[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. It's another Friday in New York. Another Friday in America. It's the third Friday in a row when a court will rule on access to the abortion pill mifepristone. Today, it will again be the Supreme Court which for the third time in a week could totally or partially suspend the drug's availability or keep it available for Americans whose doctors prescribe it. Abortion rights in this country are literally a day-by-day affair right now.

It's the fourth Friday in a row when we have to say New York State is starting its new fiscal year without a budget because the powers that be in Albany can't agree on the state's bail and housing laws. Now, Crain's New York Business reports today that the governor and legislature have completely failed and given up on what is arguably the state's biggest policy need right now, more affordable housing. Crain's site sources who say they couldn't even find a way to compromise on the proposals for new affordable housing construction and new tenant protections, so they won't be in the final budget bill at all, no housing provisions.

It's another Friday in America when if you're Black and minding your own business, you don't know if some white person will think you're going to hurt them and shoot you. You've probably heard by now that that's what happened to 16-year-old Ralph Yarl an honor student no less in Kansas City, Missouri after he rang the doorbell of the wrong house by mistake as he attempted to pick up his brother to drive him home. Yarl reportedly thought he was at an address on Northeast 115th Terrace, but he was really one block over on Northeast 115th Street.

Now, it probably doesn't make it any better that the white guy who fired the gun acted alone and has been criminally charged, because what's the definition of acted alone? The shooter's grandson described him as, "Down the right wing rabbit hole, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line./ A 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia." A column in the Kansas City Star today argues that Fox News is complicit in the crime. It probably doesn't make it any better that a 20-year-old white woman was also shot. She was killed also after driving accidentally to the wrong house, that was in Hebron, New York north of Albany the other day.

A New York Times headline today says, "In a Nation Armed to the Teeth, These Tiny Missteps Led to Tragedy." Missteps, plural. But we know these kinds of horrors are not distributed evenly by race. With us now, Princeton professor of African American Studies Imani Perry. She is author of the 2019 book that is sadly relevant to this moment called Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. She has an article in The Atlantic now following the Ralph Yarl shooting called This Country Will Break Our Hearts Again.

Professor Perry was last on this show last year for her most recent book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon Line to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Professor Perry, thanks for coming on again. I'm sorry it's under these circumstances, of course, but welcome back to WNYC.

Imani Perry: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I guess the point of your article is that, in a way, it's always under these circumstances, whether it's the immediate aftermath of an incident like the shooting of Ralph Yarl or not, right?

Imani Perry: Absolutely. It's always under these circumstances. I really appreciated your introduction because these circumstances are, as you said, unequally distributed perhaps but tragedies for all of us which in of itself is instructive. My heart broke for the young woman. I think she was 20. I think her name was Kaylin Gillis in Hebron.

Brian Lehrer: Correct.

Imani Perry: It's extraordinary that we allow a minority but a critical mass of our country to allow the circumstance where our young people have to think about the prospect of death at every turn. Horrifying.

Brian Lehrer: In this particular case, the Ralph Yarl case, the shooter, Andrew Lester, is 84 and as an individual is described by his grandson in the Kansas City Star as I mentioned, as down the rabbit hole of right-wing Fox News conspiracy theories. Some people speculate, "Well, he's 84, we don't know the condition of his mind." I think that's actually unfair to most 84-year-olds-

Imani Perry: It really is, yes.

Brian Lehrer: -but do those things make it more of an individual crime for which only he is responsible or less of one maybe?

Imani Perry: Oh, I think it's absolutely a collective because the reality is that we have a social order in which people are socialized to be extremely selfish. We have an intensely anti-intellectual moment in history. We do have the Fox News rabbit hole where our society is proliferated with guns. It's a storm, and we all have a responsibility, particularly those of us who are of voting age, to respond to this storm. Sure there's lots of moments where people are ornery and hostile.

