As the new year arrives for much of the world, Marnie and pals look at a few time-related oddities. From the abolition of the leap second, to how some people feel they can actually see time stretching before them, to a festival of lunar-loving worms.
On the anniversary of the invention of the word “robot”, we discuss EU AI legislation and its parallels with science fiction of a century ago, regal handedness, Arctic golf courses and the time-capsule of all humanity, stuck to the side of the Voyager Probes.
Presented by Marnie Chesterton with Meral Jamal, Andrada Fiscutean, plus Prof Anje Schutze of Texas A&M University
Produced by Tom Bonnett, with Alex Mansfield and Dan Welsh
Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan’s internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with French Rococo style. In Japan Alice is everywhere—in manga, literature, fine art, live-action film and television shows, anime, video games, clothing, restaurants, and household goods consumed by people of all ages and genders.
In Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (U Hawaii Press, 2023), Amanda Kennell traverses the breadth of Alice’s Japanese media environment, starting in 1899 and continuing through 60s psychedelia and 70s intellectual fads to the present, showing how a set of nineteenth-century British children’s books became a vital element in Japanese popular culture.
Using Japan’s myriad adaptations to investigate how this modern media landscape developed, Kennell reveals how Alice connects different fields of cultural production and builds cohesion out of otherwise disparate media, artists, and consumers. The first sustained examination of Japanese Alice adaptations, her work probes the meaning of Alice in Wonderland as it was adapted by a cast of characters that includes the “father of the Japanese short story,” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; the renowned pop artist Yayoi Kusama; and the best-selling manga collective CLAMP. While some may deride adaptive activities as mere copying, the form Alice takes in Japan today clearly reflects domestic considerations and creativity, not the desire to imitate. By engaging with studies of adaptation, literature, film, media, and popular culture, Kennell uses Japan’s proliferation of Alices to explore both Alice and the Japanese media environment.
Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.
In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024), Dr. Marcy Norton offers a dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.
When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In this book, Dr. Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals—not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee—and turning some of them into “companion species.” These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
In 1914, a minor league baseball team in Baltimore, Maryland, signed a young player from the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys—a school for delinquent boys and orphans.
Unbeknownst to them, the wayward boy would go on to completely transform the game of baseball and become one of the most famous people in American history.
The changes in the sport that he ushered in can still be seen today, and even 100 years later, he is still considered to be the greatest baseball player of all time.
Learn more about the legend of Babe Ruth on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We'll tell you some of the most prominent names on the so-called Epstein List just released to the public.
Also, there is confusion and speculation about a pair of bombings in Iran, and state capitol buildings around the U.S. had to be evacuated.
Plus, hearing aids could help people live longer, there are pros and cons to a new Instagram feature called Link History, and people waited for hours to get their hands on a cup. We'll explain why.
An appeals court ruled on Tuesday that doctors in Texas are not required to perform emergency abortion care as a necessary, stabilizing treatment to protect the health of the mother or pregnant person. In the opinion, Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote the federal statute “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion.”
A pair of bombs exploded in Iran on Wednesday and killed at least 95 people and injured over 200 others. The attack happened near the burial site of Iran’s former top general, Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Iraq back in 2020. It is not yet clear who is responsible for the attack.
And in headlines: several state capitol buildings across the country were evacuated after a bomb threat was mass-emailed to officials, Donald Trump formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him on Colorado’s primary ballot, and Snoop Dogg is teaming up with NBC to help cover the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
Show Notes:
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The scientific community doesn't all agree on the core causes of climate change, and according to climate expert Willie Soon, humanity should look beyond Earth to find the source.
The Earth’s rotation around the sun affects the planet’s temperature, says Soon, a visiting fellow on the Science Advisory Committee of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Glaciers, for example, “melted away because the sun started to get … brighter and provided more solar energy to the climate system,” according to Soon.
Throughout his career, Soon, a former researcher with the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, says he has sought to pursue the facts surrounding shifts in the climate because "science is not about belief."
"Science is about data," he said.
Many people think that it is “rising carbon dioxide that is the main factor … that affects climate change, and that is wholly untrue,” Soon says. “That is such a distorted view that I think it needs to be corrected.”
Soon joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” for part two of a three-part series discussing climate change. In part one, expert David Legates explained the history of climate change.
On today’s show, Soon explains why he thinks the sun is the source of the changing climate and how the sun affects the Earth’s cycles of warming and cooling.
Paris Marx is joined by Naomi Klein to discuss the problems with personal branding pushed social media, how the left’s insufficient response to the pandemic created an opening for the right, and the fight over the roots of Western society that will shape our future.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and a columnist with The Guardian. She is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her newest book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.
The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.
At just 22, Iddris Sandu’s life story was already legendary. This Architectural Technologist learned to program at the age of 11 and has worked with everyone from Kanye West to Nipsey Hussle to Space X. In this episode from 2020 we talk coding, holograms, what ancient flutes have to do with computers, how programming works and why it's important. The designer and entrepreneur also shares his favorite programming languages, philosophies on future technology and why we should all strive to be dynamic rather than single-minded. He’s a true inspiration and Alie shamelessly begged him for life advice.
Harry Potter’s Broadway show is the highest-grossing non-musical in history — But Harry’s coming TV series is even bigger… because it’s okay to reinvent the wheel.
The world’s biggest shipping company just made the biggest detour on Earth — Maersk is sailing 6K miles around Africa instead of through the Red Sea… and you’re gonna pay for it in your shopping cart.
And United Airlines is stealing an idea from Zuck: Targeted ads — Prepare for a personalized ad for you in seat 17A (plus, we’ve got a plan to rebrand the targeted ad).
