Hosts Cecil and Celeste are joined by Colorlines columnist Brenton Mock, to reflect on the election and the future status of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Brenton Mock is a New Orleans-based investigative journalist, Voting Rights Fellow for Colorlines.com, and former senior editor for The Loop 21, where he covered electoral politics and reporting on voter ID issues. Mock also works as web editor for the online, citizen-journalist driven blogsite "Bridge the Gulf" and helped launch the New Orleans online investigative news site "The Lens." He previously worked at The American Prospect as a reporter and blogger covering environmental justice issues through a fellowship awarded by the Metcalf Institute for Environmental Reporting. His work has been published in GOOD, The Root, The Daily Beast, Newsweek.com, The Grio, The Atlantic, Next American City, Truthout.org, Alternet, Vibe.com, XXL, The Source, and Religion Dispatches.

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Eric Rutkow about his new book American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation. The book tells the story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

Eric Rutkow reads at Powell's on Burnside on Monday, 7/30, at 7:30PM and at the Hoyt Arboretum at 4000 SW Fairview Boulevard on Tuesday, 7/31, at 6pm. 

The history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself. Eric Rutkow’s epic account shows how trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy’s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country’s history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

Eric Rutkow, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, has worked as a lawyer on environmental issues. He splits his time between New York and New Haven, Connecticut, where he is pursuing a doctorate in American history at Yale. American Canopy is his first book.

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Peter Edelman, author of the new book So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America. The income-level disparity in this country is now wider than at any point since the Great Depression. How can some be so rich, while others are so poor? According to Edelman, we have taken important positive steps without which 25 to 30 million more people would be poor, but poverty fluctuates with the business cycle. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on those at the top.

Peter Edelman is professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1964 to 1968, he went on to fill various roles in President Bill Clinton’s administration, from which he famously resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation.

Hosts Cecil Prescod and Celeste Carey interview professor Dan Simon about his book In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process. Simon is Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of Southern California.

The criminal justice process is unavoidably human. Police detectives, witnesses, suspects, and victims shape the course of investigations, while prosecutors, defense attorneys, jurors, and judges affect the outcome of adjudication. Dan Simon will talk about how flawed investigations can produce erroneous evidence and why well-meaning juries send innocent people to prison and set the guilty free.