Patt Morrison for Thursday, February 10, 2011

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Thursday, February 10, 2011

1-3 p.m.

 

CALL-IN @ 866-893-5722, 866-893-KPCC; OR JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE ON THE PATT MORRISON BLOG AT KPCC-DOT-ORG

 

 

1:06 – 1:39

OPEN

 

 

1:41 – 1:58:30

Zero-sum future:  American power in the age of anxiety

The Information Age has given way to an Age of Anxiety, as Gideon Rachman sees it. In his new book, Zero-Sum Future, the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times, depicts a financially stable China manufacturing most of America’s products, a potentially unstable Middle East possessing most of the world’s oil, and America exercising its military and political muscle to maintain its power position.  Rachman argues that the financial and economic crisis unleashed by the Wall Street crash of September 2008 annihilated the assumptions that globalization was a win-win for all. It is no longer clear or even likely that globalization benefits all.  We explore unrest in Egypt, melting ice caps in the Arctic, pandemic disease in the third world, and the threat of nuclear weapons from the Cold War falling into the hands of new-age terrorists.

 

Guest:

Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times; author of “Zero-Sum Future:  American Power in an Age of Anxiety”

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• Rachman joined the Financial Times after a fifteen-year career at the Economist, which included spells as foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington, and Bangkok. This is his first book.

 

 

 

2:06 – 2:30

Is bullying the key to popularity? Counterintuitive research on status-climbing bullies

The Hollywood stereotype is that bullies are feared social outcasts, bringing misery & pain (both physical & emotional) to their cowering colleagues.  While they certainly bring misery & pain it turns out that bullies might not be the social outcasts we had assumed.  New research out of UC Davis followed almost 4,000 kids at middle schools in North Carolina, tracing their friendships and identifying the bullies and the bullying behavior as relationships among the students changed and grew.  Over four years time they found that one-third of the students in engaged in bullying and those that were moving up the school popularity chain bullied more as they went higher.  Only when kids reached the very top 2% of the school’s social hierarchy, or fell into the bottom 2%, did the bullying begin to tail off.  In a sense, bullying acted as a status-climbing tool, helping to solidify a student’s popularity.  As bullying becomes easier and more insidious, in the digital age of social networking, does this new information help to stop some seriously damaging behavior?

 

Guests:

Diane Felmlee, professor of social psychology at the University of California, Davis; author of the study in the American Sociological Review

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Jana Juvonen, Professor of Developmental Psychology at UCLA. She’s been studying bullying for more than a decade and is the co-author of “Peer Harassment in School: the Plight of the Victim”

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-          she’s currently conducting a longitudinal bullying study of 2,000 middle school students and following them through to the end of high school

-          says it’s too soon to know how social media & technology are impacting bullying, but it’s something interesting to consider

-          there are similar psychological findings re:popular kids = bullies, but they use a different methodology than sociologists to come to the same conclusion

 

 

 

2:30 – 2:39

Who will mediate the coming California civil war:  L.A. vs. San Diego over the Chargers

The first shot was fired in 1982 when Al Davis moved the Raiders from Oakland down to Los Angeles.  The Bay Area would exact its revenge on SoCal by luring the Raiders back to Oakland in 1995, and since then there have been plenty of threatened moves by California sports franchises but it has largely remained a cold war.  Talk of moving franchises is heating up again, as L.A. prepares to build a $1 billion stadium in the hopes of bringing the NFL back to the country’s second largest city and many L.A. football fans have their eyes on a local target, the San Diego Chargers.  Meanwhile up north San Jose is working hard to steal the 49ers away from San Francisco and the baseball Athletics away from Oakland.  Who will settle these simmering disputes as California threatens to break out into a sports civil war?  If Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has his way it will be a new state sports authority, an agency he hopes will eliminate city rivalries, help to finance new stadiums and attracting teams to California.  Ammiano better hurry up, before San Diego launches a preemptive strike on L.A.

 

Guests:

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-13^th District (San Francisco); author of the sports authority legislation

HE CALLS US:

 

 

2:41 – 2:58:30

“America’s Finest News Source” – yes, it’s The Onion

The Onion calls itself a “national publication and website that offers award-winning news and views that readers can't get anywhere else.” True, and well and good. Except it’s not all true; the news, views and everything else they print, video or stream are fake – brilliant, funny, bitingly satirical – but fake none the less. Ten funny people produce the content, most of whom met about 20 years ago at a University of Wisconsin Madison student newspaper and have been creating journalistic mayhem ever since. The print and online versions are now coupled with “The Onion News Network,” a 24 hour video news network on IFC, and “Onion SportsDome” on Comedy Central, new ventures that skewer cable news and sports in one – no, that’s two, blows. Editors Joe Randazzo and Will Tracy are here with behind the scenes secrets of today’s leading source for “news without mercy.”

 

PATT:  The two editors headline tonight at UCLA Live at Royce Hall, starting at 8 pm.

 

Guests:

Joe Randazzo, Editor of The Onion

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Will Tracy, Assistant Editor of The Onion

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Jonathan Serviss
Senior Producer, Patt Morrison
Southern California Public Radio
NPR Affiliate for Los Angeles
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626.583.5171, office
415.497.2131, mobile
jserviss@kpcc.org / jserviss@scpr.org
www.scpr.org