I host the spring election show and am joined by Eve Galanter, founder of the Wisconsin Civics Games. We talk civics education, voter turnout, the declining coverage of local government, and a new bill that would update civics education requirements in the state.
Interview
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Nearing one year of Metro’s redesign
The bus system is one of the most visible aspects of city infrastructure, and it’s one of the most rapidly changing aspects of life in Madison. I speak with Madison Metro Transit near the one year anniversary of the system redesign.
As heard on wortfm.org.
Safety orange is the color of the present
Cultural theorist Anna Watkins Fisher says the color known as Safety Orange describes the cultural present. In her recent book Safety Orange, she argues that the color (hex code: #FF5F15) is a lens: for state oversight and abandonment, excess and dereliction.
As aired on wortfm.org.
Mickey has entered the public domain
And each year on January 1, a community of people celebrate Public Domain Day. That’s the day get thousands of new books, plays, films, and recordings, and other artistic works are newly released from the cages of copyright protection.
The Center For the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School maintains a robust inventory of works with expiring copyrights. This year, the Center says, works from 1928 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1923.
The most recognizable figure released into the public domain for 2024? Well, that’d be Mickey Mouse. UW-Madison professor Alan Rubel helps us celebrate Public Domain Day.
As heard on wortfm.org.
Rebecca Webster on sovereignty
The history and culture of the Oneida Nation, along with changing policy on tribal land rights, is the subject of Rebecca Webster’s new book, In Defense of Sovereignty: Protecting the Oneida Nation’s Inherent Right to Self Determination (2023, University of Wisconsin Press).
As heard on wortfm.org.
How Wisconsin Got “Foxconned”
It’s been four years since Wisconsin inked a contract with Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. The year was 2017, President Trump was in office, and then-Governor Scott Walker was running for re-election. After just months of consideration, Walker signed an agreement for Foxconn to come to southern Wisconsin — after all, Wisconsin was “open for business.”
At the time, Foxconn promised to invest $10 billion into a high-tech LCD screen manufacturing facility. They said it could bring 13,000 jobs to the state, the majority of them blue-collar, family-supporting jobs. But four years later, the plan to build LCD screens has not materialized. Foxconn is expressly not producing LCD screens, while weighing what to do with the thousands of the acres of land and new infrastructure built explicitly for them. Meanwhile, homeowners have been evicted from their homes and the State of Wisconsin and Mount Pleasant are now on the hook if Foxconn backs out of the deal.
I sat down with Madison-based journalist Lawrence Tabak, who has been reporting on the Foxconn deal since its beginnings and is out this month with a new book about it. It’s called Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government, released from the University of Chicago Press in November 2021.
We discuss the context of the deal at the time, the flaws of the underlying economic analysis produced by Foxconn analysts, the “blighting” of the land and eviction of Mount Pleasant homeowners (and the unusual clearance granted by the legislature to do so), the future of Wisconn Valley and why Governor Evers renegotiated the deal – plus why the abundance of governmental-sponsored economic development is a bad deal.
Useful links:
- Find this post on wortfm.org
- Visit Lawrence Tabak’s website, and follow him on Twitter here.
- Find Tabak’s new book from the University of Chicago Press, here.
- Read more of Tabak’s reporting in Belt Magazine and the American Prospect
- More listening: Tone Madison interviewed Tabak in 2018; Reply All explored the local politics and evicted homeowners in 2018.
Accountability in the Flint Water Crisis
Top Michigan officials – including former governor Rick Snyder – were indicted on charges that ranged from willful neglect of duty and involuntary manslaughter to obstruction of justice after a new investigation into the Flint water crisis.
It’s a crisis that combined a city’s fiscal distress with politics and ignorance of environmental factors to create disaster: lead poisoning, and a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease.
I took a deep dive into the history and the details of the Flint water crisis with ProPublica journalist Anna Clark, author of the book The Poisoned City.
The many worlds of Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier was a street photographer in the latter half of the 20th century, capturing intricacies of daily life at a time when camera culture and street photography was on the rise. Though Maier was extremely prolific as a photographer, she worked professionally as a nanny, often carrying several cameras around while she was working. A private person, she was largely unknown and undiscovered during most of her lifetime, but beginning close to her death in 2009, her archive was picked up by collectors in Chicago and her work quickly scattered online.
Pamela Bannos, Professor of Photography at Northwestern University, became interested in Maier’s life and work after a local public television station asked her to comment on the photographer’s work. Her biography is Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life And Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
As recorded for wortfm.org and Tone Madison.
The voice of the Madison bus system
Squeaky doors, the hum of traffic, overlapping conversations — they’re all a part of the soundscape of the Madison bus system. Also a part of that soundscape is the voice of Ward Paxton, who has been the literal voice of the transit system for more than a dozen years. My interview for wortfm.org.