My guest for today’s season finale is Bob Karp (@BobKarpDR). Bob is a photographer whom I first learned about through his amazing photos of endangered lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center. I assumed Bob had always been a wildlife photographer, but in fact, he has over three decades of photojournalism experience, covering everything from Michael Jordan to 9/11, from Hurricane Sandy to Trump rallies and Black Lives Matter marches. Looking through his photos is like looking through a photo album of America.

Bob Karp has been up close and personal with a number of famous faces: Joe Biden, Taylor Swift, Mike Tyson, Bruce Springsteen… but the photos of his that interested me the most (beside the lemurs of course) were the pictures of everyday people in their everyday lives, sometimes in moments of unbridled joy, others in moments of unspeakable sorrow.

I wanted to have Bob on the show to talk about the stories behind these photos, about what photography captures but also what it leaves out, and how Bob has seen America unfold and change over the past years. And of course, we talk about the lemurs.

Bob Karp’s photography:

https://www.bobkarpphotography.com

https://www.dailyrecord.com/picture-gallery/life/2018/12/21/three-decades-images-daily-record-photojournalist-bob-karp/2391073002/

Book recommendation:

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee & Walker Evans

Kate Tomlinson is a nurse who specialises in palliative care. I wanted to talk with her more about why it’s so hard to talk about death, what it’s like being with people and their families in their last few months, and how society balances extending life vs. quality of life. We also talk about Kate’s work with Doctors Without Borders in central Africa, and how Covid has (or hasn’t) changed the way we think about both global health and mortality.

Recommendations:

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

Eric Reidy (@Eric_Reidy) is a journalist and the migration editor-at-large for The New Humanitarian. He has reported extensively on migration in the Mediterranean as well as on humanitarian aid work and vigilante groups at the US-Mexico border.

In addition to the New Humanitarian, he has written for Wired Magazine, the New Republic, the Nation, Mother Jones, and the MIT Technology Review, among other outlets. He is the author of the award winning Ghost Boat – an investigative series about the disappearance of 243 refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.

I’ve wanted to have Eric on the podcast for a while to talk about both the issues he covers, and also how he covers them. His style of journalism is one you don’t see very often – long-form, character-driven, and usually based on weeks or even months of investigative field work in tough places.

In this episode, we talk about the worsening humanitarian situation at the US-Mexico border, Eric’s previous work on migration to the EU, what people get wrong about refugees, and why there are no easy answers to policy questions about migration.

Recommendations:

Beyond the Sand and Sea by Ty McCormick

The Ungrateful Refugee, by Dina Nayeri