Tom Sutcliffe looks at the future of human rights with the campaigner Bianca Jagger and academic Stephen Hopgood. Jagger points to the failure of the global community to tackle violence against women and girls, while Hopgood sounds the death knell for international Human Rights with the rise of religious conservatism and the decline in influence of Europe and America. Pakistan's Tribal Area close to Afghanistan is the setting for Fatima Bhutto's debut novel, and the playwright Howard Brenton examines the chaos of the partition of India in his latest production, Drawing The Line.
Guest Rogue: Phil Plait; This Day in Skepticism: Dr. Who; News Items: How Many Earth-Like Planets, Image of Saturn, 6-Tailed Asteroid, Chopra Attacks Skeptics, Typhoon Haiyan; Name That Logical Fallacy; Your Questions and E-mails: Blind Mole Rats; Science or Fiction
Is genetic testing a new national obsession? From reality TV shows to the wild proliferation of home testing kits, there’s ample evidence it might just be. And among the most popular tests of all is for so-called “Native American DNA.”
All of this rests upon some uninterrogated (and potentially destructive) assumptions about race and human “origins,” however. In Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), Kim TallBear asks what’s at stake for Indigenous communities and First Nations when the premises of this ascendant science are put into practice.
TallBear, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas-Austin and enrolled Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, conducted years of research on the politics of “human genome diversity,” decoding the rhetoric of scientists, for-profit companies, and public consumers. The result is a vital and provocative work, tracing lineages between racial science and genetic testing, “blood talk” and “DNA talk,” and the undemocratic culture of a field which claims it can deliver us from racism.
Ruth Alexander speaks to a statistician at the forefront of cancer research, Professor Terry Speed. He has just been awarded the Prime Minister?s Prize for Science in Australia. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Shares of Tesla lose some energy. Target misses the mark. Green Mountain grinds out big earnings. And Campbell's Soup serves up some disappointing numbers. Our analysts discuss those stories and share three stocks on their radar. Plus, corporate governance expert and film critic Nell Minow talks JPMorgan Chase, CEO pay, and must-see movies.
Hello! We are taking a week off the podcast to work on some special things that you will like a lot. This episode is a Best Of*, in case you have a friend who hasn't gotten a chance to check us out who you might like to share TLDR with. It also includes an answer to one of our show's enduring mysteries - just what the hell TLDR stands for.
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JFK was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, and fifty years later the majority of the American public doesn't believe the official story from the Warren Commission. But why? Join Ben and Matt as they talk about the lingering questions they found in the JFK case and why conspiracy theories about the murder remain so prevalent in the modern day.
