← Georgia Today
Georgia Today
Rural hospital funding cuts; International student enrollment decline; Atlanta author
00:16:07
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A
Welcome to the Georgia TODAY podcast. Here we bring you the latest reports from the GPB newsroom. On today's episode, rural hospitals plan for a future that includes federal funding cuts, international student enrollment at Georgia's public colleges slows down, and an Atlanta author's new work grapples with a problematic literary genius.
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B
I'm very interested in this idea of how you reconcile the artist with with the art and in particular in the literary world.
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A
Today is Monday, November 17th. I'm Peter Biello, and this is Georgia Today. Billions of dollars in proposed cuts to health care programs likely will trickle down to rural hospitals. But as GPB's Sophie Gradis reports, that's not stopping those hospitals in Georgia from planning for their futures.
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Sprinkled across rural Georgia are hospitals and clinics eager to recruit people like Pratik Patel, a medical student at Mercer University in Macon.
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I grew up in a small town. We used to have a hospital and then it closed down. And after that point you can tell like the shift in, like the healthcare. And so I kind of know the importance of just having a doctor around.
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Patel's scholarship requires him to work in a medically underserved area after residency. That's good news for people like Allison Klein from Clinch Memorial Hospital in South Georgia. At a recent recruitment fair at Mercer's Macon campus, Klein was looking for a specific candidate.
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We don't have a pediatrician within around 40 to 45 miles any way you go right now.
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It's a deep need for us, she says. Hospitals like Clinch need to invest in the essentials if they're going to manage federal cuts to health care. Down the hall, Monica Morris, a recruiter for a hospital system in Tifton, also has a list of openings.
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And the more doctors we have, the more productive we're going to be to kind of circumvent that, that issue of the cutbacks.
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Morris Hospital is nearly financially recovered from COVID A reserve of safety net money could get them through another emergency. For GPB News, I'm Sophie Gradas. In Macon.
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A
The Trump administration is releasing more relief for farmers recovering from 2023 and 2024 natural disasters, including Hurricane Helene. The U.S. department of Agriculture said today's announcement was delayed by the 43 day government shutdown. The agency's deputy secretary, Steven Vaden, says stage one funding released in July focused on major crops.
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G
Stage two is focused on those who suffered shallow, non indemnified losses, losses for which they either didn't have crop insurance or you couldn't purchase crop insurance.
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A
The agency says it's paid more than 4,000 Georgia applicants about $176 million from its emergency crop assistance program so far this year, mostly for cotton and peanut crops. Applications for Stage two funding will open up next week on Monday. University System of Georgia enrollment climbed this fall to an all time high of more than 382,000 students, but growth in international student enrollment has slowed. That's according to numbers the system released last week. GPB's Orlando Montoya has more.
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G
While enrollment at Georgia's 26 public colleges and universities grew by about 5%, international student growth was about 1%. Rachel Banks of the association of International Educators says the Trump administration's changing immigration policies are scaring foreign students away.
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F
Like domestic students, you know, international students and their families are looking for a certain amount of certainty and predictability. And so we're really losing out competitively as we watch other countries proactively attract students.
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G
President Trump last week on Fox News defended his student visa policies, saying foreign students are vital to American universities. For GPB News, I'm Orlando Montoya.
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A
In South Georgia's Jeff Davis county, federal environmental officials are monitoring air quality after a massive tire fire burned for 12 hours over the weekend. Firefighters in at least six neighboring counties responded to the blaze. In Hazlehurst county, emergency management spokesperson David Miller says the smoke was dangerous, but a lack of wind kept it mostly aloft.
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H
As those tires burned, the smoke mostly went up and it wasn't going, you know, horizontal, it was going vertical. That helped out with that. The EPA came in, put up monitors, he says.
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A
The Georgia Forestry Commission is investigating the fire's cause. It started on the property of a man who built a massive wall of old tires around his yard. His house burned down. Container traffic at Georgia's ports is down more than 8% over this time last year. The Georgia Ports Authority announced the numbers at its November board meeting in Atlanta. GPB's Chase McGee reports.
