Make Me Smart June 27, 2022 transcript

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Kai Ryssdal: Hey, everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams: And I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you for joining us this Monday. We’re just gonna do the news. And then share a couple of make me smiles and then let you on your merry way for the rest of your week, which I hope is a good one. News fix. Kai, why don’t you get going?

Kai Ryssdal: Alright, so two things. Both you may have heard of, but I can’t not talk about. Number one is this notice that came from the January 6 committee today. That – surprise, surprise, surprise, our next hearing will not be in July. It will be tomorrow. And not only that, they’re not letting us know who the witnesses are. So obviously, this is curious. It’s a big deal. I will be watching – actually, I won’t be because I will be in the podcast taping for this podcast. Thank you very much Bridget Bodnar. I’m just gonna say this is your fault. But yeah, I mean, I’m all on Twitter. You know?

Kimberly Adams: Yeah, I’m very interested to see where this is going. I mean, the committee said last week that they were getting a flood of new information. You know, I guess people watching the hearings and reevaluating their choices about whether or not they wanted to come forward with information. And so the fact that they’re not saying who it is, it’s really interesting. I still haven’t actually watched the last one because I was doing something else when it happened. And I was trying to catch up all weekend, but I got tied up in other things, including going to an astronomy festival, which was fun.

Kai Ryssdal: Which was cool. Yeah, but have you not now seen all the spoiler alerts? I mean, you basically know what happened.

Kimberly Adams: Oh yeah, of course I’ve. I do but I want to watch it. I want to see it. So I’m gonna go back and try to watch that one before I watch the one tomorrow to catch up. Yes.

Kai Ryssdal: Fair enough. So my second one is a quickie. It’s the cover of the next New Yorker, which always gets released online beforehand. And it is – coincidentally, I think – the July 4 edition of The New Yorker. Also, the New Yorker now costs $8.99 a copy by the way, which I had missed. But anyway, the cover image is basically (a) divided America. They got a couple of townhouses, on the left side, there’s somebody from the more liberal side of the spectrum, and on the right side is somebody from the more conservative side of the spectrum, and the signage and the decoration and everything, you know, gives you the identity of who’s inside. Left side is Black Lives Matter, the right side has a thin blue line flag. You know, the American flag, black and white, but with that one blue line. The one really interesting thing, I think, is that both of them have American flags hanging on the sides of the houses. I just, it struck me. I know it’s really silly, and I know we’ve been polarized for a while, but this one just struck me in it. Bummed me out a little bit. Bummed me out a little bit.

Kimberly Adams: It is so striking, but it’s like I’m trying to imagine in what part of America with those two families even that close to each other, you know? Because like, literally, that’s how divided it is. People don’t even want to live around each other if they think differently.

Kai Ryssdal: So there we go. Sorry. I brought us down right out the gate. Sorry about that.

Kimberly Adams: But you know what? Seeing it and talking about it, and maybe it’s just the first step towards finding some kind of solution. You know, … used to say, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Was that it?

Kai Ryssdal: Yeah, I think it’s Peter Drucker from way back. But yeah, that’s the fundamental.

Kimberly Adams: I know it from Hollywood. It’s a similar concept until you sort of acknowledge and talk about it, you know, how do you find a fix. So I’m gonna take it in that spirit. So, the whole weekend, everyone in my friend group and life wanted to talk about the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe versus Wade. It’s still such a big topic, and the fallout is continuing as clinics shut down, and as states enact new laws or trigger laws coming in, there was breaking news just before we went on air that some of the trigger laws are being held up in court. And in Louisiana, abortion is going to be allowed to resume there. But you know, from a business perspective, there’s a lot of interesting things happening as well. I was looking at the story on CNBC, that CVS the pharmacy is capping purchases of plan B pills. So these are not abortion pills, not the ones that actually induce an abortion, but these are contraceptives, basically. And people are apparently like, I guess, trying to buy them en masse. And CVS says there’s plenty of supply, they just want to make sure that there continues to be a equitable supply. And so they’re capping the amount that people can buy at once, although Walgreens isn’t. And I found that to be interesting, because there’s a lot of concern, especially given the Clarence Thomas dissent, that contraceptives may be next on the agenda. And then also, Vice has some reporting that Meta, I’m sorry, Facebook – specifically Facebook, sub-company of Meta – is banning people on the site who say that they will mail actual abortion pills. So in these states where you can’t buy abortion pills, and they’re illegal, which is weird, because federally they are legal, but that’s another thing. But there are lots of groups that are organizing to try to mail abortion pills to people in states where abortion is not available. And so Facebook is saying, apparently, Facebook has been banning some people including Motherboard, which is another news outlet that was posting about it and Facebook removed the post on the same day. So yeah.

Kai Ryssdal: Wow, I have not heard that. That’s kind of wild.

Kimberly Adams: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So those are my two.

Kai Ryssdal: Here you go, All right, moving briskly, into the next phase of this podcast.

Kimberly Adams: This is because I want to talk about my story. I love it so much. So I still get a paper version of the newspaper. It’s like…

Kai Ryssdal: Oh wow.

Kimberly Adams: It makes me feel fancy. And one of the things I like about my paper newspaper is I end up stumbling across stories that I probably wouldn’t have read online. Because when sure, they update the website and move stories around, and you might see something in the side banner, but pretty much when I’m online looking at news, I know what I’m looking for, I’m going to the sections… I always go to the politics section, the tech section, of local weather, whatever. But I was looking in the business section of the newspaper. And because – for people who maybe aren’t familiar with how newspapers work, the stories are broken up across pages.