There was a viral video of someone being angry about a baby crying on the plane the other day, but we live in a society where those moments of anger can actually convert into absolute tragedy so easily. That's because we have people saying, "Well, it's your right to shoot somebody who irritates you and who is on your property." Or, "It's absolutely fine to have a stockpile of weapons for no particular reason besides your fantastical imagining that someone might charge into your house and do something to you." It is absolutely more a collective issue.

I think that's really important because it may be the case that this individual is held responsible, but the reality is that this will happen again and again until we start to decide that we're going to change this situation. The idea is that we don't want children shot and in some circumstances, thank God he survived, or killed. Not just that we want a "remedy." We want it not to happen in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, you can't legally shoot somebody on your property because they irritate you, to use the word you used a minute ago, but some commentators are talking about stand-your-ground laws such as protected George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin back in 2012. Stand-your-ground laws with an expanded definition of self-defense. Missouri officials haven't even ruled out that stand-your-ground might be used as a defense in court by Andrew Lester in the shooting of Ralph Yarl. Now, you are not a law professor, but do you have thoughts on where stand-your-ground laws or the mentality that it derives from and then in turn promotes might come in?

Imani Perry: Yes. I used to be a law professor although [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I didn't know that.

Imani Perry: Yes, for seven years. I started my career in legal academia, but I was not a crim professor, so I'll say this with a little bit of caution. Whether we're talking about expanded stand-your-ground laws or actually the logic of self-defense generally, that one of the challenges is that the interpretation of self-defense, whether it's expanded interpretation legally speaking or the exercise of discretion where people on a jury are interpreting self-defense or even in circumstances where there's a judge that racial ideologies often come into play in those moments of interpretation and they hinge upon the reasonable experience of fear.

That's part of the impact of a racially unjust society, and racially bigoted discourses is that oftentimes people think that fear is legitimated when it's not. I mean his mischaracterization of Ralph Yarl as 6 feet tall and if grabbing the door. I broke down when I saw the photograph of him in the hospital bed because he's still so narrow and slender and clearly a baby. He's 5'8. Even if he was 6 feet tall, it wouldn't matter, but that misinterpretation we know is common. There's lots of research on how Black children are adultified. They're misperceived as being older and bigger than they are.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the most infamous incidents of the last decade, that was a factor in the Michael Brown shooting where they saw him as being so big. That was a factor in the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was adultified by the police.

Imani Perry: Absolutely. We do have to think about, there's the issue of the law, but there's also the issue of the racial ideology and discourses that shape how people interpret the law, who make decisions about what does or doesn't happen to those who act violently.

Brian Lehrer: I was also thinking in the legal context this morning how Dominion Voting Systems just want a big liability settlement from Fox News for harming the company by unfairly making people suspicious of it. I guess in a court of law someone representing Black America can't sue Fox News on the same grounds, but do you see it that way?

Imani Perry: Yes, but it will be required to suing the entire nation and its history. It's not incidental that we're in this moment where there are states where there's legislation taking place against African American history or the study of Black life in any form because I think there is a desire to sustain the bigotry. I can't remember the exact number, but hundreds and hundreds of children came out to support Ralph Yarl. That is terrifying to those who want to maintain the status quo of racial inequality.

The way that they are organizing to prevent those young people from being moved in that way is to try to keep them ignorant. The charge, I think, yes to Fox News potentially, but so much of our history has been producing knowledge or limiting knowledge in ways, and present, that actually sustain and extend racial discrimination.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls about the shootings of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, Missouri, and Caitlin Gillis in Hebron, New York. Maybe you just need to say something out loud about how you feel. That's okay. Maybe you have some analysis or proposal or question for Imani Perry, an African American Studies professor from Princeton, former law professor, as we just learned. Maybe you just need a public venue for your grief and anger. You know what? We're here to provide that, actually, as one of the many things we do here on the show sometimes. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Professor Perry, part of your article in The Atlantic is about how things like this keep happening even though there is more coverage of them in the mainstream media in the last 10 years or so. You're referring maybe to the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and then Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 as the start of an era?

