Emily Woodbury

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” during the noon hour on Wednesday. This story will be updated after the show. Here’s how to listen live.

Since 2014, the photoblog Humans of St. Louis has curated more than 2,400 stories online. Each post includes a photo and short description, giving the world an intimate look into the lives and struggles of the people who live in St. Louis.

The organization has expanded its showcase to the St. Louis Lambert International Airport with a new exhibit, “Humans of St. Louis: The People of St. Louis, One Photo & Story at a Time.”

While “the cyclical nature of generational denigration is embedded in our history,” generational labels like “baby boomer” and “millennial” are artificial and wrong, says St. Louis University associate professor Cort Rudolph.

Rudolph recently wrote about the topic in his campus editorial “OK Boomer Not OK, Nor Backed by Research.” Mostly, he is concerned that routinely categorizing people of different ages by generation leads to ageism.

The deadline to enroll in a health care plan via the Affordable Care Act marketplace is Dec. 15. Are plans more or less affordable than in previous years? What should people be aware of while searching for plans outside of the ACA marketplace?

Thursday on St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske put these questions to Timothy McBride of Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to talking about the health and future of the ACA marketplace, McBride, the co-director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy, discussed what Medicaid expansion could look like in Missouri. Just last week, Gov. Mike Parson said he would expand the program if voters say that’s what they want. 

The Earth’s moon contains ice, but scientists don’t know much about where the water came from. As the moon formed, water could have come from Earth’s volcanoes in the form of gas. It could have been brought there by comets and meteorites. Or, it may have traveled to the lunar surface via solar wind that interacted with minerals on the moon to create water. 

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are teaming up to find some answers. The team has been chosen as one of NASA’s eight new Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institutes. They are part of a five-year cooperative agreement valued at more than $7 million.

University of Missouri-St. Louis researchers connected with students in the Ruhr area of Germany to get a sense of how gentrification manifests in post-industrial cities like St. Louis.

They submitted their final presentation, “Clean Walls = Higher Rents?! Gentrification Debates in Legacy Cities” to the intercultural student project, “Future of My City,” and they recently won first place in the initiative's competition.

On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, UMSL graduate student Adam Brown and doctoral student Liz Deichmann talked about the findings of their study, including the ways Dortmund, Germany, has implemented practices that mitigate the issues of gentrification, like the displacement of low-income residents by the more affluent.

Since 2005, the Grannie Annie Family Story Celebration has encouraged young people to discover, write and share stories about their family history. 

Monday on St. Louis on the Air, Sarah Fenske talked with Grannie Annie board member Martha Stegmaier, as well as Karissa Hsu, who wrote a story about her grandmother’s journey to America after fleeing conflict in East Asia during WWII. Her father Leo also joined the conversation.

Nov. 24 marks five years since the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer responsible for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Ferguson received a lot of attention during and after the unrest, but the town of Dellwood also experienced upheaval. 

After the grand jury decision, five of Dellwood’s stores were looted and 13 businesses were set on fire. 

“It was a very traumatic event emotionally to our community, but I’m just glad we have rebounded from that,” said Dellwood Mayor Reggie Jones on Monday’s St. Louis on the Air. 

The new artistic director of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Hana Sharif, makes her directorial debut at the Rep this December with an adaption of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

On Thursday’s St. Louis on the Air, Sarah Fenske spoke with Sharif about the production and her background.

The International Institute of St. Louis has been a welcoming community for immigrants and refugees to the area for 100 years. Its mission is to foster a more connected community to benefit not only immigrants and their families, but the wider community as well. 

According to IISTL President and CEO Anna Crosslin, most of the organization’s events are “geared toward trying to demystify ‘the other,’ so that people are less fearful.”

“They can find out that there are, in fact, shared values and behaviors among people that go beyond the visible differences,” she said.

In the new Netflix documentary "The Game Changers," a former team physician for the St. Louis Rams and Cardinals challenges what he refers to as a “locker-room mythology about meat, protein and strength.”

