The Detour
The Detour is a monthly show about people and ideas. At Oregon Humanities we believe in the power of people listening, learning, and struggling together, and we hope you do too. Join us as we explore hard topics of our time with writers, educators, artists, and activists.
Episodes
November 28, 2022 • 51 min
Few conversations are as polarizing as the ones that appear online between Black native Oregonians and transplants. It's a discourse that brings Oregon's history of anti-Black exclusion laws and redlining into the present, along with the frustrations that arise in a small community where so many people know each other. But are these tensions based more in perception than in reality? To explore this question, journalist (and...
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October 25, 2022 • 51 min
The Pacific Northwest has long been a hospitable home to conspiratorial thinking—often with dangerous results. What leads a person down these dark paths and what might it take to come out the other side? In this episode, we talk with Leah Sottile and Eli Saslow, two Oregon journalists who have gone deep into the world of conspiracy theories, about some of the conditions and patterns that lead people to conspire against the nation t...
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September 28, 2022 • 52 min
In this episode, we talk with David Harrelson and Clint Smith about monuments, memorials, and statues—and also about culture, understanding, and hopes for the future. Talking about memorials, as Harrelson and Smith make immediately clear, you can't help but talk about values, and also about people and peoples. And, recently, talking about monuments, memorials, and statues has also meant talking about toppling, contextualizing, ...
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August 31, 2022 • 51 min
In this episode, we ask young people in Oregon about what they thought and felt when COVID landed—and what they think and feel now, a few years in. You'll hear from Caroline Gao, a high school senior from Albany, and several students from Encore Academy in Warrenton.
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July 22, 2022 • 51 min
In this episode, we discuss the fictions, myths, and hopes that the United States of America produces and depends on. We spoke with Mitchell S. Jackson, author of The Residue Years and Survival Math, about the dream of homeownership and all it contains, and Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise, about the self-evident truths we claim to hold within this nation's borders.
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June 30, 2022 • 52 min
Many of us grew up thinking that being coupled with one person—and codifying that union through a government institution—was the ultimate expression of romance. But why do we continue to conform to traditional coupledom despite the data against it? In this episode, we discuss love and ambivalence with Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love and Love in the Time of Contagion. We’ll also hear from Jamie Passaro, a writer and editor base...
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June 23, 2022 • 41 min
Episode 8 of The Detour featured conversations with Karl Marlantes and Sean Davis, veterans from Oregon who served in two different wars. In this episode extra, we speak with Sosan Amiri. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sosan has also had firsthand experience with war. In conversation with Rozzell Medina, Sosan talks about how she advocated as an Afghan American for her family, community, and home country during the US military's w...
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May 20, 2022 • 53 min
There are so many ways humans and other beings shape each other’s lives, for bad and for good, often in ways we fail to notice let alone understand. In this episode, we explore the relationship between human beings and other beings—between humans and animals, humans and plants, and humans and the earth itself. We talk to Robin Wall Kimmerer, author, scientist, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Emma Marris, a...
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April 29, 2022 • 55 min
In this episode, we reflect on the significance of the military in American life and discuss what it's like to serve in the armed forces during wartime. We spoke to Karl Marlantes, author and Vietnam War veteran, and Sean Davis, author and Iraq War veteran, about the experience of preparing for war, being at war, and coming back home to Oregon from war. Content note: This episode contains descriptions of violence throughout and...
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April 19, 2022 • 57 min
In this episode, we take a look at the ways Oregon is divided and the mechanisms that widen those divides. We talk with Chad Karges, founder of the High Desert Partnership; Amaury Vogel, associate executive director of the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center; and Eddie Melendrez, member of the Ontario City Council, about how Oregonians can work across differences, beliefs, and backgrounds to develop relationships and build trust.
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April 6, 2022 • 53 min
Walk into just about any room in the United States and ask about the biggest challenges facing us today, and you’ll almost certainly hear people talk about divides: political, cultural, religious, racial, economic, educational, generational. In this episode, we talk with Emma Green, a journalist focused on religion and democracy, and David French, a political commentator and moderate evangelical who diverged from an increasingly ex...
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March 11, 2022 • 13 min
This week, we're bringing you an episode extra inspired by our episode “Communities of Contagion” with Eula Biss. Our conversation with Eula happened in 2015, long before pandemic was an everyday word. We wanted an updated conversation to take a present look at the moral responsibility we have to everybody in the time of COVID. So we spoke with Courtney Campbell, a medical ethicist at Oregon State University who engages in conv...
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February 28, 2022 • 52 min
A conversation on vaccination, immunity, and community with Eula Biss, author of four books, including "Notes from No Man's Land" and "On Immunity: An Inoculation."
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February 11, 2022 • 51 min
When you hear the words "criminal justice system," what do you think about? In this episode, we'll dig into ideas around punishment, accountability, and justice, and how those show up or don't in our court and prison systems. First, we'll revisit a 2018 conversation with Bobbin Singh, executive director of Oregon Justice Resource Center; david rogers, a program officer for the Ford Foundation and former executiv...
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December 15, 2021 • 51 min
This episode is dedicated to writer Barry Lopez, author of numerous books on travel, landscape, animals, and humanity and a longtime Oregon resident. Lopez passed away in December 2020, just three months after losing a significant portion of his property on the McKenzie River to the Holiday Farm Fire. We’ll listen to a conversation with Lopez from 2015 and hear from Debra Gwartney, Lopez's wife, reading from her essay "Fire...
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December 14, 2021 • 52 min
In this episode we talk with novelist and scholar David Treuer, author of "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee," "Rez Life," and many other books, about land, possession, and his recent article in The Atlantic, "Return the National Parks to the Tribes." We’ll also hear from Christine Dupres, Portland author, therapist, and member of the Cowlitz tribe, reading from her 2016 essay "Between Ribbon and Root."
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December 13, 2021 • 52 min
This episode explores democracy, especially how we can participate in governing ourselves as well as some of the challenges to doing so. We talk with people working on voting rights and democratic process about what democracy means to them: Desmond Meade, of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, who led the effort to end disenfranchisement of people with past felony convictions in Florida; Danielle Allen, a political ethicist a...
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