The suggestion that the virus first emerged from a Chinese laboratory has proved stubbornly persistent; as calls mount for more investigation, it has become a potent epidemiological and political idea. Latin America’s strict lockdowns have had the expected calamitous economic effects. We look at the region’s prospects for recovery. And the tricky business of artificially inseminating a shark.
In which a series of typographic attempts to improve on the exclamation point and question mark are doomed to failure, and Ken is unable to justify the existence of the backslash. Certificate #22311.
McDonald’s just launched its BTS boy band collaboration with a digital strategy that’s never been tried in food before: Golden Repackaging. Exxon Mobil’s board just got served a Cinderella story from a little engine. And MGM Studios has been officially acquired by Amazon — last week we looked at Amazon Prime Theaters, this week we’re looking at why they did it (Answer: Passion of the Prime).
$MCD $XOM $MGM $AMZN $MMM
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On Sunday, authorities in Belarus took a prominent opposition journalist into custody by flagging down a commercial flight with a fighter jet and a false bomb threat. Since then, the small country has garnered international condemnation - though it’s evoked little contrition from President Alexander Lukashenko. What does this hijacking signal about the steadfastness of authoritarianism in Belarus and around the world?
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Juul Labs seemingly started out with the aim to reduce smoking, but the company's e-cigarettes came to symbolize something very different: a teen vaping epidemic.
Host Maddie Sofia talks with Time health writer Jamie Ducharme about the science and marketing behind the rise and subsequent controversy surrounding Juul Labs. Plus, a look at what might be next in the future of e-cigarettes.
Click here for links to studies mentioned in this episode.
Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life (Wayne State University Press, 2020), by Zev Eleff, challenges the current historical paradigm in the study of Orthodox Judaism and other tradition-bound faith communities in the United States. Paying attention to "lived religion," the book moves beyond sermons and synagogues and examines the webs of experiences mediated by any number of American cultural forces. Eleff lucidly explores Orthodox Judaism's engagement with Jewish law, youth culture and gender, and how this religious group has been affected by its indigenous context. To do this, the book makes ample use of archives and other previously unpublished primary sources.
Eleff explores the curious history of Passover peanut oil and the folkways and foodways that battled in this culinary arena to both justify and rebuff the validity of this healthier substitute for other fatty ingredients. He looks at the Yeshiva University quiz team's fifteen minutes of fame on the nationally televised College Bowl program and the unprecedented pride of young people and youth culture in the burgeoning Modern Orthodox movement. Another chapter focuses on the advent of women's prayer groups as an alternative to other synagogue experiences in Orthodox life and the vociferous opposition it received on the grounds that it was motivated by "heretical" religious and social movements. Whereas past monographs and articles argue that these communities have moved right toward a conservative brand of faith, Eleff posits that Orthodox Judaism-like other like-minded religious enclaves-ought to be studied in their American religious contexts.
The microhistories examined in Authentically Orthodox are some of the most exciting and understudied moments in American Jewish life and will hold the interest of scholars and students of American Jewish history and religion.
Zev Eleff is chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College and associate professor of Jewish History at Touro College.
Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
Not long ago, the only resource for uncovering our familial pasts was to consult libraries and archives, combing old newspapers for birth announcements and obituaries. These days, many people are turning to websites like Ancestry and 23andMe, taking DNA tests to learn more about their ancestors and where they came from—often discovering long buried secrets and long lost relatives in the process. But for some, the answers to these questions exist not in archives or in their DNA, but within a suitcase.
When writer Danielle Geller’s estranged mother passed away, she left behind just eight suitcases of belongings, cataloging her wayward spirit, moving between boyfriends, states, and jobs, at times experiencing homelessness. In her debut memoir, Dog Flowers (One World, 2021), Geller, trained as an archivist, consolidates the most important artifacts from the collection—never before seen photographs, documents, letters, and diaries—piecing together a portrait of the mother she grew up without, and reconnecting with her Navajo heritage in the process.
Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down to chat with Danielle Geller about her striking family memoir, Dog Flowers, available now from One World (2021).
Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020).
One officer in Los Angeles used car inspections to hit on women. In the San Francisco Bay Area, another woman says an officer used police resources to harass and stalk her. The California Highway Patrol quietly fired both of them for sexual harassment, but never looked into whether their misconduct was criminal. The second episode of On Our Watch examines the system of accountability for officers who abuse their power for sex and exposes where that system falls short.
Amazon plans to buy movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion, which would give the tech company a huge library of movies, shows, and franchises including the James Bond series. Some in Congress want to block the sale. The tech company is also the target of a new antitrust suit from the D.C. Attorney General.
The largest Confederate monument in the country is in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and it’s three acres large and carved into the side of a rock face. The park said this week that the monument will be left intact, but more context will be added to represent the South in a way that doesn’t glorify the Confederacy.
And in headlines: a gunman killed eight people in San Jose, Howard University names its College of Fine Arts after Chadwick Boseman, and the latest on sea snot.
We'll tell you about a tragic workplace shooting in northern California.
Also, there's a new kind of investigation into the origin of COVID-19 and new research shows COVID-19 immunity may last years.
Plus, which major movie and TV studio Amazon is buying, how you can hide the likes on Facebook and Instagram, and where to watch the reunion 'Friends' fans have been waiting for.