“The attitude of most athletes for many years was that you had to eat meat to get protein, [that] we need that protein to get big and strong, and again, that meat was the best source. But that’s clearly just not true,” Dr. James Loomis said Friday on St. Louis on the Air.

“There are many, many highly successful athletes, both in the strength world … but also endurance athletes, who really thrive on a plant-based diet.”

The Trump administration’s formal withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change has members of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative concerned. The organization is worried that the withdrawal could lead to U.S. commodities producers being taxed or penalized by countries that signed on to the accord, something that the European Union has signaled it would like to pursue.

In 2009, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan suddenly experienced hallucinations, paranoia, seizures and catatonia. She was misdiagnosed for a month before she was finally treated for a rare autoimmune disease that can attack the brain, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.

Cahalan has little recollection of this time in her life, but she investigated her experience and published the details in her 2012 book, “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness.”

Most people are knowledgeable about the early accomplishments of Michelangelo, like his work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in his 30s. But the artist and architect worked well into his 80s, at a time when the average life expectancy was about 40 to 45 years. In fact, he was still carving sculptures four days before he died.

Nov. 9 will mark 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall that divided Germany from 1961 to 1989.

A dance production being staged this week by St. Louis’ Modern American Dance Company explores the personal stories behind the politics of that moment in time. The production, “WallSTORIES,” was choreographed by native Berliner Nejla Yatkin and is a collaboration between MADCO and the University of Missouri-St. Louis' German Culture Center. 

At a 2017 funeral service for a student at Yeatman-Liddell Preparatory Middle School in north St. Louis, Nate Oatis noticed a young friend of the victim trying not to cry. 

“I could feel the gentleman’s energy, [this] 13- to 14-year-old trying to process the death of another 13- to 14-year-old due to gun violence. As he tried to bottle that energy, that intense emotion that really needed to spill, I put my arms around him and embraced him, and he absolutely melted,” Oatis said. “It broke my heart to think that a child doesn’t have the ability to vent those types of frustrations.”

Missouri is one of the only states that did not update its tax law after the U.S. Supreme Court case South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc. This decision allowed states to charge a sales tax on purchases from out-of-state businesses, even if the businesses don't have a physical presence in the state.

Missouri lawmakers’ inaction on this issue is causing the state to miss out on up to $600 million in sales taxes a year, according to the nonprofit Faith, Justice and Truth Project.

Thursday on St. Louis on the Air, Sarah Fenske talked with state Sen. Karla May, D-St. Louis, and state Rep. Justin Hill, R-Lake St. Louis, about the recent push for an online sales tax in Missouri and how the issue may be addressed in the upcoming legislative session, which begins Jan. 8.

Better Together was supposed to merge St. Louis and St. Louis County through a statewide initiative, but backers withdrew their proposal last spring after facing a major backlash.

In its place, the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis developed a plan to put together a Board of Freeholders. The Board of Freeholders will have representation from both city and county, and special powers under the state constitution. Members can draft a plan to merge the city and county or drop the idea altogether. 

Growing up in the 1960s, Carolyn Kidd Royal experienced racist incidents that, combined with the way African American history was taught in schools, affected her sense of identity for the worse. 

“In that mid-’60s timeframe ... you weren’t happy that your skin was brown, that your hair was a little different; and overall, we did not have a sense of pride in our race and in our individual selves. At least, I didn’t,” she said.

But, as the civil rights movement gave way to the Black Power movement, shifts in culture made a difference. Specifically, the 1969 James Brown classic “Say It Loud.”

NPR Silicon Valley correspondent Aarti Shahani has written a memoir about her family’s journey from pre-partition India to Casablanca to New York. It’s called “Here We Are: American Dreams, American Nightmares.” 

Shahani said that her father lived the nightmare, but that she lived the dream. 

“Not that it was easy,” she added. “I detail in this book how the justice system derailed my life. I grew up in the shadow of a legal case that was supposed to go away, but never did, and that’s a very common experience in America.

