When the Flames Go Up

John Amuso, Esq. has never appeared on a podcast before. He has zero interest in social media, and his website sits in a remote corner of the Internet like an old Ford with possums living in it. Basically, he’s not much of a promoter. Because he doesn’t need to be. John is an in-demand family lawyer in New York State’s Attorneys For Children program, representing kids in matters of post-divorce cu...

Akil Bello us the Senior Director of Advocacy at The National Center for Fair & Open Testing ( Fairtest ), which advances quality education and equal opportunity by promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluations of students, teachers and schools. It’s the perfect job for a man who has been calling out myths, socioeconomic bias, and overall shenanigans in college prep for 30 y...

Our guest Jessica, who was elected to her local school board in 2020, has strong feelings about gender-affirming care for kids—and not just because she had to travel over 300 miles to find the care her trans-masculine child needed. Her research, which dates back to the mid-90s, shows that gender-affirming care improves the mental health of the estimated 300,000 transgender and nonbinary teenagers...

Anxiety sucks. You can’t tell why it affects some brains and not others. Talking about it—often in the context of a “mental health crisis”—often makes it worse. It makes you wonder if you’re a bad parent. And it’s not even a new phenomenon. The CDC reports that persistent feelings of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness among young people increased by about 40% in the 10 years before the pandemic...

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