The data analyst Hannah Ritchie challenges the doomsday climate scenarios dominating the headlines to argue for a more hopeful outlook. In Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet she uses the data to show what progress has been made, and what actions will have the most impact in the future.
Capitalism, consumerism and unfettered growth are often blamed for the climate crisis, but the Bloomberg journalist Akshat Rathi believes that capitalism is the best means we have to tackle the issues in time. In Climate Capitalism he meets the business people and politicians from around the world who are finding innovative ways to go green.
The oceanographer and Joint Director of the UK National Climate Science Partnership, Professor Michael Meredith often works in one of the most difficult and least understood areas of the planet - the Southern Ocean around the Antarctic. He believes that while individual actions and choices are important to tackle climate change, only stronger worldwide governance can slow the irreversible effects of ice sheet decline and rising sea levels.
Correction: during the live broadcast we mistakenly stated that Britain gets more than 40% of its energy from renewables, instead of 40% of its electricity.
Joe Magestro is back! First we get an update with what's going on in Wisconsin, and then we pick up where we left off in SIO405 to walk through why polarization happens, and what, if anything, we can do to reduce it.
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The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support.
In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create what Filindra calls ascriptive martial republicanism. Her book demonstrates how the militarized understandings of political membership prominent in NRA narratives and embraced by many White Americans fit within this broader revolutionary ideology.
Even as contemporary NRA narratives embrace 18th and 19th century versions of ascriptive martial republicanism, the NRA radically decouples political virtue and military service by associating virtue with the consumer act of purchasing a firearm. Rather than emphasizing military service or preparedness, consumer choice defines the politically virtuous citizen.
White Amerians embrace this combination of civic republicanism and White male supremacy but Filindra’s research shows that they also hold a competing form of republicanism (inclusive republicanism) that includes a commitment to peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and a strong belief in multiculturalism.
Dr. Alexandra Filindra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in American gun politics, immigration policy, race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and political psychology.
George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.
Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
We'll update you about extreme, coast-to-coast winter weather: who is most impacted and how long it's expected to last.
Also, the top Republican presidential candidates are making their final pitches to Iowa voters. We'll tell you what you need to know about today's caucuses.
Plus, how Americans are remembering a civil rights icon, what FDA scientists decided about marijuana, and what to expect from tonight's Emmy Awards.
The Iowa caucuses are here. Former President Donald Trump is in the lead, according to the most recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll. He has the backing of 48 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley is in second place with 20 percent, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in third place at 16 percent.
Meanwhile, it is bitterly, bitterly cold in Iowa with a wind chill warning in place until after the caucus on Tuesday. And it’s not just Iowa – an arctic cold outbreak is set to bring record-setting, too-cold-for-comfort temperatures all over. Daily records for this time of year could be broken from coast to coast.
And in headlines: Sunday marked 100 days since the Israel-Hamas war began, John Kerry will step down as the U.S. special climate envoy, and the Supreme Court agreed to take on cases that will impact people experiencing homelessness and workers’ rights to unionize.
Show Notes:
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Time is a concept so central to our daily lives. Yet, the closer scientists look at it, the more it seems to fall apart. Time ticks by differently at sea level than it does on a mountaintop. The universe's expansion slows time's passage. "And some scientists think time might not even be 'real' — or at least not fundamental," says NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel. In this encore episode, Geoff joins Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber to bend our brains with his learnings about the true nature of time. Along the way, we visit the atomic clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, consider distant exploding stars and parse the remains of subatomic collisions.
Want to know more about fundamental physics? Email shortwave@npr.org.
For years, especially during the Cold War, Hungary looked to America as an example of freedom, but now it might be time for the U.S. to take notes from Hungary, according to Shea Bradley-Farrell.
Bradley-Farrell, president of the Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education, recently spent several months in Hungary doing research for her new book. While in the European nation formerly controlled by the then-Soviet Union, Bradley-Farrell says she found herself often having a similar conversation with Hungarians.
“Hungarians told me over and over, ‘the rhetoric coming out of the United States reminds us of our Soviet era,’” Bradley-Farrell recalled. “And the more I dug into that, the more that I realized that the things that we’re dealing with here and the so-called progressive agenda, the woke agenda, the Biden administration, they’re directly out of the playbook of communism,” she says.
