Life and Death in the Red States: KPFK 6/17

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Life and Death in the Red States:
KAI WRIGHT reports from Kansas on the human toll of Republican refusal to expand Medicaid for millions of sick Americans. Kai is Features Editor of The Nation magazine and reported from Brownback’s Kansas.

Plus: The history of The Nation – the magazine, America’s oldest weekly, now celebrating its 150th anniversary.  Susan Sontag in 1982 said a person who read only the Reader’s Digest would have been “better informed about the realities of communism” than someone who read only The Nation.  Was she right?  D. D. GUTTENPLAN explains. His new book is The Nation: A Biography.
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Also: Vladimir Nabokov and American politics. The author of Lolita spent 20 years in the US in the forties and fifties, and drove through the West every summer. ROBERT ROPER analyzes Nabokov’s strange political profile: refugee from both Stalin and Hitler, enemy of racism and defender of free speech—but also a supporter of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon.
Roper’s new book is Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita.