SCOTUS Rulings, Trusting In Democracy, Saharan Dust Cloud

Supreme Court’s Unusual Term Winds Down With Disappointment for Conservatives (0:30) Guest: Kimberly Robinson, Supreme Court Reporter, Bloomberg Law The US Supreme Court struck down a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana this week, despite the fact that conservative justices outnumber liberals. The swing vote in this case was Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush, but in three of the Supreme Court’s most consequential cases this session, has voted with the court’s liberals. Virus Detection Network (17:11) Guest: Pardis Sabeti, PhD, Professor at the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health. COVID-19 infections continue to rise rapidly in the US, prompting many states, including Arizona, Florida, Texas and California, to step back from reopening as they try to slow spread of the virus. Widespread testing and tracking for COVID-19 has proven crucial to the reopening process in other countries that have more successfully managed the pandemic.  Rebuilding Trust in American Democracy (34:00) Guest: Danielle Allen, Director, Harvard University's Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics There’s not much trust to go around these days in American society. Public trust in the federal government is stuck at historic lows. Americans are less trusting than they used to be of businesses, the news media and even religious institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a deep lack of trust in one another to do the right thing. Where do we go from here? A committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences held listening sessions with people across the country to get a sense for what might restore our faith in each other and in American democracy. A Giant Saharan Dust Cloud is Coming (52:54) Guest: Thomas Gill, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso A giant cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa spent m