This is the last episode of Notes from America with Kai Wright. If you’ve been with the show through its multi-year history and iterations as a NYC-based narrative podcast and local call-in show called The United States of Anxiety before becoming a nationally distributed program, then you may remember the conversation in this finale. It’s with cultural historian, Columbia University professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman , who introduces host Kai Wright to young women whose lives were ob...
Dec 30, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast The drumbeat of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area is not politics. It’s go-go music. The genre developed by Chuck Brown in 1976 features syncopated rhythms, a large ensemble of musicians and a rich drum beat to create a live experience that has fans dancing ’till they can't dance no more. Go-go has been nurtured by D.C. natives for decades, from the time the District was considered a majority Black “Chocolate City,” and the music has significantly influenced the broader region into Maryl...
Dec 23, 2024•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Host Kai Wright celebrates the many years and iterations of Notes from America by revisiting some of the show’s most engaging listener moments. He’s joined by producer Regina de Heer to open up the listener mailbag of responses to recent episodes and highlights from live events and focus groups. Then, we listen back to a conversation with Lindsay Kimball, program director for Minnesota Public Radio’s renowned music station The Current, accompanied by a holiday music playlist curated with the hel...
Dec 16, 2024•50 min•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast College student Hisham Awartani, 21, was visiting family in Vermont over Thanksgiving break in 2023 when he and two of his friends were shot. All three victims are of Palestinian descent and were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves when the attack happened. Awartani and the other two young men, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmed, all survived. However, Awartani was left paralyzed from the waist down and over the past year, he’s been learning how to live a new life that involves using a ...
Dec 09, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 epidemics. Decades later, AIDS is still with us and its status as an epidemic remains accurate. In this episode, we learn ...
Dec 02, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Contemporary Arts, a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace. These days, as chair of the Commissioning Group for the Fourth Plinth ...
Nov 30, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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, activist and educator born and raised in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He is the co-founder of El Grito de Sunset Park, a gr...
Nov 25, 2024•51 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast 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 haunted Matar's life and work, an overshadowing that he has transformed into books of extraordinary power and beauty. For this ...
Nov 23, 2024•36 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast 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 and legacy, and what it means to be “good” versus “bad” in an unequal world. Abdurraqib also reveals one of the most chal...
Nov 21, 2024•37 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast 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 stance, it's important to recognize that Republicans aren't the only party that set the stage for mass deportations....
Nov 18, 2024•49 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast 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 and record a conversation for the PBS television series, “Soul.” Baldwin was in his late-40s and an established figu...
Nov 16, 2024•28 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Initiative , which focuses on social movements working to root our multiracial democracy in equity and justice. She s...
Nov 12, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 without any pretense, he found himself immersed in the book’s words and characters. Reading it later in life as an accomplished autho...
Nov 09, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 , setting a stage to justify mass deportations or, if needed, declaring a stolen victory. To put it bluntly, there will lik...
Nov 04, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the seventh episode of “Notes on a Native Son" our guest is writer, philologist and James Baldwin biographer David Leeming . In the biography, Leeming tells us that almost from the moment h e met Baldwin, he recognized that he was in the presence of a highly complex and driven individual, who was more intensely serious than anyone he had ever encountered. It was in 1961, during Leeming’s time as head of English at the Robert College in Istanbul, that he first met Baldwin. Over the years, Leem...
Nov 02, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast This presidential election is likely to be a squeaker, decided by a handful of votes in some key swing states. In this episode from our friends at the podcast Code Switch , we visit one of them — Michigan — in order to hear from some of the most influential and misunderstood voters in the country: Arab Americans in Dearborn. Code Switch host Gene Demby reports that The Dearbornites they met said that the war in Gaza is one of the key issues weighing on their minds as they consider how to cast th...
Oct 31, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the 2024 presidential election right around the corner, all eyes are on the swing states. In this episode, host Kai Wright travels to Atlanta, the heart of one swing state where early voting numbers are at a record high , to hear about the historically large political gender gap. While the show was in town, Atlanta hosted homecoming festivities for Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, two of the nation’s most famous historically Black schools — and the perfect campuses to talk politics with stud...
Oct 28, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the sixth episode of “Notes on a Native Son,” writer Caryl Phillips shares the experience of getting to know James Baldwin beyond the pages of his work. Phillips not only respected Baldwin as a writer, but regarded him as a friend and perhaps a mentor, too. Phillips was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, and moved to Leeds, in northern England, when he was just 4 months old. It was as a student at Oxford where he first encountered the work of Baldwin. He tells host Razia Iqbal that me...
