Emily Woodbury

This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” over the noon hour on Wednesday. This story will be updated after the show. Here are some ways to listen live.

Chef and restaurant owner Katie Collier is getting ready to celebrate nine years of sobriety. After struggling with alcoholism and going through multiple treatment centers, she opened up Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria. The business is now in its sixth year of operation.

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.

After the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead last year, President Donald Trump linked the prevalence of gun violence to mental illness. That sentiment came up again after recent shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. 

Former St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson first introduced the idea of the “Ferguson effect” in a 2014 column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, when he wrote that the unrest in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown had left officers afraid to enforce the law. 

“The criminal element is feeling empowered,” he wrote.

National pundits soon picked up on the idea. They claimed that police feeling demoralized had led to a spike in crime.

This special will air on St. Louis Public Radio over the noon hour on Monday.

Songs like "Fight the Power", "This Land is Your Land", "Dixie", and "The Times They Are a Changin’" were all written as a response to a moment or a movement and grew into an anthem.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer Roundup, is manufactured by Monsanto-Bayer. Depending on whom you talk to, it’s either a safe, highly effective herbicide, or it’s a dangerous substance linked to cancer cases from use by farmers and landscapers.

Wednesday on St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske talked with author Carey Gillam, who will give a presentation Friday at Washington University titled “Monsanto Trials and Monsanto Papers.” Gillam has investigated the topic of agrochemical safety and corporate interests for more than 20 years.

On July 30, St. Louis gained a new resident — Tobias, the Somali wild ass. His birth is special, since he is part of a subspecies that is both critically endangered in the wild and underrepresented in zoos nationwide. In fact, just by being born, Tobias increased the number of Somali wild asses in the United States by 1.5%.

Tuesday on St. Louis on the Air, Sarah Fenske spoke with Tim Thier, the acting curator of antelope at St. Louis Zoo, about the Somali wild ass and the zoo’s conservation efforts in the Horn of Africa, where the Somali wild ass resides.

The XFL is a planned professional U.S. football league with the mission of reimagining America’s favorite sport. The league originally debuted in 2001 and only lasted one season. XFL games are set to begin again in February 2020.

The St. Louis BattleHawks were one of the league’s eight teams announced this week.

Ballerina Vanessa Woods came up with the idea for Vitality Ballet when she was looking for a side hustle that involved making a meaningful impact through movement. 

The founding principle of the organization is that no one is too old to learn to dance.

“I actually got the idea from my mom,” Woods said. “She’s an occupational therapist, and she works with older populations ... and I loved that idea. It immediately captured my imagination.”

For Woods, the major question was, “How could I create a dance program that would allow seniors to experience ballet?”

A U.S. District Court recently ruled that the Missouri Parole Board had been violating the U.S. and Missouri Constitutions in its handling of cases involving juvenile offenders.

“I sat in on a couple of these parole hearings and got to see firsthand what they were like,” said Amy Breihan, director of the MacArthur Justice Center. “They largely focus, if not exclusively focus, on a detailed accounting of what happened at the crime, [instead of asking,] ‘What have you done in the 30 years since you were convicted, how have you matured over time, and how have you demonstrated that you are ready to be released into the community?’ which really should be the relevant question here.”

During the first week of the school year, St. Louis Public Schools didn’t just deal with summer learning loss – it started classes without several of its students.

“We have a 7-year-old who will not be starting school today,” said the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s Mary Warnecke, who spoke with reporters on Tuesday. “We have a 10-year-old murdered not that long ago, in the city of St. Louis, who will not be starting school today. We have a 2-year-old murdered on Ferris not so long ago. We have a 3-year-old who was murdered on Michigan not so long ago.”

The chancellor is the chief academic, administrative, and budgetary officer of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and Tom George has held the post for the past 16 years. He is retiring Sept. 1.

On Thursday’s St. Louis on the Air, host Sarah Fenske talked with George about what he hopes to see in the university’s future.

Last week, St. Louis attorney Michael Kahn won over a federal jury in a case looking at whether the Katy Perry song "Dark Horse" infringed on the copyright of a 2009 rap song “Joyful Noise” by St. Louis artist Marcus Gray, who is known as Flame. The jury decided that Katy Perry and Capitol Records must pay Gray $2.78 million in damages.

“There’s an old joke [that] when you say, ‘This is not about money, it’s about principle,’ it’s really about money,” said Kahn. “But for our clients, it was really about principle. They almost didn’t care about the money part of it. They felt that they’d been mistreated, and they wanted their day in court.”

Young adults throughout the St. Louis area make up the St. Louis Story Stitchers artists collective. They aim to showcase the region’s culture through performance art, and they work to curb gun violence, which many members have grown up with.

Tylea Wilson is a storyteller with the group, and she regularly performs her poem, “Guardian Angel,” about a friend who was shot and killed.

Paying for day care is one of the largest expenses per month for families. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of infant child care in Missouri is about $800 a month.

In the early 1990s, a man abducted and murdered at least three women from south St. Louis. This man is known as the package killer, and the three murders remain cold cases nearly 30 years later.

Ryan Krull, Riverfront Times contributor and University of Missouri-St. Louis assistant teaching professor, investigated the details of these cold cases over the past year. His reporting found that there are a lot of factors that make it harder to solve a murder when the victim is a sex worker, which was the case for two of the three package killer murders.

The St. Louis County Pet Adoption Center was once celebrated for lowering its euthanasia rate, but a recent audit found that the rate was only lowered after the shelter implemented the practice of labeling the “owner requested euthanasia” checkbox as simply “ORE” on animal surrender forms. 

“This box was encouraged to be checked as a default,” said Danny Wicentowski, who covered this story as a staff writer for the Riverfront Times. “And in many cases, according to the audit and those that I've spoken to, the people who were bringing their animals in were either not told what that acronym actually meant, or were even pressured to check it as a matter of course.”

Over the weekend, the National Women’s Political Caucus convened in St. Louis to give women the chance to network, recruit, train, and provide support for political campaigns. The conference included sessions on things like how to effectively use social media, fundraise, and target specific voters.

On Monday’s St. Louis on the Air, guest host Jeremy Goodwin talked with St. Louis Public Radio political correspondent Jason Rosenbaum and University of Missouri political analyst Hanna Brant about the convention and the representation of women in American politics.