With Good Reason

When you make a decision, is it really you deciding? New research suggests we might be living with an illusion of our own control, and our unconscious minds might be calling all the shots. From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines short form storytelling and compelling interviews to bring you the best of each week's episode in under five minutes.

It's obvious to some and obscure to others -- why do we really need science? We talk to designers who see it changing the way we live, teachers who are inspiring kids to discover new methods, and engineers who are seeing it save lives.

Turns out one of our best weapons against disease is a database of thousands upon thousands of twins. We talk to the doctor who runs the database, plus doctors behind new science on allergies and an artificial pancreas that's giving diabetes sufferers a new peace of mind.

For more than a million Americans with Type 1 diabetes, managing their disease can be a lot of painful -- and dangerous -- guesswork. But now, a new piece of technology promises to automate insulin delivery, and its helping some sufferers sleep through the night for the first time in their lives. From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines compelling interviews and short-form storytelling to bring you the best of each week's episode in under 5 minutes.

For many in Charlottesville and around the country, the events of August 12th were a shock. But for black residents, it wasn't a surprise at all to see white supremacists marching in the street of a southern college town. Charlottesville brought into light, again, America's long history of racism. This week on With Good Reason, we reflect on American racism past and present. We talk to two filmmakers who documented the "social phenomenon" of lynching that claimed 4,000 lives; we hear from some of the nation's top journalists on how the media perpetuates racism; and we get Charlottesville residents' reflections on the violence of August 12th.

For many Americans, August 12th marked a shift in the national conversation about white supremacy and racism. For the people who were injured in the vehicle attack in Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer, the 12th marks Day One of a long process of recovery. From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines short-form storytelling and compelling interviews to bring you the best of each week's episode in a short, digestible segment.

Vietnam veterans could all name the songs on the unofficial soundtrack of the war: "Purple Haze," "What's Going On," and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" are just the start. Now, a new book explores what these songs meant to men and women awaiting deployment into the unknown.

Spanning the golden age of American rock 'n' roll, the Vietnam War has one of the most evocative soundtracks of any conflict. Now, two scholars have interviewed hundreds of veterans to compile the "official" soundtrack to one of America's longest wars. From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines compelling interviews and short-form storytelling to bring you the best of each week's episode in under five minutes.

Underneath the heated rhetoric, sometimes our biggest bogeymen are nothing to fear. We talk to two professors who are busting stereotypes about illegal immigrants by teaching English in the east coast's largest detention center; we hear the guy who hunts poachers "telephoning" fish and stealing bear spleen; and we look at some misunderstood monsters of cinema and literature, from Godzilla to Germany's hard-bitten detectives.

Farmville may only be a tiny Virginian town, home to about 8,000 mostly White people. But nearby, Farmville Detention Center is the home to people from the world over -- it's the biggest immigration jail on the whole east coast. Two professors decided it was time to bring the two worlds together. From With Good Reason, The Short Listen combines compelling interviews and short-form storytelling to bring you the best of each week's episode in under five minutes.

"Facing It" is the title of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusuf Komunyakaa's most famous poem, exploring themes of race, war, and home. On this week's show, we speak to Komunyakaa and other authors about how artists' work is impacted by the environment of their time.

John Singer Sargent painted the portraits of American richest people at the peak of the Gilded Age. So why do some of his women look so sad? From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines compelling interviewing and short-form storytelling to bring you the best of each week's episode in under five minutes.

There was a time in America when, for a few glorious decades, people rich and poor, urban and rural, embraced a love of the bicycle. So how did the humble cyclist fall from grace? Plus, we look back on a grab bag of interviews, including a conversation with an animator behind Hey Arnold!, Spongebob Squarepants, and The Simpsons; the unusual case of Patrick Swayze's disappearing lake; and more.

In the final episode of our special series on education and inequality, we dive deep into the debate over charters, examine new ways school districts are tackling integration, and explore the forgotten regions of America's vast public school system.

When we think about the way public education should look, we tend to think about big suburban schools or struggling inner cities. That means when federal education policy gets written, vast swaths of rural America are being forgotten. From With Good Reason, the Short Listen combines short-form storytelling and compelling interviews to bring you the best of each week's episode in under five minutes.