Today is Columbus Day, and it also marks a holiday that more and more cities and organizations are formally recognizing: Indigenous Peoples’ Day. 

Indigenous Peoples’ Day was first proposed in 1977 by a delegation of Native nations to the United Nations, and it’s meant to honor Native Americans with a recognition of their histories and cultures.

In 2008, with his book “Mapping Decline,” history professor Colin Gordon brought context to the issues of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts and abandoned factories in the St. Louis region.

Gordon’s new book, "Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs," digs into how municipal boundaries and school district lines were drawn to exclude and how local policies and services were weaponized to maintain civic separation.

According to projections by the United Nations, our current food system won’t adequately sustain the 9 billion people expected to be living on Earth by 2050. Protein, the most resource-intensive ingredient in food, will be especially hard to produce.

St. Louis resident Sarah Schlafly is keenly aware of that fact. That’s why she started Mighty Cricket, a startup that produces food products including powdered, roasted crickets.

Crickets are a protein source comparable to animal protein. They can also be farmed in small spaces within an urban setting. Schlafly predicts that this food source will become quite affordable roughly 30 years from now, right around when animal protein will likely be more expensive and harder to come by.

With Wednesday night’s win, the St. Louis Cardinals advanced to the National League Championship Series for the first time since 2014. 

On Friday’s St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske talked with Missy Kelley, the CEO of Downtown St. Louis Inc., about the economic boost the Cardinals’ success is providing to the St. Louis area. They also talked about Ballpark Village’s new high-end housing options, and Kelley shared her top picks for businesses that have opened downtown in recent years.

Here’s a sobering statistic from the animal advocacy nonprofit Red Rover: Only 10% of domestic violence shelters accept pets. That means many people fleeing abuse find themselves giving up animals with whom they’ve formed meaningful bonds. And sometimes, those animals themselves are at risk of experiencing abusive behavior. 

Such was the case for Jill and her 10 year old lab-mix named Scarlet. Like Jill, Scarlet is also a domestic violence survivor of the same situation. 

President Trump has appointed judges at a fast and steady pace since he took office almost three years ago. His administration has appointed nearly one in four of the country’s federal appeals court judges and one in seven of U.S. district court judges. 

“You’re going to see a dramatic switch in the lower courts to a much, much more conservative approach,” said NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on St. Louis on the Air.

Since 1999, Washington University’s Mini-Medical School has taught students everything from the basics of a checkup to how to repair nerves via microscopic surgery.

There is no homework and there are no tests. These courses are offered simply to help foster a better understanding of the medical field, and anyone with an interest in learning can attend. In fact, students come from all walks of life. The course’s youngest students come from high school, and the oldest student attended class at 96 years old.

For the past five years, Champale Anderson has distributed free snack bags to kids in her neighborhood who would otherwise go hungry.

“Sometimes that snack is the only thing the kids have that evening,” she said. “They get a bag at 3 p.m., and they’re back by 7 p.m. for more.”

Attending a baseball game at Busch Stadium in the middle of downtown St. Louis is quite a different experience from going to a game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where the stadium is surrounded by parking lots.

In her new book, historian Connie Sexauer argues that a stadium in the midst of the city brings people of different socioeconomic backgrounds together, and it shapes the culture of the businesses and neighborhoods that reside nearby.

Better Together, the plan to merge St. Louis and St. Louis County through a statewide initiative, withdrew its proposal this past spring. In its place developed a plan to put together a Board of Freeholders, which would have the ability to either draft a plan that could merge the city and county, or drop the idea altogether. 

The Municipal League of Metro St. Louis is in the process of submitting petitions to the election boards of the city and county that would begin the Board of Freeholders process. 

The Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation is unveiling its 2019 Places in Peril list today, which details places threatened by deterioration, lack of maintenance, insufficient funding, imminent demolition and development. 

On St. Louis on the Air Friday, host Sarah Fenske spoke with the executive director of the Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation, Bill Hart, about the places included on this year’s list.