Alyssa Milano: Sorry Not Sorry

There is a rapist presiding over the United States. That rapist has directed his government to gut federal efforts to protect women from violence of all sorts. Health and Human Services fired nearly all of its staff at the Division of Violence Prevention. The office on violence against women has removed all funding opportunities from its website and reports are coming in that all of the grants it issues are being cancelled. Online, platforms owned by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg–billionaires who support Trump and his regime–own giant social media platforms rife with digital violence against women and seemingly no efforts at all to curtail it. It is a dangerous time to be a woman. This has always been true, but it is especially true in Trump’s America. Our guest for this episode is Alia Dastagir. Dastagir is an award-winning journalist and former reporter for USA Today who was one of eight U.S. recipients of the prestigious Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. Her book on women and online abuse, “To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person: Words as Violence and Stories of Women’s Resistance Online,” is now available.

Most weeks, we bring a guest onto speak in depth on a single issue. But every once in a while, there’s so much going on that Alyssa and Ben take an episode to check in on...all of this nonsense. That’s what we’re doing this week. And we even start with some good news: It’s baseball season.

The United States executes more people than nearly any other country. In fact, in 2023, the only countries with more reported executions were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Iraq. Inside the United States, courts are trying to navigate the legality of execution and methods of execution, and the various states have different rules and customs of this barbaric practice. Gianna Toboni has faced some of the world’s most dangerous people: ISIS fighters, cartel hitmen, and sex traffickers. In her new book --- THE VOLUNTEER: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate’s Quest to Die with Dignity -- Gianna dives into her most intense year yet—covering the life of a death row inmate, all while uncovering the shocking, dirty truths about our criminal justice system. And it should be noted that this episode contains frank discussions of both capital punishment and suicidality.

In late March, thousands of writers, publishers, students, and writing educators gathered in Los Angeles for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conference. Since our own Ben Jackson is a writer and professor of composition, we thought it would be a great opportunity to hear how writing is changing the world for the better in a time when we desperately need to change the world for the better.

In the two months since the Trump regime took power, it has worked feverishly to dismantle the higher educational apparatus in the United States. Grant money funding research in the billions of dollars has been stopped or held to use as leverage against researchers and institutions. At the same time, Trump and his cronies are working to suppress free speech on campuses, deporting faculty and graduate students who do not share the administration’s views on the Israel-Gaza conflict. The effects of these actions are terrifying. To discuss, we’ve invited Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors and an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University.