Oct 26, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast There is a longstanding, widely held belief that the best chance at a better future is to go off to college – especially for people from marginalized communities. Whether it was your teacher, general political rhetoric, or one of many sitcoms that reflect middle class American life, the message was to go to school or risk failure — dismissing millions of people who decided not to go to college and created viable, sustainable careers in trade professions, from manufacturing and welding to plumbin...
Oct 21, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the fifth episode of Notes on a Native Son, our guest is Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak . She has published 21 books, 13 of them novels — including “The Forty Rules of Love” and her latest, “There are Rivers in the Sky” — and her work has been translated into 58 languages. Shafak is among those contemporary writers who are both lauded with awards, and deeply beloved by her readers. Born in Strasbourg, France to Turkish parents, Shafak’s early life was peripatetic, living in both Ankara an...
Oct 19, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson has always aspired to be a federal judge. In fact, the newest appointed associate justice of the United States Supreme Court wrote in her application to Harvard University that she wished “to attend Harvard Law School as I believed it might help me ‘to fulfill my fantasy of becoming the first Black, female Supreme Court justice to appear on a Broadway stage.’” She tells stories like these in her new memoir, " Lovely One ." Justice Jackson joins host Kai Wright to dis...
Oct 14, 2024•56 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast In the fourth episode of “Notes on a Native Son,” our guest is the writer and essayist Darryl Pinckney . His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The Village Voice. Most recently, he's been the recipient of a highly prestigious award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his contribution to American literature. Host Razia Iqbal meets up with Pinckney in Harlem, where James Baldwin grew up and eventually left in the 1940s. Pinckney lives there in a str...
Oct 12, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A year ago, the world was shaken when Hamas militants entered Israel, resulting in the deaths of approximately 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds more. It was one of the most devastating days for Israelis and Jewish communities around the world in decades. In the immediate hours after that attack, Israel launched an invasion of Gaza, resulting in the deaths of at least 42,000 Palestinians and counting. Early on in the escalation of the war, two women came together to start having diffic...
Oct 07, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the third episode of “Notes on a Native Son,” host Razia Iqbal sits down with the celebrated writer of novels and essays, Siri Hustvedt . When Hustvedt was invited to record a conversation for the podcast about her favorite passage from the work of James Baldwin, the timing in so many ways couldn’t have been worse — it turned out to be the last few weeks of life for her husband, writer Paul Auster. However, a few weeks after his passing, Hustvedt reached out to say that she was ready. She fel...
Oct 05, 2024•31 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Americans under 30 years old have been through a lot in their young lives. Perhaps living through and witnessing the volatile political moment that was Donald Trump’s presidency, a global pandemic, a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, and growing devastation due to war in the Middle East, has led to their reported lack of trust in several key political and social institutions. And yet, as we hear in this episode, Gen Z is deeply engaged with the issues and ideas that will improve their experien...
Sep 30, 2024•55 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Host Razia Iqbal sits down with the celebrated civil rights lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, a man as dedicated to his chosen profession as James Baldwin was to his. Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative , based in Montgomery, Alabama, which has not only transformed the conversation about the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated Black Americans, but has also challenged how we think about the criminal justice system and the system’s treatment of children in particular. ...
Sep 28, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast More than 36 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election. Who they will support in November is still very much in play — and this year, the candidates’ approach to seeking that support can’t be copied from playbooks of the past. In this episode, guest host Janae Pierre is joined by Mike Madrid and Chuck Rocha, co-hosts of the Latino Vote podcast, which looks at the voting trends and behavioral patterns among Latino communities in the U.S. from the view of two polit...
Sep 23, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the debut episode of “Notes on a Native Son,” host Razia Iqbal sits down with essayist and novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates to discuss one of his favorite passages from the works of writer James Baldwin. His choice comes from Baldwin’s essay “ On Being ‘White’…And Other Lies ,” published in Essence Magazine in 1984. Coates shares why this piece resonates with him as a writer tackling whiteness, race and what it means to be an American today. Coates is the author of the bestselling books “Between the...
Sep 21, 2024•41 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Warning: This episode contains profane language and detailed descriptions of sexual assault allegations. More than 20 women say a man who went by Officer “Champagne” sexually assaulted them while they were held at the Rikers Island women's jail. Their allegations span decades and they are now suing the city for more than $500 million. But the Department of Correction says there was no one with that name who worked there during that time. WNYC spoke with several women who say they were assaulted ...
Sep 19, 2024•58 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Come November, an estimated 36 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the U.S. presidential election. Across the nation, there are Spanish language radio stations invested in them as an audience — and content on those stations is targeting listeners with disinformation about the candidates, the parties and political issues. In this special episode, host Kai Wright sits down with journalist Paulina Velasco to discuss “Frequency of Deception,” an investigation into the lies, rumors and propag...
Sep 16, 2024•51 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast 