Kai Ryssdal: Look, guys, I laughed but that’s literally true. There are people out there mostly younger, clearly, but who don’t know how that works. It’s totally true.

Kimberly Adams: Yeah. So you’ll have a portion of the story on the front page, and it says like, go to page B2 to read the rest of it. But then when you go to read the rest of that story, you land on a page with a bunch of other stories that you may not have otherwise noticed. So one of them that I stumbled upon this weekend was this business columnist named Carla Miller, who basically people write in with questions about the workplace in business, and she gives answers. And apparently, a letter came in last summer from a female teenage lifeguard, who discovered – and I’m reading from this piece – who discovered that she was being paid less per hour than the same age male lifeguards with the same experience. And after she requested that her pay be made equal, the pool management company changed almost everyone’s pay rates, including reducing the boy’s pay. And then the teen who wrote in and the two other lifeguards ended up quitting in protest over the company’s pay policies. I know this sounds terrible. However, the team went ahead and filed an EEOC complaint – an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint. And basically, they looked at her complaint, they said it was valid and worth an investigation. They did an investigation, she went before an arbiter with her parents and the company. And even though the terms of it are private, they came to a settlement that she felt good about. And I loved reading about the fact that here’s a young woman who saw something that wasn’t okay, she spoke up about it. And didn’t just speak up about it, but did something. And not only did she fix the problem at this company, I hope, but she’s learned something. And at the end of the article, it says – they have a quote from her it says, “Now I know there’s lots I can do if this happens again,” she says, “I realized I’m stronger than I thought.”

Kai Ryssdal: It was cool. Especially now, that’s cool, right? That also resonates, especially now. For sure. For sure.

Kimberly Adams: Oh, and there was another good thing about it. I’m going to just read this. “At her new summer job as a swim coach, Grace, which is not this person’s real name but Grace and a male coworker recently discovered that she was being paid four times what he was. Even given greater work experience, the pay disparity seemed excessive. Seeing his dismay, she told him, you know, there’s things you can do. He brought the matter to management’s attention and his pay was doubled.

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, snap. That’s great.

Kimberly Adams: It’s great. Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal: No, good for her. That’s fabulous. Oh my goodness, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Mine is a touch more pedestrian, less touching of the heart. But still, for those of you who are space geeks, warming of the heart. So you might have seen in the news last week, and in fact, I think we had it as a half full half empty on Friday, about the Artemis program, which is NASA’s plan to get back to the moon. So anyway, so last week, they did what’s called a full wet test, they dragged this giant rocket out to the launch pad, filled it up with a gazillion gallons of all the really dangerous and combustible hypergolic – I love that phrase – hypergolic fuels, and everything was basically fine. So they emptied it out, they rolled it back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, the big giant one, and they are now good to go for a launch of the uncrewed assembly of the rocket and the capsule by late August. Which is super cool. They’re gonna go up to the moon, zip around, come back, no people on it. But that’s awesome. I just think that’s super cool. Super cool. That’s it.

Kimberly Adams: It really is. So at the astronomy festival, there were of course people from NASA there. So this was the summit… For summer solstice, the Smithsonian’s here in Washington, DC, they kept a bunch of the museums open late. And then they also had an astronomy festival. And there were all these telescopes out on the National Mall, and you could go and look in different telescopes and see different things. It was super cool. But there are also all these booths from NASA, from JPL, from Ball… you know the people who make the mason jars? Yeah. Apparently they make all kinds of space stuff, including like some of the materials that went on the James Webb Space Telescope, if I’m not mistaken. Like, okay, I need to look that up exactly. But they had a big presentation because they make all of these materials that go on satellites. And it was a little strange and broke my brain a bit. But there was also an exhibit about the next big space telescope that comes after James Webb, which I didn’t even know was coming. And they had a little mockup of it and everything and it was super cool. So. I was very excited about that.

Kai Ryssdal: Ball Aerospace. Look at that.

Kimberly Adams: Yes. You just looked it up, didn’t you?

Kai Ryssdal: Yeah, no, I was like it can’t be, but it is. So here’s the line from their website. Ball corporation is a provider of metal packaging for beverages, foods and household products AND of aerospace and other technologies. How about that? Who knew? Learn something new every day on this podcast, people, I’m telling you!

Kimberly Adams: Made me smart!

Kai Ryssdal: All right, boom.

Kimberly Adams: Okay, that’s it for today. Tomorrow, we’re gonna do a deep dive on something that, you know, may not actually exist: affordable housing. What is it exactly and why it’s so hard to build affordable housing and then to keep that housing affordable, and kind of what even is affordable in this economy.

Kai Ryssdal: Send us your questions also your comments please. We’ll take a voice memo or an email to makemesmart@marketplace.org. Or you can call us and leave a voice message because they’re different. 508-U-B-SMART is the phone number. I’m never gonna let that go. I will die on that hill.

Kimberly Adams: I’m entertained by it every time. Make Me Smart is produced by Marissa Cabrera. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp.

Kai Ryssdal: Our senior producer is Bridget Bodnar and the Director of On Demand is Donna Tam.

Kimberly Adams: I got so many stickers at that festival.

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, I bet it was super cool.