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Port CEO Griff lynch says that while they've been impacted by the downturn in trade, he's, quote, hopeful things will bounce back in the new year. For now, they'll use this time to work on infrastructure projects and required maintenance. Chairman of the GPA Board Alec Poitovent says it's important to make improvements before traffic picks up again.
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And these times when things are a little slower is that every single employee at their job ought to focus on the little things. We focus on the little things. We'll be ready when the big motion comes again.
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This spring, the authority also plans to open its $127 million. Blue Ridge Connector, the inland rail facility north of Atlanta is expected to eliminate thousands of trucks from the state's highways. For GPB news, I'm Chase McGee.
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Savannah Technical College and Hyundai Motor Group have signed their first class of apprentices training to jo the thousands of workers needed at the automaker's manufacturing site in southeast Georgia. At a ceremony on Friday, seven recent high school graduates signed up to receive hands on experience in advanced manufacturing while earning college credits. The plant's chief administrative officer, Brent Stubbs, told them they have a guaranteed job at the facility once they complete the 18 month program.
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There's been a lot of discussion about the future of manufacturing in America. You know, people not sure will we have the talent. You represent the next generation. That gives us all hope.
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A
The next apprentice class is expected to launch in the spring. A lot has changed about our workspaces in recent years. Remote work became more of a thing during the pandemic. So have return to office notifications. Co working spaces have popped up all over the country. And now there's the hot desk. That's a desk shared with your co workers, perhaps over different days or parts of the day. It's also the name of the debut novel by Atlanta writer Laura Dickerman. She recently spoke with GPB's Orlando Montoya about her romantic comedy set in the high stakes world of New York publishing.
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G
Laura Dickerman, thanks for joining me.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
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Our two main characters here, book nerd 20 somethings, Rebecca and Ben, work for competing publishing houses but share a desk, which leads to a lot of frustration, but also hilarity and romance. What brings their story together?
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B
They work in publishing, which is a great place for this book to take, for the book to happen, because in publishing there are only a couple of big companies that own all the imprints. And so Rebecca and Ben work for rival imprints, but under the umbrella of the same publishing company. And that publishing company has instituted a cost saving measure called hot desking, where they're forced to share a desk on different days of the week and hijinks ensue.
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G
They are both young and ambitious, trying to land an important deal for their firms. And that's the publishing rights to the estate of a recently deceased 20th century literary giant, a man called simply the Lion. And although he's dead, he looms large in this story. So who is he?
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B
Who is he? Well, I think I was very interested in how literary men, certain literary men were, I guess, the most famous celebrities of that time, the 80s, then 70s 80s 90s Men who were incredibly talented, geniuses even who had, I guess you could say, problematic or bad behavior. I'm very interested in this idea of how you reconcile the artist with the art and in particular in the literary world. So someone with the charisma of Byron and the popularity of Hemingway and the talent of Philip Roth and just make him this very charismatic genius writer, but also someone who acts with impunity and treats particularly, I would say, women in a way that's problematic.
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G
He's described as an old white misogynist kind of a man of his time, meaning the post war era. But he nonetheless wrote brilliant words and everybody knew him and loved him in the 20th century. But he's being re evaluated for modern times. Was this reevaluation based on anything that you've seen recently?
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B
I think that we are in an interesting time, obviously for many reasons, but I do think that there has been re evaluation of writers for good and for bad. And I think that for me again, the most interesting evolution, I would say in the book is the young character of Ben Heath, who's one of the the romantic leads. And he's a young man who idolizes the lion. He has grown up reading his books. He is gone into publishing because of the books. And so I feel as though he's a character who has a bit of a, I would say comeuppance, but it's also evolution. So he learns to reconcile the bad behavior of the man with the genius of the books. And I think he doesn't want to, I don't love this expression, but throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the other main character, his love interest Rebecca, is someone who is a young woman who's quite fierce. She's a little abrasive, she is sometimes a little obnoxious. She says what she thinks, she does what she feels is right. She has very, very strong opinions about these kinds of men. And her view is not 100% the quote unquote right view either, I think. So the two of them together, not only are they tiptoeing towards a romance, but also in my mind coming to terms about how you reconcile the art with the artist.