Imani Perry: Yes, it's the start of an era. I was, perhaps, I think, initially skeptical but people kept saying to me, "Oh, the growing awareness will change things." I said I wasn't certain that growing awareness would change things, but I did believe that growing awareness was important. Black people have been, of course, protesting these episodes for generations, literally speaking.

We had a moment of a garnering of national and international attention, and the beautiful thing is that millions of people of all sorts across the globe spoke out and devoted their time and energy to saying that they did not find this repeated pattern of targeting, of killing of unarmed Black people acceptable and yet, we are still in this same place. We have these moments.

Everybody says we've got to take to the streets, and we got to get this person prosecuted, and we have all those actions that we are hopeful, we want to act, we're hopeful that things will change, and they have not. We have to deal with that cycle. We have to acknowledge that reality. Something has to change.

Brian Lehrer: After those earlier cases, there was, of course, the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Ahmaud Arbery in 2020, which is kind of like the Yarl case because Ahmaud Arbery wasn't really doing anything. He was just out for a run. That was even worse, I think, if we can compare these things. His killers were hunters. The question that I'm setting up is that these attacks are making mainstream news.

The killers are at least more often being charged with murder, unlike George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin, or the cops who killed Michael Brown going to back then, and yet, as you say, these things keep happening. In your article, you reference Sisyphus from Greek mythology. Would you make that analogy for our listeners?

Imani Perry: Yes. I remember at a moment when that was the ready analogy that came as Sisyphus who keeps rolling the boulder up the hill, and it rolls down, and he's charged. This is his punishment. The boulder rolls down the hill, and he walks back down, and then he rolls it back up again, and then it goes down again, but really, this feels so much worse because it is devastating. It's a cycle. It's dizzying. We actually take a range of actions and expend energy in a variety of ways, and we experience trauma and grief in each instance.

Even the fact that part of the grief of this moment is that the child had to go to three houses before he got help. There's the shooter, but then there is whatever produces a response to a shot child that you would not immediately say, "I must help this child," is part of the problem too, and so yes, it's worse than Sisyphean. It's dizzying. It's devastating.

Brian Lehrer: The line of the article that the title is drawn from, "We know that all the awareness and outrage in the world hasn't changed things. Our need for action is a sorrowful distraction from the reality that even after the trial of the man charged in Ralph's shooting has run its course, if there is a trial, this country will break our hearts again." I'm curious before we take some phone calls where that leaves you personally or politically if your faith in progress towards safety and equality keep getting reduced because people will point to a big historical picture as they see it and say slavery was abolished eventually, Jim Crow was abolished eventually. It would be wrong to be too cynical about the idea of progress even with all the awfulness that persists so persistently.

Imani Perry: Right. I think immediately of James Baldwin's sentence, how long do you want for your progress? This is too slow. It's slow, and it's happening simultaneous to an intensity of backlash. There's a relitigation that's happening in the 1960s, and we see that with respect to reproductive rights. We see that with respect to the attack on LGBTQIA people and particularly trans children, and we see that with the hostility to African American history across the board. We're not just dealing with slow progress on one side. We're dealing with a rapid erosion of rights and access that people died for 50 years ago or 60 years ago.

Really, I'm not an organizer. I'm an intellectual, although I think I have a responsibility to be involved in movement. For me, the point of writing the piece is to say, "Look, this, we have to engage in some kind of course shift. The strategy has to shift. I don't know what it is, but in some ways, it's this hands-open saying, what are we going to do now because what we've been doing is not working?"

Brian Lehrer: Tara in Ocean County, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Not that far from Princeton where Imani Perry is a professor. Hi Tara, you're on the air.

Tara: Hi, thank you for taking my call. What I was telling your screener, and hopefully I can say again, is that as someone who grew up in school when the Columbine shooting happened and going through the fear of that, I was in college when Virginia attack happened, and now raising children of my own, it's hard to not just feel hopeless. It feels like depression and hopelessness is an appropriate response to the state of things right now.

