The Best of Making Contact
Best of Making Contact 2019 Before we jump into our 2020 catalogue, we look back at our favorite shows from 2019. From Artificial Intelligence, to the stigma around women’s periods, from guns and restraining orders to the cost of Insulin, these are the stories that inspired us, taught us something or just made us think differently. Featured shows: Guns and Restraining Orders Legacy of Mistreatment Bad Math: The Risks of...
One Long Night: Andrea Pitzer on the Global History of Concentration Camps
The Global History of Concentration Camps “The use of concentration camps changes the world, but going forward, the most predictable outcome of their use is a world with more camps” Today we use a lot of euphemisms: re-education camps, internment, work camps, prison camps, camps for internally displaced people. But before world war one, these prisons were known simply as concentration camps and they started in Cuba in the...
Bio Hackers versus Big Pharma: Tackling the Rising Cost of Insulin
Tackling the Rising Cost of Insulin As the cost of insulin continues to skyrocket patients are dying from trying to ration their medication. It’s an extreme example, but not unusual – the cost of insulin mirrors the broader health crisis in the United States. Medicine is too expensive and inaccessible. And as insurance companies continue to raise prices, more and more people are put at risk, especially if...
A Journalist Reckons with Truth and Objectivity
Lewis Wallace Lewis Wallace was a reporter at Marketplace. You may have heard his voice on the Marketplace Morning Report with David Brancaccio. That was until he publicly questioned the role of objectivity in a Medium post. “We need to let go of idea that objectivity is dying. A more useful framework is that objectivity is a mythology that we’re urgently debunking to figure out what can stand in its place. That doesn’t lessen our...
Bad Math: the Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Like this program? Please support our work. Click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks! Artificial Intelligence When we think of Artificial Intelligence we often think of intelligent robots who act and think like humans -the walking, thinking, feeling machines that we see in the movies. The advent of that kind of intelligent robot is so far off in the future, that we often don’t recognize the...
In the Shadow of the Volcano: Guatemala’s Unequal Disaster
Fuego Volcano-Guatemala The Central American region and especially, the country of Guatemala, is vulnerable to numerous natural disasters – earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides, droughts and … volcanoes. Thousands of Guatemalans are still recovering from the effects of the eruption of a volcano called Fuego – Spanish for “fire” – which took place in the summer of 2018. In this report, Maria Martin,...
