The Brian Lehrer Show

Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.

Demise of Spirit Airlines  (First) | Is a Rent Freeze Coming? (Starts at 38:21) | Avoiding Phishing Scams (Starts at 57:35)

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Photo: The self-service check-in kiosks of Spirit Airlines stand idle with a message to customers after the company ceased global operations at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 2, 2026. US air carriers mobilized Saturday to help passengers and crew members stranded by the overnight shutdown of Spirit Airlines, after last-minute talks with creditors and the White House collapsed. The budget airline known for its bright yellow planes succumbed to crushing fuel prices and announced in the early hours of Saturday that "all flights have been canceled, and customer service is no longer available" as it "started winding down its global operations, effective immediately." (GIORGIO VIERA / AFP via Getty Images)

Janai Nelson, president-director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, talks about the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Callais V. Louisiana, which they say gutted the Voting Rights Act. Plus, her reaction to the news that the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the voter-approved redistricting ballot measure that would have been a boon to Democrats.

Photo: United States Supreme Court Building in Washington D.C., (Marielam1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

David Brand, housing reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, talks about the Rent Guidelines Board's preliminary vote on rent regulations for about one million regulated apartments, and other housing news.

Photo:  The Queensbridge public housing development in the neighborhood of Long Island City in Queens, New York, (NewYork 1956 at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, 2026), traces the breakdown in democratic institutions to missteps by Western leaders following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Photo: US President George HW Bush (in grey suit) and Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin (1931 - 2007) (in black suit) wave as they step off Marine One, Maryland, June 17, 1992. (Photo by Ron Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)

Author Alva Gotby's book They Call it Love: The Politics of Emotional Life (Verso Books, 2023), coined the term emotional reproduction to describe the unseen and unappreciated labor involved in maintaining relationships that tends to fall on women in heterosexual pairings. For this Mother's Day, listeners call in to share how this concept appears in their lives and appreciate the emotional reproduction of the mothers in their lives.

Photo: A woman gives a child a hug. (Credit: Myles Grant/Wikimedia Commons BY CC 2.0)