Things seem to be getting worse, and planning trips to the grocery store to go when it's not crowded. When you go to a festival trying to think, "If something happens, where are we going to meet up? You take these kids. I'll take these kids. Don't look for us. We'll meet over here." Living like this, it's so heavy and exhausting. It feels like it's just permeated so much of life and it feels like it's getting worse. It's not getting better. It feels worse. I just don't see any hope of it getting better.

Brian Lehrer: I can hear or see or envision at least from this end of the microphone so many young parents like yourself nodding their heads in sad agreement right now. Professor Perry, I don't know what the response to Tara is. I don't know if it's comfort or just yes.

Imani Perry: Yes, I just appreciate so much what Tara testified to because she spoke to, I think, what is an overwhelming feeling. The reality is also that it's so unfair because this is what it means to have made a response. A response have to be private. Individuals have to imagine what they would do under impossible circumstances because our democracy is not functioning on these issues. These should not be things that individuals have to figure out how to resolve.

Our elected representatives, our community-based organizations should be able to represent the interests of what are legitimately the majority of Americans who think this is not how we should have to live and we should have some reasonable common sensical limitations on people's capacities to wreak havoc. It's so profoundly unfair that we have to try to figure this out on our own, and none of us have that--

I say at the end of the piece, I'm trying and talk about wishing watching my 16-year-old drive and wishing I could hold him to my chest again in the BabyBjörn and then realizing what would that do. I'm not any safer than he is. We're all vulnerable, every last one of us.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with more of your calls and Imani Perry from Princeton. We will get to at least one lighter thought from her article in The Atlantic about teenagers. Stay tuned for that but stay tuned as we continue on The Brian Lehrer Show in general.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Princeton professor of African American Studies, Imani Perry, author of the 2019 book that is sadly relevant to this moment after the shooting of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City called Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, and she has an article in The Atlantic now following the Ralph Yarl shooting called This Country Will Break Our Hearts Again. We will get to the shooting of the 20-year-old young white woman in Upstate New York and more on how they relate as we go.

We can't sugarcoat it, the emotions that people are having around this, and the fact that things like this happen again and again. Let's keep going. June in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in, June. Hi.

June: Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'm bereft and just heartbroken over this climate. I identify as biracial. My dad is white and my mom is Black. However, it's just [unintelligible 00:24:04] telling a story I went to a high school reunion recently and all of my friends are from originally Westchester County. We met from various parts of the country and one of my dearest friends, Leah, lives in North Carolina. She's a African American woman. Her response, because we all have children, is that she owns guns. She lives in a remote area, but she does have neighbors.

They're mixed race and she's always welcomed and feels comfortable in that community, but she says everyone in her area has guns and so she has guns. I asked her if she'd ever been to a firing range or anything. "No, but I just want to have it." Then she also said which shocked me, she's considering getting an assault weapon. I said, "Why in God's name would you do that?" She said, "I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it." That cognitive dissonance is just beyond my understanding.

Brian Lehrer: Did you keep going to get to a scenario that she has in mind in which she might need an assault weapon, not even just say a pistol, for self-defense?

June: She just said, "I have a perimeter. It is marked, but I know that I want to see someone coming and feel protected before they're on my doorstep." That terrifies me because it just seems like we're arming.

Brian Lehrer: Before they're even on her doorstep. Did that come to mind? Was that brought home even more shockingly when you heard the Ralph Yarl story?

June: It did. I just wept. I don't know what else to do. I pray. I weep.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Perry, you want to talk to June for a minute?

Imani Perry: Yes. What I thought immediately, it's devastating because you can visualize the scenario. It's the expression, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so someone walking up to your house could be seen as a threat. Then there's the element of the gun culture of the deep South and also of the Midwest and for African Americans, historically, of being attached to a logic of protection.

My mother talks about how in the neighborhood she grew up in, in Birmingham, my neighborhood is slightly different, but the men would patrol the streets at night with guns because the police could not be resorted to for safety and white people would place bombs in the neighborhood. This notion that guns protect you from racist violence has a real history and yet we can see how that goes awry as well.

