With Good Reason

Children of Asian immigrants face tension between pressures at home and demands of the broader American culture. Social Worker Peter Nguyen ( Virginia Commonwealth University) says we need more culturally sensitive therapists and social workers to help parents and children work through the extremely tough task of living in two worlds. Also: America must compete [...]

William Faulkner was a rich presence on the University of Virginia grounds fifty years ago. Steve Railton (University of Virginia) discusses Faulkner’s influence on American literature and what the recordings from his time at UVa offer visitors to a current Faulkner exhibit. Also: Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald had a celebrity marriage during the Jazz [...]

Dan Kerr (James Madison University) says America has a homelessness crisis. To find out why, he spoke to homeless people on the streets and in the shelters of Cleveland, Ohio, and he has recordings of those conversations to share. He’s found that the causes of homelessness lie in the lack of affordable housing and the [...]

“Losers shop at Target.” That’s one of the messages coming through in ‘Gossip Girls,’ a popular teen book and TV series. Naomi Johnson (Longwood University) says these books are filled with product placements that try to convince young girls that the most important thing in life is to get a boy through buying and wearing [...]

Winner of the 2009 Gabriel Award for “News/Informational Radio Programming – Markets 1-25,” designed to honor works of excellence in broadcasting which serve viewers and listeners through the positive, creative treatment of concerns to humankind. Roberta Culbertson (Center on Violence and Community at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) looks for ways to mitigate the [...]

Men and women who believe in sharing housework equally often find it difficult to do so in a marriage. Sociologist Shannon Davis (George Mason University) explains why live-in boyfriends generally perform more housework than husbands. Also: When a single individual holds conflicting points of view on a subject, that’s called ambivalence. Professor of Communications Xiaoquan [...]

Many companies are now hiring “actors” to strike up conversations with unsuspecting customers in order to convince people to buy their products according to Vince Magnini (Longwood University). This growing use of undercover sales agents along with ‘product placement’ in the movies and television raises ethical and legal questions. Also: We think of the Holidays as a [...]

Why are we both titillated and repulsed by relationships between much older men and younger women? Authors Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote provocative books that featured May-December romances but literature professor Esther Godfrey (Longwood University) says those relationships are far more complex than most readers assume. Godfrey says these novels can offer [...]

Nurses are already in short supply, and some predict the shortage will be critical in just a few years. When the baby boomers retire, they will need far more nurses than we currently have. Jeanette Lancaster (University of Virginia) and Marti Barnas (Virginia Western Community College) talk about the pending nursing shortage and how Virginia is trying to make [...]

They’re baaaaack! Liberal use of DDT and other pesticides virtually eliminated bedbugs in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, but international travel has brought these unwanted passengers back into our hotel rooms. Entomology Professor Dini Miller (Virginia Tech) is studying the bedbug problem. She’s growing them in her lab, and volunteer graduate students are offering up [...]