We wanted to get to some of the larger questions raised by the story of the ongoing water crisis in Flint. So we got some context from some people who follow this stuff for a living: Brentin Mock of CityLab and Talia Buford of the Center for Public Integrity.

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Our second annual Valentine's Day episode! Ko and Gene hear stories of a woman who survives a disastrous Tinder date with a superstar athlete, a young man whose shoe fails him at inopportune time, and woman who finds exactly the man of her dreams, thanks to a fortune teller. (Sorta.) Some salty language. Thanks to Morgan Jerkins, Decker Ngongang and Bee Quammie for telling us about their dating stories. Shouts to the people who agreed to read their tweets about their bad dates: Danielle Lavore Evans, Twila Ann, Christina Hernandez Brown, Jordan Pelavin, Caroline Edgar, Victoria Walker, and Lenore.[Our theme music is 'Nic's Groove' by The Foreign Exchange, and used with permission. This week's outro music is "Something to Behold,' by F.E.]

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When Angela's sprawling, keenly observed debut novel, "The Turner House," dropped last spring, it won rave reviews in big, important outlets like The New York Times. The novel picks up in 2008, with the housing market in full swoon. The many siblings of the huge Turner family in Detroit are fighting over what to do with the home in which they grew up: their matriarch is elderly and fading; the house is practically worthless. The novel hopscotches across the decades, telling the story of the Turners and the big, messy city they call home. Six months after it dropped, "The Turner House" is on the fiction shortlist for the National Book Award, the winner of which will be announced this Wednesday. Angela has been part of the PostBourgie family since nearly the beginning, and we were amped that she sat down to talk with G.D. about writing dialogue, channeling the very different POVs of her characters, and her otherwise big-ass year.

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Spike Lee's forthcoming flick, "Chi-Raq." is a satire about a woman who rallies the other women in her neighborhood to stop having sex with their male lovers in order to use it as leverage and get them to Stop The Violence™ . Oddly enough, that happens to the very same plot of a low-budget 2003 movie called "A Miami Tail" starring Trina. (Actual tagline: "Until they lay down their guns, this gang ain't banging!") In this mini-episode, G.D. sat down to watch and discuss "Tail" with Akoto Ofori-Atta of The Trace and Soraya Nadia McDonald of the Washington Post so you wouldn't have to.

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#38: Race Is Always The Issue. (November 1, 2015) by PostBourgie

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We were originally planning to have Deadspin’s Greg Howard on the podcast to talk about race and sports journalism — with our peg being the series of articles he wrote about the woes of The Undefeated, the troubled, much-delayed race, culture and sports site from ESPN helmed by Jason Whitlock. Whitlock had been one of the most famous and controversial sportswriters in America, having built his polarizing career on his essays connecting sports to the evils of black pathology. He could be petty and ugly, like when he wrote that Serena Williams would never be an all-time great because she was fat and lazy ("[S]eriously, how else can Serena fill out her size 16 shorts without grazing at her stall between matches?" he wrote). And he could be simplistic and scolding, as in diatribes about the evils inherent to female basketball players dunking or black people's use of the word "nigger.") Howard’s articles argue that the enmity Whitlock earned from black journos and writers for this schtick made it nearly...

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G.D. and Terryn talk to Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker, who went back to his former high school in Queens, which was recently closed down. Jelani was trying to figure out how the diverse, highly regarded school quickly deteriorated quickly after he graduated in the 1980s and soon became, to many, an example of why big, neighborhood schools can't work. (Hint: HOUSING SEGREGATION.) And Eve Ewing of Seven Scribes talks to G.D. about the fight to save Walter Dyett High School, the last public school open to everyone in Bronzeville, a historic black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Protesters there had been staging a month-long hunger strike to keep Dyett's doors open, and Eve says that the fight over the school has huge implications for the neighborhood, where so many local public schools have been shut down by the city over the last decade.

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It's the beginning of football season, so we decided to re-up a favorite old episode of ours where we spoke to Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic about his decision to stop watching the NFL after the evidence of the effects of football-related brain injuries became too hard to ignore.

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The N.W.A. movie "Straight Outta Compton" is the latest entrant into the anemic hip-hop biopic genre. It's crushing at the box office even as controversies around who was cast in it and which details were left out of it. (Namely: all of the women, ever.) Jalen Coats (@jvcoats), a writer and DJ from LA, joins GD to figure out what it all means, and argue over which great female MCs should get a biopic of their own, and also why biopics should never exist.

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On a recent two-part story on This American Life, Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine went to Normandy High School — the struggling St. Louis County school from which Michael Brown graduated just weeks before he was killed last year in Ferguson. Normandy is the lowest-ranked high school in Missouri and nearly entirely black, and when a series of events opened the door for hundreds of Normandy kids to be bussed to Francis Howell High School, a high-performing, mostly-white high school a few towns over, the Normandy kids were greeted with massive opposition from white parents.Nikole and G.D. talked about her reporting on the seemingly insurmountable problem of school segregation in America's schools, and why it makes sense to be pessimistic about America achieving racial equality.

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Terryn is packing up and moving to the D for a new gig! To help get her ready, we convened some folks who have Big Thoughts about the state of the Motor City. Angela Flournoy, the author of the critically acclaimed new novel, "The Turner House," set her book there, the city where her father grew up. And Siwatu Moore, a writer in Brooklyn, is a Detroit native. Will Detroit have to morph into something unrecognizable in order to survive? And does Detroit have more cat daddies per capita than any city in the world?

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