- The film CODA gave many moviegoers new insight into the Deaf community. But for Cliff Moers and his family, it was less revelation and more confirmation. Moers and his wife are deaf. All four of their children can hear. That makes the kids CODAs – or, Children of Deaf Adults. Cliff Moers heads the Colorado Commission for the Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and DeafBlind. He and his daughter, Avery, joined Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner, along with Cliff’s ASL interpreter, Christine Pendley.
- Was she villain, victim, or somewhere in between? Five hundred years ago a young indigenous slave known as La Malinche was forced into service as an interpreter for the Spanish forces that conquered Mexico. Through the centuries, her name has been uttered as an epithet, or spoken reverently by those who viewed her as a hero. In the 1960s, she became an icon of Chicana feminism.
- When director Steven Spielberg was remaking "West Side Story," he turned to members of the Latinx community to make the film more culturally and racially sensitive. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, the chair of cinema studies at CU Boulder, was part of that committee. He also wrote "West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece."
- Former Peace Corps volunteer Andy Kelec lived in Truskavets, Ukraine in 2017 and 2018. He knew it as a pleasant, touristy town where he helped the locals learn English. Hoping to maintain those ties, Kelec relaunched his English club and reconnected with his students by Zoom a few months ago. Their weekly sessions continue, but now the talk is of war.
- You'd think in this era of modern science, there'd be nothing new under the sun. Well, get ready for a newly discovered species of plant. And it's called the funky thistle. It lives in some of the alpine meadows here in Colorado. Jennifer Ackerfield is head curator of natural history collections and associate director of biodiversity research at the Denver Botanic Gardens.
- Singer-songwriter Neyla Pekarek found inspiration in the story of Kate Slaughterback, the famous Colorado woman who slayed a rhumba of rattlesnakes in the 1920s, and turned their skins into a flapper dress. She turned that story into a musical, "Rattlesnake Kate," with the Denver Center for Performing Arts Theater Company.
- This week’s climate report from a United Nations panel finds the effects of a warming planet are happening even faster than expected. One place where those effects are being studied is on a massive glacier in Antarctica. Among the researchers is Boulder scientist Ted Scambos, who's watched how the Thwaites Glacier has changed over three decades.