The Impact
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
40 Acres: Reaching reconciliation
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What good are piecemeal reparations? From Georgetown University, where school leadership once sold enslaved people, to Evanston, Illinois, where redli...
40 Acres: The old Jim Crow
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why slavery? Marxist scholar Adolph Reed argues that Jim Crow — not enslavement — is the defining experience for Black Americans today. Reed recou...
40 Acres: $14 trillion and no mules
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Paying the price. One of the typical questions asked during conversations about reparations is how to pay for them. Fabiola talks with economist Willi...
40 Acres: The original promise
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Fabiola Cineas talks with Nkechi Taifa, the founder and director of the Reparation Education Project, about the history of the fight for reparations i...
The Toll
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this bonus, chat episode of The Impact, Jillian is joined by Vox's Matt Yglesias and Course Correction's Nelufar Hedayat to talk about how the data...
Where the US already has a border wall
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are known as “Ambos Nogales” — “both Nogaleses.” The city straddles the border of Arizona and Sonora,...
Free tuition is not enough
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Free college tuition seems like a solution to so many problems. After all, the price of tuition is the No. 1 reason students give for leaving school. ...
Family Dollar(s)
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Natasha Razouk wants to give her 7-year-old the best possible life. She buys big boxes of fresh tomatoes at Costco, and she gets her daughter warm boo...
Saving Private Health Care
31 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Janet Feldman has been paying for private insurance for years. She does so even though Australia has a robust public insurance option. But when she wa...
How Taiwan got Medicare-for-All
29 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1990s, the government of Taiwan decided to try an experiment. In just nine months, they completely revolutionized their health care syste...
Green New Germany
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Two decades ago, Hans-Josef Fell quietly started a revolution in his home country, with a law that looks a lot like part of the Green New Deal endorse...
After conviction, a second chance
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
President Gerald Ford took office during one of the most difficult times in the country’s history. In August 1974, the US had just lived through Wat...
How to stop an epidemic
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running for president with a plan to fight the opioid epidemic. Her legislation would dramatically expand access to addiction...
The Impact of 2020
06 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this season preview, Vox’s Jillian Weinberger calls a fellow native Ohioan to discuss the perils of Swing State pride during presidential electio...
New season, new host
16 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Kliff returns for a farewell and a handoff to The Impact's new host, Jillian Weinberger, who has a preview of what's to come in our next season....
Denmark’s paternity leave problem
14 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Denmark gives new parents nearly a year off work after they have a baby. Most of that time can be taken by either parent — but dads take barely any ...
The incredible shrinking city
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, Memphis grew by bringing its suburbs into the city limits. City officials thought this suburb-gobbling policy would be an economic boon--...
Leaving Baltimore behind
30 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Baltimore is running a unique housing experiment that gives longtime residents vouchers to leave the city’s poorest, most violent neighborhoods for ...
What schools look like when we fund them fairly
23 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
All across the country, it seems like a given: places with more expensive houses have nicer schools because they can pay higher taxes. That’s just h...
Food fight!
16 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
22% of New Yorkers are obese. In Chicago it is more than a quarter of the city. Obesity puts people at risk of diabetes, heart disease, even certain k...
Deportation without representation
09 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
While the federal government is trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, Oakland, California, is running a policy experiment to help immigrant...
Sit in a circle. Talk to other pregnant women. Save your baby’s life?
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A decade ago, South Carolina was one of the most dangerous places in America for a baby to be born. But now, it’s taking an unconventional approach ...
Is fixing campaign finance as easy as giving everyone $100?
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Seattle is running the country’s most radical experiment to fix campaign finance. Last year, the city sent every resident $100 that they could donat...
Season 2: The most interesting policy experiments across the country
26 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Impact’s second season focuses on states and cities as laboratories of democracy. Unlike our gridlocked Congress, local governments are constant...
Help us make season 2!
08 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We're making season 2, and we need your help! We want to know about local policy experiments from around the country. These can be at the state, count...
How California saves moms from dying in childbirth
04 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The United States has an astoundingly high maternal death rate. It is three times higher than the UK, eight times higher than Norway, and still climbi...
The black robe effect
27 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What is the best way to care for patients with severe mental illness? The United States has struggled with this question for decades. In 1963, Preside...
This robotic pelvis reduces teen pregnancy
20 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
American women are changing up their birth control. The use of IUDs and implants has increased 6000% in the United States since 2002. That's the res...
The controversial way doctors fight pain without opioids
13 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of The Impact, we’re looking at a possible future for pain treatment. It’s an idea known as “pain acceptance,” and in the wake...
The policies that created the opioid epidemic
06 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
There's a well-known narrative about the opioid epidemic: pharmaceutical companies and dirty doctors pushed misinformation and addictive drugs on pati...
It’s time to face the fax
30 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Why are fax machines still such a staple of American health care? We talk to a pair of policy makers who hatched a plan to replace paper files and fax...
Car crash hospitals vs. plane crash hospitals
23 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Central line infections can be deadly. And they used to be extremely common: just a decade ago, hundreds of thousands of patients got them every year....
The curious case of the $629 Band-Aid
16 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How does a Band-Aid wind up costing so much money? Why are American health care prices so incredibly high? Vox’s new podcast, the Impact, explores h...
Introducing The Impact
09 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Impact is a show about how policy affects people. In Washington, the story often ends when Congress passes a law. For us, that’s where the story...