I think the question for me again is always, how do we get past even this question being asked at the individual level? There's a reason we have governments theoretically that help us. It's sort of like Plato's Crito where the formulation is that in exchange for having the protection of a society, you have to be willing to make some concessions. Some of those concessions may be that you can't actually have assault rifles that can kill a huge number of people in a matter of seconds.

That's what I think the piece that we are missing is that we leave these decisions to individuals who may have any kinds of thoughts in their head which should not be left to individuals. You should have to mediate those things in order to be in community with other people.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I wonder if, for June's benefit, it's worth just quoting something from your article in The Atlantic, the part where you refer to the choreography as you call it. "We know what to post. We know what to listen for, where to be. We know what to wait for and who will speak." I guess my question, maybe a little on June's behalf, is does that choreography, in your opinion, serve a coping purpose like other rituals of grief and anger, and can it serve a collective as well as an individual purpose?

Imani Perry: Yes. I think that that's a really great point that it does serve a coping purpose. I think I'm so appreciative of June what you've said because it's important also to be able to speak those moments and the devastation. I think my worry is that the coping is seen as the response so often and that we have to understand the difference between when we need to be in community with each other, we need to testify, we need to hear, we need to be able to offer support that we also need to figure out a solution. That's essential and that's tough. Obviously, we don't know what to do. We don't know individually. We have to figure out collective solutions.

Brian Lehrer: June, anything else you want to say before you go?

June: I was just thinking as you were speaking that all of that resonates with me, and thank you. I will seek the article and those words. I think [unintelligible 00:30:04] because I know my friend so well, I think it was just a matter of feeling on the most fundamental level, safe amongst other people who want to be safe. I know her to be incredibly conscientious and passive. She's a loving human being. I just think, again, just that whole mindset that we're all in of just hunkering down and being ever watchful, but keeping an eye on her perimeter I think was what her intent was.

Brian Lehrer: Motivation was. June, thank you. Thank you very much. That puts me in mind of another passage from your article in the context of the other story this week of the 20-year-old white young woman who also accidentally went up to the wrong house, also shot by an elderly resident who apparently felt threatened. Her name, Kaylin Gillis. There are different details, of course, but eerily similar to the shooting of Ralph Yarl in some big respects. We have the New York Times headline that I cited in the intro, In a Nation Armed to the Teeth, These Tiny Missteps Led to Tragedy.

You wrote in your article, "Unquestionably, racism makes our experience as Black Americans more frightening, more dangerous, but they won't even save their own children." All of our kids are coming of age in a society in crisis. I think that's exactly what we've been hearing on the phones this morning which leads back to politics, I guess, and to June's friend who's gotten the AR-15, not for aggressive purposes as she sees it, but defensive ones.

Imani Perry: Yes. There's so many moments of devastation, but there was a particularly harrowing dynamic, I think, for me, after Sandy Hook, because I was like, "If in this instance the society is not changed, I don't know what will occur." I think to a certain extent, the refusal to respond to a circumstance like Kaylin Gillis's murder, I guess that's not the technical term yet, but killing, in a way that is-- it really speaks to the values of the nation.

There's racial inequality on one side, but then there is also this pathological commitment to private property and fetishization of guns that even the figure that has been described as the person who should be most protected in the society, a young white woman, can be killed with impunity says a lot about where we are.

Honestly, that also struck fear in my heart because my older son, who was 19, as she was with a group of friends hanging out for that exact same weekend, and they were driving back to campus, they could have very easily dipped into somebody's driveway to make a turn. You don't think to tell your kid, "Make sure you don't turn in someone's driveway for 10 seconds. They might kill you." It's absurd.

Brian Lehrer: David in Middlesex County in Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, David.

David: Hey, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: I'm all right under the circumstances. Thank you for calling in.

David: What--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, David. Go ahead.

David: Oh, Brian, you can hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you loud and clear.

