Some funny things happened in the past year: a reality TV star became president, tiki torches had to renounce white nationalism, and CNN's Don Lemon seemingly went through a reinvention. In our latest edition of Good For The Blacks, culture writer Ira Madison III joins us to debate Don Lemon’s 'transformation’ from respectability politician in chief to beacon of wokeness.
This month World Book Club comes from the Belgium capital Brussels for an Agatha Christie special.
The programme visits the Bibliotheca Wittockiana to discuss one of the bestselling crime novels of all time: Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie in which that shrewdest of detectives Hercule Poirot hunts for a killer aboard one of the world’s most luxurious passenger trains.
To help untangle this fiendish puzzleknot and discuss the enduring popularity of the Queen of Crime are acclaimed crime novelist Sophie Hannah who has brought the renowned sleuth back to life again with her sequels, and James Prichard, great grandson of Agatha herself.
(Picture: Agatha Christie at an event in 1967. Photo credit: BBC.)
British women first got the vote a century ago this year. The social historian Jane Robinson tells Andrew Marr the suffrage movement is known for the actions of its militant wing and their call for 'deeds not words'. But thousands of ordinary women, known as suffragists, campaigned successfully to have their voices heard too. Political theorist Christopher Finlay asks whether violent political protest is ever justified, while the artist Peter Kennard explains how he was inspired by the protest movements in Europe in 1968 to infuse his works with politics. The writer Mary Shelley was born into a politically radical family, with an anarchist father and her mother the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. On the 200th anniversary of her novel Frankenstein, the poet Fiona Sampson looks back at Shelley's radical life.
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The President assures the country of his mental stability, Mueller hones in on obstruction while Republicans in Congress try to undermine him, and the Democrats plot their strategy to protect the DREAMers. Jon, Jon, and Tommy do the pod live from Stockholm, Sweden.
Is Twitter real life? Tom from Cognitive Dissonance is here with me to talk about his philosophy on dealing with criticism and unpleasant people online. It's very zen and interesting, but is it something you and I would be able to adopt? Then we move on to the broader topic of the morphing of analog and digital lives and how the world is changing. Leave Thomas a voicemail! (916) 750-4746, remember short and to the point! Support the show at seriouspod.com/support! Follow us on Twitter: @seriouspod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seriouspod For comments, email thomas@seriouspod.com
Sometimes the technical stuff is how you get to the crucial stuff. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Ohio’s voter purge, and the case rests on some sticky statutory interpretation questions. Up to 1.2 million voters may have been purged from Ohio’s rolls after they sat out a couple of elections and in this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick does a deep dive into the technicalities of the case. Dahlia and her guests also use this moment to take stock of the state of voting rights in the US. Dahlia talks with Mayor Joseph Helle of Oak Harbor, Ohio, a veteran who came home to find he’d been purged from the rolls after not voting while on active duty, and to the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho. Ho even cites his favorite Justice Antonin Scalia opinion.
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