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G
As I mentioned at the beginning, Rebecca and Ben share a hot desk in a New York office building, but they don't actually see each other until midway through the book. So how does having this hot desk affect their relationship?
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B
Well, it's funny because there's been a little bit of pushback from I would say maybe the rom com genre community in that if you pick up this book expecting a very strict genre rom com. You have a couple of the tropes, you have an enemies to lover trope, you have a slow burn. But in this case it's a very slow burn. They don't, as you said, lay eyes on each other until almost two thirds of the way through the novel. And, and that was by design on my part. I was interested in using the concept of this rom com and two young editors who don't lay eyes on each other but sort of flirt and banter and be annoyed with each other through post its and texts and sort of modern day work type conveniences. But I wanted the two of them to be fully formed characters. I wanted them to have friends, I wanted them to have family, I wanted them work lives that we, the reader became very well acquainted with, that we saw them as fully developed people before they entered into a romantic relationship. So that even though they may not know it, we know that they're right for each other. So by the time that they collide, almost literally, we know this is going to end well for them.
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G
Now in the end, we find out whether Rebecca or Ben will get the glory for landing the lion's estate. We find out how their romance blooms and whether the deceased lion will be re evaluated fairly or not, among other plot resolutions. So in the end, what do you hope readers will get out of hot desk?
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B
I hope that readers have as much fun reading the book as I had writing the book. One of the most rewarding things I've ever heard about the book was when I was speaking to a bookseller early on and she said she had brought an advanced copy to the beach and that her mother and she and her daughter all loved it. So I thought if I can get three generations to all enjoy the book, that's a win for me. That's fantastic.
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G
Were there any parts of the book that resonated with you particular personally?
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B
Well, I would say again that as the story of Jane, who's Rebecca's mother, that as that story sort of took hold, that became for me the heart of the book in a lot of ways because both my own experience and Jane's in New York City in publishing in the early 1980s and then this, as I said, the friendship between the women, that's very important to me. Women's voices, women's friendship, that resonated with me as well as the, as the.
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G
Romance sounded like a glamorous world.
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B
It was very glamorous. It was glamorous and it was seedy and it was crazy. It was a lot of fun. But also, as I write in the book, there were, you know, things happened all the time that wouldn't, would not happen today.
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G
Well, it's a delightful book and I thank you for writing it and sharing it with us and talking about it. Laura Dickerman wrote Hot Desk. Thank you for being here on gpb.
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B
Thank you so much.
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A
And you can hear me in Orlando talk about Hot Desk on a recent episode of Narrative Edge, GPB's podcast about books with Georgia connections. Find Narrative Edge on your podcast app of Choice and on YouTube.
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A toxic fire, a plume of smoke, and a community demanding ANSWERS. In Conyers, Georgia, the BioLab disaster left residents searching for truth and accountability. This season, GPB uncovers system failures, hears from whistleblowers, and follows neighbors still fighting to be heard. I'm Pamela Kirkland. Join me for season two of Manufacturing the Biolab Story. Listen now at gpb.org podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
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A
In sports Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Penix will be placed on injured reserve and will miss at least four games with a left knee injury. Pennix suffered the injury in yesterday's 30:27 overtime loss to Carolina. It was the Falcons fifth straight loss. The injury leaves Kirk Cousins as the starter for the Falcons. Cousins will make his second start of the season when the Falcons play New Orleans on Sunday. Penix apparently aggravated an earlier bone bruise and may have suffered a more significant injury. That's it for this edition of Georgia Today. Make sure you come back tomorrow, though. We've got more news coming your way. Subscribe to this podcast and you won't miss a thing. You can also check for updates and all the Latest news@gpb.org your feedback is important to us. If you're liking the podcast, or if you think of a way that it could be improved, let us know by email. The address is Georgia todaypb.org I'm Peter Biello. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.