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Eat Up for Heat Up, Power of History, Mr. Universe

It’s cold. And after a full weekend of snowfall, we can’t help but think of our neighbors in the winter who are facing heat insecurity.

So we chat with the newly minted executive director of Community Action Pioneer Valley, Lev Ben Ezra, about their Eat Up for Heat Up fundraiser, which has a full week of local restaurants donating to the Claire Higgins Fund for Community Resilience. We hear more about who’s participating, the ongoing need in the face of unstable federal support and more.

We also have a look at the broader reach of American history from a whole other continent. Clark University professor Ousmane Power-Greene joins us from Liberia to talk about the connections of the Connecticut River Valley to the cross-oceanic migrations that helped found the nation and recent efforts to preserve, restore and broadcast more of that history for an intercontinental edition of the Power of History.

And is a galaxy naked without stars? Mr. Universe, Salman Hameed of Kainaat Studios and Hampshire College, talks with us about the first-ever instance of a galaxy found without stellar trappings and about an important shift in the ‘trekkie-verse’ in an exploration of its latest show, “Starfleet Academy.”

Christopher “Monte'' Belmonte is host and executive producer of NEPM's The Fabulous 413. He was born and raised in Massachusetts and has been a radio host in western Massachusetts for the last 20 years — the last 17 of them as host of Mornings with Monte on The River 93.9/WRSI.
Kaliis Smith is a radio host and producer for NEPM's The Fabulous 413.