Labor Day Best-of: How Unions Win; Book Bans; School Refusal; Ultra-Processed Foods; Guide to LED Lights

The Brian Lehrer Show | Sep 4, 2023

For this Labor Day holiday, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:

Jane McAlevey, organizer, senior policy fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, The Nation's strikes correspondent and co-author of Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations (Oxford University Press, 2023), draws on case histories of successful negotiations to offer blueprints for other unions.

In a March 13 op-ed for the Daily Beast, bestselling author Jodi Picoult condemned the removal of several books, including 20 of her own, from a school district in Florida. Many of these challenges were filed by a single person. Jodi Picoult and Suzanne Nossel, PEN America chief executive officer, explain what's at stake as states and local governments continue to ban books.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report in February that showed an increase in teenagers struggling with their mental health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared mental health challenges for teens a "national emergency." Ari Fox, psychotherapist and founder and director of Cope With School NYC, discusses one of the more troubling manifestations of youth mental distress: an exponential rise of kids refusing to attend school.

Chris van Tulleken, associate professor at University College London and a practicing infectious diseases doctor and the author of Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023), talks about the health effects of eating diets heavy in highly processed foods - which he researched and experimented with on himself.