can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Professor John Meeker , senior associate dean for research at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, spoke with WEMU's David Fair about how best to safely use these products on "Issues of the Environment."