America Trends Podcast

 Many say that AI will keep you from working because your skills can be replaced by this technology in ways that make it faster and cheaper for companies to accomplish the work.  Well, here’s another way AI may affect your job. Have you heard about the resume robots?  Many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) that scan for hyper-specific keywords which are often pulled straight from the job description.  These ATS systems can act as a digital filter replete with hidden biases that may silently purge candidates based on age, race, gender or disability before a human ever sees t...

There has been a lot of ink spilled trying to explain the climate weirdness which has spread all across the globe.  And while some of the metrics may still be questioned, the near universal effects agreed upon by climate scientists and visible to the naked eye are upon us.  So how well do we really understand what is happening and why?  Pable Ribeiro Dias, Ph.D. in his new book “Climate Changed:  The Science of Sustainability and How Each of Us Can Do Our Part,” is the primer and reference resource we’ve all been waiting for on this vit...

 The thirty-year history of the WNBA has been a raucous roller-coaster and controversy continues to swirl around the league, as it welcomes new teams, new revenue streams, greater audience interest and yet retains ongoing socio-political challenges based on sex, sexual orientation and color. It is fair to say that the league could not have achieved the status of the longest-running professional women’s sports league in US history without a certain cache that has been growing over the years.  The league is trying to grow into the fact that players are key and that how you compensate them and buil...

Many people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 were hoping that he could restore the economy back to levels before the pandemic and somehow bring inflation down. That hasn’t happened and affordability is hanging around the neck of Republicans like an albatross going into the mid- term elections.  Still others wanted a tougher immigration policy, but no one bargained for citizens getting swept up in ICE raids and others getting gunned down like in Minneapolis, Houston and Maine.  Another group thought Donald Trump would keep us out of foreign adventurism and yet we are now bogged down in a co...

 Individually and collectively, the Beatles and Bob Dylan were the pulse, the heartbeat, and the cultural pacesetters of the 1960’s.  They each influenced the course of popular music for generations, but until now, there hasn’t been a serious investigation into the ways their rivalry and collaboration affected the other. In his new book, “Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other–and the World,” Jim Windolf, features editor at the New York Times, does a deep dive into the personal and musical cross-pollination between the two.  Would Dylan have gone electric at the Newpor...

Carole King was always a great writer of pop melodies from the early days of Teen Pan Alley, at the Brill Building, in the heart of midtown Manhattan, when she and her then husband, Gerry Goffin, a lyricist, gave us classics like “Up on the Roof”, “Natural Woman,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Locomotion” and hundreds more.  Her transformation in 1971 to a recording artist giving us one of the most successful albums in history, “Tapestry,” was something many who knew her might not have anticipated.  She was shy and not confident about her vocal abilities and star power.  And, yet...

We are all in the doom loop of what has become known as the ‘annoyance economy’.  You know the drill–long hold times on calls and the ‘friendly’ AI assistant unwilling to get you to a human, hidden junk fees, voluminous spam offers, health insurance wrangling that pits you against health care giants, corporate-friendly cancellation processes that are designed to make you throw up your hands and pay the damn bill regardless of the validity of your claim, airline policies from ‘budget’ carriers that are anything but (and it’s impossible to navigate their websites or talk to a human) and subscr...

Our guest has resurrected the word ‘instigators’ and given it a powerful and positive connotation. In this case, she is bringing attention the historical importance of Black women, ages 18 to 45, whose role continues to be that of pushing our society forward for social justice and historic reforms of all kinds.  Atima Omara, author of “The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy and What We Can Learn from Them”, challenges us to consider any progressive movement–be it abolition, voting rights, labor justice, the environment, the rights for LGBTQ and those advances relating to persons with disability–...

Google Trends reported a 2,400 percent increase in searches for “AI girlfriends” recently.  Millions of people are currently in what they consider to be serious relationships with AI.  Thousands have engaged in ceremonial weddings with their AI companions and stay as faithful to them as they would a human partner.  Could legal marriage to AI be far off?  To many of us such concepts are unusual to say the least.  However, it’s hard not to see how so many in our society could take their screen addiction to another level as they seek some form of connectedness.  While in sci-fi we ha...

Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory.  Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success.  In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away.  This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team.  It all could have ended right there, but for the determination of Bob King and Bill Hodges to brin...

 You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions.  In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories from the Old Guy at the End of the Bar.”  The book is a spirited read full of life lessons, based on his years working on ranch crews, winning buckles in cow work competitions...