Third-Party Candidates, Sex Testing Olympians, Guitar’s Not Dead

Coming up on today’s show:

• What is the value of third-party candidates in a volatile election year? Sam Wang, founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, argues that it’s the impact on down-ticket races and that, for Republicans in particular, the more presidential candidates the better.

• Monday is the 45th anniversary of the Nixon Shock. The executive order resulted in a series of economic measures including a 90 day freeze on wages and prices in order to counter inflation. It also effectively put an end to the gold standard. Douglas Irwin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, looks back at the history of the measure and its connection to the 2016 election.

• Violence in Chicago has been astronomical this summer — already the number of shooting victims is up more than 600 this year. Ayesha Jaco, a community activist and co-founder of the organization M.U.R.A.L. (Magnifying Urban Realities & Affecting Lives) explains how she is working to address the problem.

• In Queens, New York, a local imam, Maulama Akonjee and his assistant, Thara Uddin, both Bangladeshi Muslims on their way home from Saturday afternoon prayers, were shot and killed by an unidentified male gunman. The police have said the two men were clearly the assailant’s intended victims, but have stopped short of classifying this as a hate crime against Muslim Americans. Kobir Chowdhury, who knew and worked with both victims, shares the Muslim-American community’s reaction to the double murders.

• Sex testing of female athletes is a recently-abolished practice at the Olympics. Dr. Payoshni Mitra, an athlete’s rights activists and sports researcher, weighs in on how gender scrutiny continues to hurt potential Olympians, and can have long-lasting effects on these women who oftentimes underwent surgery or hormone therapy in order to compete.

• In part one of our series “Trashing the High Seas,” Sylvia Earle, a renowned oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, has been on a decades-long mission to inspire public awareness of how to save our oceans. Her solution? Give nature a break and leave half of the Earth alone. She explains what this means, how it is feasible and what steps are needed to change human behavior.

• After years of the guitar ruling rock and pop starting in the 1960s, the past decade has been quick to call for the death of the guitar. But a new guitar sound is surfacing, that’s more emotional and less aggressive. John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s Soundcheck and New Sounds, explains.