David: Okay. The professor is extremely articulate, and she's really putting down some serious knowledge. I'm Black and I'm also a former CIA employee. I worked in Washington for about 16 years. I've been all over the United States, been to South America, been to a lot of places, seen a lot of stuff. I think since the 45th president got into office, before he got into office, he riled up a lot of white males who were angry about-- I don't know if they're losing their jobs or they think minorities are taking over the country, but what they failed to realize--

My mom had a master's in education. My mom taught for 35 years in Newark. Black people, basically, during slavery, we raised white people's kids, we picked all the food. Asian people laid the railroads. There wouldn't even be a United States without minorities, so why white men in particular are getting all bent out of shape because so many minorities from India and this and that, I'm like, "What is wrong with you? Nobody's threatening you. Nobody's bothering you."

But the gun situation, that's just a long, long issue. The problem is that there's too many mentally unstable people and angry people with guns. That's the basic problem. I think, in every state, before you buy a gun, you need to get a [unintelligible 00:35:32] profile, hands, bottom line, bar none because there's too many lunatics shooting people like the girls in Texas I just told your screener. The girls in Texas. The cheerleaders got shot. This was a crazy week, and it's just getting crazier. I don't know what to do. That's my thought. Thanks, guys.

Brian Lehrer: David, thank you. Thank you. Call us again. Professor Perry, he brings up the psych profile, as he calls it, but also the sociological profile of what happened around the time that 45, as he called him, meaning Donald Trump, was running for office and in office. I haven't seen exact polling, maybe you know it, but we do seem to live in an age where despite the objective facts on the ground, white people might feel as aggrieved as Black people on racial grounds.

Imani Perry: Yes. I think that although that's not the first time, you can go back to right after the Civil War, you have lawsuits in which people are saying Black people need to stop being the special favorites of the law, and I think of in the thick of the birth of Jim Crow. I think that in that [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: That was an argument against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, right?

Imani Perry: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: That was going to confer special rights?

Imani Perry: Special rights, yes. The reality is that it is about the way in which white people can be manipulated with a sense of fear that they will lose their relative advantage and therefore feel even more vulnerable and in some ways a displacement of the anxiety and vulnerability in a society that actually fails to adequately protect all of its citizens. A displacement of that fear onto people who were below them as opposed to above, lets say it that way, onto people who have been historically marginalized.

Well, if everything is equal, then my status drops is the fear. That is what it is. I do think that the thing about the psychological element though, in some ways, it's predicated on, I think, a myth that the majority of us are all well and that there's a small number of people who are psychologically unhealthy. If we are in a society that is profoundly unhealthy in so many ways, we all actually are vulnerable psychologically, particularly in the midst of the aftermath of COVID, and as a consequence of this, all of this death and the hypermedia landscape where people are connected to phones 24/7 and we're filled with all kinds of chemicals.

All of us actually are at risk of making poor decisions when we have deadly weapons in our hands. I think we have to acknowledge that and to think about our collective well-being, given our collective lack of healthfulness as a society.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, I said to the audience before that we would include at least one thought on the lighter side from your article, and that is that you wrote that you love teenagers, and that's part of why you teach college students. Not everyone says they love teenagers. [laughter] Why do you?

Imani Perry: Oh, because they're amazing because they're so smart and they're so curious, but they're also so goofy and they make terrible decisions. It's like the perfect storm of humanity. They're babies. They're the wisest. They're goofy. I think it's important, though, to keep that in mind, to have a tender heart to that age. We have these moments, and then people start evaluating. I mean, this question of whether or not he held the door, my goodness.

I believe Ralph Yarl, that he did not, but I just am astounded at the conversation we can have so easily that moves us away from the reality of how magnificently messy teenagers are. I just think we have to remember our tenderness in these moments that that should be part of our political and social analysis. Love them. Love the kids.

Brian Lehrer: They're babies and they're wise.

Imani Perry: [laughs] Yes, that's [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: With that, we leave it with Princeton professor of African American Studies, Imani Perry. She is author of the 2019 book that is sadly relevant to the conversation we've been having today called Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, and she has an article in The Atlantic now following the Ralph Yarl shooting called This Country Will Break Our Hearts Again. Professor Perry, we really appreciate you coming on today for this.

Imani Perry: Thank you so much for the conversation, Brian.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.