Notes from America with Kai Wright

Dec 02 2024 33 ep. 3.7k

Notes from America with Kai Wright Podcast artwork

A show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.

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We Could End AIDS. So Why Are People Still Dying?

This episode was originally published March 1, 2024. Host Kai Wright started his career covering the impact of HIV and AIDS on communities in America. A new project brings that experience full circle. Kai hosts the latest season of the Blindspot podcast, “The Plague In The Shadows,” which introduces listeners to people who were affected in the early years of the HIV and AIDS ep

Writer Ekow Eshun on James Baldwin’s History

Our guest on the final episode of “Notes on a Native Son” is British writer Ekow Eshun. He has been described as a cultural polymath. At a startlingly young age, 29, he became the first Black editor of Arena, a mainstream magazine in the UK. He continued to break new ground when he became the first Black director of a major cultural institution, London’s Institute of Contempo

An America Without Police is Safer Than You Think

The public debate over policing has made more of us more familiar with ideas like defunding or abolishing the police, but these ideas are still often dismissed as infeasible. In this episode, host Kai Wright is joined by three experts who have seen communities sustain and improve public safety absent of law enforcement. First, we meet Dennis Flores, a Nuyorican multimedia artist, a

Writer Hisham Matar on James Baldwin’s Patience

In the 10th episode of “Notes on a Native Son,” host Razia Iqbal sits down with writer and former architect Hisham Matar. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his profound and painful memoir, “The Return,” which chronicles his return to Libya after the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi had his father Jaballa kidnapped and thrown into jail, never to be seen again. This has haun

Presenting This is Uncomfortable: Writer Hanif Abdurraqib on what it Means to “Make it”

This is Uncomfortable is a podcast from Marketplace. For their season premiere earlier in 2024, host Reema Khrais shared a conversation with one of our favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, and we're excited to share it with you. He joins her for a wide-ranging conversation about the moral judgments we’re quick to make about people’s financial circumstances, notions of success an

It’s Trump’s Policy, But Both Parties Set the Stage for Mass Deportations

For nearly a decade, Donald Trump and his political allies have made it clear that one of their primary goals is mass deportation of undocumented people living in the U.S. After the election, this rhetoric is set to become a policy reality, affecting millions of people across all sectors of society. While Trump and right-wing conservatives have proudly embraced an anti-immigration

Nikki Giovanni on James Baldwin's Anger

As a young woman, poet and writer Nikki Giovanni could see that no one was interested in a Black girl writing what was seen as militant and revolutionary poetry. So she formed a company and published it herself. Her second book was launched at the famous New York jazz venue Birdland as she was making a name for herself. When she was 28, she flew to London to sit with James Baldwin

A Majority of Voters Have Endorsed Cruelty. So Now What?

What do the results of the presidential election tell us about our country? We asked a veteran movement organizer to reflect on what feels like a rejection of her core values. To help him make sense of all the post-election feelings, host Kai Wright gets advice from his mentor in the movement for racial and social justice, Rinku Sen. Sen is the executive director of the Narrative I

Author Colm Toibin on James Baldwin’s Interiority

Award-winning Irish writer Colm Toibin has long admired James Baldwin, ever since he read “Go Tell It on the Mountain" as a teenager, and has now written a book about him called simply “On James Baldwin.” When he picked “Go Tell It on the Mountain" from a shelf years ago, Toibin hadn’t heard or read anything about the novel, one of Baldwin’s most famous works. And witho

The Real Reason Why the Lies and Violent Rhetoric Won’t Stop On Election Day

Former President Donald Trump has spent the last days of his 2024 campaign casting doubt on the U.S. election system, even taking the stage at a rally in Pennsylvania to say he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2020. The rhetoric and lies coming from the Trump campaign have also included a false narrative that non-U.S. citizens are voting illegally in large numbers, se