Notes from America with Kai Wright

Donald Trump understands something very important about American democracy: We don’t debate public policy, we fumble our way toward a shared political culture. So if you want to control the debate over how to build a health care system, you first have to

  From activists in the current resistance movement to a McDonald's worker just trying to survive, get to know Americans fighting for what they believe in and shaping the future of the country's political culture. The United States of Anxiety: Culture Wa

In the wake of the recent violence in Charlottesville, where a protester was killed by a white supremacist, dozens of monuments to the Confederacy are being taken down. It's an extraordinary moment in American history, and in this episode, we stop to ask

One Brooklyn woman's complicated relationship with the hijab and the experience of living in between worlds.

America incarcerates more people than any country in the world. It starts with kids. On any given night, roughly 53,000 young people are in some form of lockup. Nearly 60 percent are black or Latino. We all make dumb mistakes in our youth. But for these

The city of Olathe, Kansas, has been shaken since February, when a man gunned down two Indian immigrants in a bar there. Witnesses say the shooter yelled,  “Go back to your country!” It was the first hate-crime killing after the 2016 presidential electio

Starting with the 1925 Scopes Trial — also known as the "trial of the century" — we look at one of the most controversial topics in our time: the debate over evolution versus a Fundamentalist understanding of the Bible. It started with a substitute teach

Talking to Trump voters during the campaign, we'd sometimes hear what felt like a unified sentiment bubbling up beneath the popular, and populist, reasons for supporting their candidate. Retired truck mechanic Fiore Napolitano from Long Island put it thi

How can music — even music without lyrics — be political? We explore that question in episode 4 of "Culture Wars." In the 1920s, composer Aaron Copland took off for Paris. His search for a distinctive American sound in classical music resulted in some of

The culture wars of the Boomer generation still shape our politics today. In this episode we look at those culture wars from another vantage point. Instead of focusing on the debates themselves, we ask the question: How do people move from radical politi