Today, we're talking about President Trump's expected announcement about the Iran Nuclear Deal and there's an update about the lava and earthquakes in Hawaii.
Plus: the company on track to reach $1 trillion, the Game of Thrones character who won a real life contest and the Met Gala.
All that and much more in less than 10 minutes.
Award-winning broadcast journalist and former TV news reporter Erica Mandy breaks it all down for you.
Do trees have feelings? How do they talk? How old can they get? Are there any tree stories that will make me cry? Spoiler: YES. Possibly the world's most enthusiastic tree expert, J. Casey Clapp, shows Alie his many tree tattoos, explains how roots communicate to each other, addresses "crown shyness" and schools Alie on the mental health benefits of tree proximity. Also: banana facts and Casey f*cking hates apples.
Today’s episode welcomes back one of our favorite guests — and the show’s only five-time guest, Andrew Seidel, attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Together, Andrew, Andrew, and Thomas tackle a bunch of church and state separation issues. First, they break down Andrew Seidel’s recent success in convincing the New Jersey Supreme Court to strike down a grant program that spent taxpayer dollars rebuilding churches and saved the citizens of New Jersey more than a quarter of a billion dollars! Then, the gang does a deep dive into a pending law in Kansas that would permit adoption agencies within the state to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation (or anything else that offended the organization's... wait for it... sincerely-held religious beliefs). Finally, we end with the answer to Thomas (and Andrew!) Take The Bar Exam question #74 about the admissibility of evidence. Don’t forget to following our Twitter feed (@Openargs) and like our Facebook Page so that you too can play along with #TTTBE! Recent Appearances Andrew was the recent guest masochist on Episode 141 of the God Awful Movies podcast, reviewing "Cries of the Unborn." Check it out! Show Notes & Links
If you love Andrew Seidel, you might want to go back to his FOUR previous appearances on the show, Episode 82 (on Trinity Lutheran), Episode 85 (which was originally a Patreon-only exclusive),Episode 111, and most recently, Episode 131.
On today’s Gist, there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t want Gina Haspel to run the CIA.
Jake Tapper’s latest book is The Hellfire Club. It’s a work of historical fiction; a political thriller set in the 1950s, when Washington was gripped by McCarthyism. Tapper says he saw echoes of President Donald Trump as he read about Sen. Joe McCarthy’s attacks on his political enemies. “The people who survived the ’50s with their reputations intact were the ones who stood up to McCarthy,” said Tapper. “Either decency and truth are important to you, or they’re not.” Tapper is the host of CNN’s The Lead and State of the Union.
In the Spiel, the armed and fabulous women of the NRA.
This week, we’ll take you to Zaire for a story about national identity, colonialism, and one of the most notorious dictators in history. All courtesy of our friends at the new Gimlet podcast, “We Came to Win.”
In this sweeping new biography, Colin G. Calloway, John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time—Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle—and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America’s founding. The Indian World of George Washington (Oxford University Press, 2018) spans decades of Native American leaders’ interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic’s destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country.
The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway’s biography invites us to look again at the history of America’s beginnings and see the country in a whole new light.
Ryan Tripp teaches history at several community colleges, universities, and online extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.
The great statistician, Hans Rosling, died in February last year. Throughout his life Hans used data to explain how the world was changing ? and often improving ? and he would challenge people to examine their own preconceptions and ignorance. Before he became ill, Hans had started working on a book about these questions and what they reveal about the mental biases that tend to lead us astray. Tim Harford speaks to his son Ola and daughter in law Anna who worked on the book with him.
Will we recognise the signs that democracy has ended? Cambridge professor David Runciman worries that we spend far too much time comparing today's politics with the 1930s, and that this blinds us to the frailties of democracy today. He tells Amol Rajan why he thinks our current political system will come to an end - and why we may not even notice this happening.
Professor Nic Cheeseman is all too aware that democracy can become an empty shell. His new book How To Rig An Election, co-written with Brian Klaas, looks at the myriad ways autocrats use elections for their own ends, from buying votes and bribing electors to issuing fake pens in the ballot box. And it is not only the developing world in which corruption takes place. He addresses the role of outside states in the 2016 US presidential election, and asks how western democracy can be kept healthy.
Anne Applebaum has studied the ways in which democracy can arise like a phoenix from the ashes of authoritarianism. As the author of Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine, and a professor at the LSE, she has analysed the reasons why democracy flourished in Poland and Ukraine after 1989, and suggests reasons why the 2012 Arab Spring has not yet had the same results. But as a journalist for the Washington Post she is all too aware of attacks on democracy today, both in the former Soviet bloc and in America. She argues that the onus is on us to save our own systems.
Will we recognise the signs that democracy has ended? Cambridge professor David Runciman worries that we spend far too much time comparing today's politics with the 1930s, and that this blinds us to the frailties of democracy today. He tells Amol Rajan why he thinks our current political system will come to an end - and why we may not even notice this happening.
Professor Nic Cheeseman is all too aware that democracy can become an empty shell. His new book How To Rig An Election, co-written with Brian Klaas, looks at the myriad ways autocrats use elections for their own ends, from buying votes and bribing electors to issuing fake pens in the ballot box. And it is not only the developing world in which corruption takes place. He addresses the role of outside states in the 2016 US presidential election, and asks how western democracy can be kept healthy.
Anne Applebaum has studied the ways in which democracy can arise like a phoenix from the ashes of authoritarianism. As the author of Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine, and a professor at the LSE, she has analysed the reasons why democracy flourished in Poland and Ukraine after 1989, and suggests reasons why the 2012 Arab Spring has not yet had the same results. But as a journalist for the Washington Post she is all too aware of attacks on democracy today, both in the former Soviet bloc and in America. She argues that the onus is on us to save our own systems.
