Code Switch

President Trump and Silicon Valley tech bros are obsessed with IQ, but the history of intelligence testing is full of bunk race science and eugenics. With the rise of AI's "super intelligence," should we still be ranking human intelligence at all? We teamed up with our play cousins from It's Been a Minute to find out who gets to be labeled as smart with Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and Angela Saini, author of Superior: The Return of Race Science.

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Are the men in your life reading? How do you convince people to check out more novels? This week, we turn to our play cousins at It's Been a Minute and their recent conversation with author Jason Reynolds. Reynolds is the acclaimed author of young adult novels, Look Both Ways, Long Way Down, and Ghost and he joins host Brittany Luse to discuss the lessons in empathy, friendship and hope that novels can inspire in all readers.

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In 2020, “defund the police” was everywhere. Now, even politicians like AOC and Zohran Mamdani have turned around on it. But some proposals that fell under the defund umbrella, like unarmed crisis responders and violence prevention programs, actually took hold. Gene talks with Chenjerai Kumanyika, journalism professor and creator of the Empire City podcast about the history of the NYPD. They dig into why politicians will say “abolish ICE” but not “defund the police,” and whether the public is more ready to rethink policing than the people running for office think they are.

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Right-wing ideology has crept into gyms across the country. Is this a new phenomenon, or is the very idea of "fitness" ripe for politicization? Is our idea of fitness inherently fascist? We find out with political commentator Hasan Piker, historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and professor Ava Purkiss, author of Fit Citizens.

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Why do Black contestants on reality TV keep getting voted out first? Like a lot of people, B.A. Parker watches reality TV to escape. But seeing contestants of color on the receiving end of microaggressions keeps pulling her back to reality. Parker talks with Xavier Prather, Big Brother’s first Black winner, and sociologist Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, about whether reality TV has an implicit bias problem.

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