Month: October 2016

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The Gist - Investigating Long Island’s Not-Deplorables

In The Gist, Arun Venugopal looks at a place that could stand in for America as a whole during this election: Long Island, New York, home to high levels of taxation, opioid addiction, and support for Donald Trump. Venugopal walks us through some of the stories that help explain the psychology of this year’s campaign.

For the Spiel, Mike takes a look at the closest Senate races. 

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Start the Week - Soldiering on: the British Army, Lenin and Putin

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the former Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt about the history of the British Army, its role in present conflicts and relations with NATO. The writer Ben Macintyre reveals the wartime antics of one of the most secret regiments, the SAS and the historian Catherine Merridale recreates Lenin's journey across Europe in the midst of the Great War. John Lough was NATO's first representative based in Moscow and explores the tensions on Russia's borders.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

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Start the Week - Soldiering on: the British Army, Lenin and Putin

On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe talks to the former Chief of the General Staff Richard Dannatt about the history of the British Army, its role in present conflicts and relations with NATO. The writer Ben Macintyre reveals the wartime antics of one of the most secret regiments, the SAS and the historian Catherine Merridale recreates Lenin's journey across Europe in the midst of the Great War. John Lough was NATO's first representative based in Moscow and explores the tensions on Russia's borders.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

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The Gist - How Bad Is the Trump Tax Leak?

In The Gist, what can we really find out from the Donald Trump tax leak? As Philip Hackney argues, not a lot. Hackney is a professor of tax law at Louisiana State University and formerly worked as counsel at the Internal Revenue Service. He says that Trump’s returns don’t indicate any wrongdoing per se. But there’s lots of ways he might have used the tax system to his advantage to save money. For the Spiel, even more on Trump, taxes, and hypocrisy. Panoply survey: We want you to tell us about the podcasts you enjoy and how often you listen to them. So we created a survey that takes just a couple of minutes to complete. If you fill it out, you’ll help Panoply to make great podcasts about the things you love—and things you didn’t even know you loved. To fill out the survey, just go to megaphone.fm/survey. Today’s sponsors: Indochino, the company that’s reinventing men’s fashion. Go to Indochino.com to get any premium suit for just $389, plus free shipping, when you use promo code gist at checkout.

Rocket Mortgage from Quicken Loans. Rocket Mortgage brings the mortgage process into the 21st-century with an easy online process. Check out Rocket Mortgage today at QuickenLoans.com/gist.

Join Slate Plus! Members get bonus segments, exclusive member-only podcasts, and more. Sign up for a free trial today at slate.com/gistplus.

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Social Science Bites - Karenza Moore on Dance Culture

The culture of dance clubs has a way of popping up in policy debates around the world. In September, for example, the closure of London’s Fabric nightclub – called “one of the most influential and internationally renowned electronic music venues on the planet” by a major newspaper half that planet away – created a huge debate. In Los Angeles in July, the deaths of three people at the Hard Summer Music Festival -- on the heels of more than two dozen drug-related deaths at raves across the U.S. Southwest in the past decade -- saw enormous (but unsuccessful) efforts to ban the electronic dance music festivals.

Dance culture, then, isn’t just frippery, it’s policy.

That’s no surprise to Karenza Moore, the guest of the latest Social Science Bites podcast. Moore, a lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University, has for more than a decade studied and written about the dance clubs, the music they play, and the drug use she says the culture has “hidden in plain sight.” Her interests are purely academic; Moore describes herself as a “participant observer” with at least 20 years standing on the dance floor.

In conversation with David Edmonds, Moore makes no bones about the prevalence of drugs in the club scene – even if alcohol is the most used drug in the post-rave era. MDMA, whether known as ecstasy , E, Molly, is used as a matter of routine, which she says “needs to be acknowledged.” Her sociological ethnography of the scene and its drug use sees her reject purely prosecution-oriented responses to that acknowledgement. Drawing from what she calls ‘critical drug studies,’ sees, Moore suggests that violence attributed to the clubs is linked to the underground drug trade, not the more-or-less open drug use. “Prohibition causes more harm than good,” Moore tells Edmonds, by placing a matter of public health in the hands of people who have no regulation to abide by.

In the podcast, Moore also talks about the mechanics of interviewing club-goers – seems many have a desire to overshare their exploits – and how long ‘participant observers’ can keep observing in a culture that’s generally reckoned to focus on youth.

At Lancaster, Moore runs the aptly named Club Research as a hub for research on all the drugs, legal, illicit and novel, in the scene, as well the various subcultures and the larger “night-time economy.” A lot of that work appears at her blog, http://www.clubresearch.org/, and is covered in her contributions as co-author to the 2013 book from SAGE publishing, Key Concepts in Drugs and Society.