Every week, we round up news and talk to interesting people doing important things across the Southern U.S.
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Headlights Ep. 51: The Trans Panic Continues
Another year, another cluster of hateful anti-transgender bills proposed in our state legislatures. This week, we round up some of the worst laws passed this spring in Southern states to further bully and harass trans people.
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Headlights Ep. 50: Rev. Lawson’s Legacy of Nonviolence
Nonviolent resistance was the core strategy of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, and its chief architect alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was another pastor, Rev. James Lawson Jr. Like King, he studied the success of Gandhi’s anti-colonial resistance in India, and he answered King’s call to teach its precepts to…
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Headlights Ep. 49: Who Are the Young Democrats?
The Democratic Party has an identity problem with voters nationwide, and especially in the South. But a rising wave of young party activists is seeking to bring new energy and ideas into some of the most conservative areas of the country — like Knox County, Tennessee, which has been sending Republicans to Congress since the…
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Headlights Ep. 47: El Paso at the Crossroads
El Paso is a city at multiple borders — not only between countries, but cultures, languages, and histories. This week we talk to journalist Jazmine Ulloa, an El Paso native whose new book about her hometown dives into more a century of its history. Following the stories of five families, she traces the ways El…
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Headlights Ep. 46: The Air in Cancer Alley
Everyone knows the air around Louisiana’s Cancer Alley is bad. But how bad? And what’s actually in it? That’s what two scientists at Johns Hopkins University set out to understand. Their work so far has shown the air in the communities around massive petrochemical plants has as much as 10 times higher levels of toxins…
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Headlights Ep. 45: A Stand for Georgia Immigrants
As minority whip for the Georgia state Senate Democrats, Senator Kim Jackson helped lead the fight in this session for a package of bills aimed at reining in aggressive immigration enforcement in the state. Republicans have blocked them, but this week Jesse talks to Jackson about the proposals and the public outcry that led to…
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Headlights Ep. 44: Primaries and ICE Resistance
A raft of primaries and one special election in the South last week brought some fresh faces into the spotlight and offered tantalizing clues about this fall’s midterms. This week we take a look at the high-profile Democratic and Republican contests for U.S. Senate in Texas, as well as a slate of anti-establishment votes in…
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Headlights Ep. 43: The ICE Prison Profiteers
This week, we take a look at CoreCivic, the Tennessee-based company that is one of the two largest operators of private prisons in the United States. We listen in on the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call, full of rising revenue numbers and rosy projections — and we annotate it with context and background that…
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Headlights Ep. 42: The ‘Ministry of Truth’ Brings Back Coal
When it comes to environmental protections, the Trump administration has been on a deregulatory spree. On the front lines of fights to protect air, water and ecosystems across the South is the Southern Environmental Law Center — a nonprofit with a team of more than 100 lawyers, who are keeping busy in courts and on…
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Headlights Ep. 41: Trump’s EPA in the South
When it comes to environmental protections, the Trump administration has been on a deregulatory spree. On the front lines of fights to protect air, water and ecosystems across the South is the Southern Environmental Law Center — a nonprofit with a team of more than 100 lawyers, who are keeping busy in courts and on…
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Headlights Ep. 40: The High Cost of Alabama Power
Why does Alabama have the highest residential electricity rates in the country? This week, we dig into the profitable, polluting business of Alabama Power, the state’s largest electrical provider. Dennis Pillion, a reporter for Inside Climate News, joins to talk about what he has found digging into the private company. Much of its decision-making is…
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Headlights Ep. 39: New Orleans vs. ICE
While outrage continues to mount about violent immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, ICE and the Border Patrol are active at smaller scale in cities across the South. A hearing last week in New Orleans brought together political leaders and immigrant advocates to detail the terror that Operation Catahoula Crunch has instilled in local communities, where many…