Month: July 2018

Posted on

World Book Club - Anuradha Roy: An Atlas of Impossible Longing

This month World Book Club talks to internationally celebrated Indian writer Anuradha Roy about her much-loved novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

Spanning three generations of an Indian family from the turn of the 20th century to India's partition An Atlas of Impossible Longing traces the intertwining lives of the inhabitants of a vast and isolated house on the outskirts of a small town in Bengal. Centred on sensitive foundling orphan boy Mukunda and the wild and motherless daughter of the house, Bakul, the novel charts the unshakeable but oft-threatened bond that grows between them in a world where they feel abandoned by everyone else. A haunting and compelling story of love, loss, grief and the power of home.

(Picture: Anuradha Roy. Photo credit: fmantovani.)

Posted on

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - The Argument That Could Reclaim the Supreme Court for Democrats

This week Dahlia LIthwick talks with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, about what we can expect over the next several months as Donald Trump nominates a new associate justice to the Supreme Court. He talks about why Democrats must care more about the Supreme Court, the danger of dark money, and the frustration of confirmation hearings.

Please let us know what you think of Amicus. Join the discussion of this episode on Facebook. Our email is amicus@slate.com. 

Podcast production by June Thomas.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Posted on

The Gist - Just Use My Data, People

On The Gist, the shamelessness of the Wall Street Journal editorial board on Scott Pruitt leaving the Environmental Protection Agency.

Advertisements are a pain, interrupting our television programs and distracting us while we play games on our phones. They’re a necessity though, funding all the entertainment we consume. Ken Auletta joins us to discuss the current state of advertising and its uncertain, data-driven future. Auletta’s new book is Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else). 

In the Spiel, can we please just have targeted ads already?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Posted on

CrowdScience - Where Do All Our Vegetables Come From?

Listener Pogo wants to know why there aren’t any cabbages – or any of the other vegetables – in his local forest. Where did they all come from? And could they someday disappear? Presenter Gareth Barlow goes hunting for wild snacks in a city park and unearths the evolution of our most beloved greens. The vegetables on our supermarket shelves today were not always nicely wrapped and tasty. Humans have been selecting for specific genes in plants for thousands of years by choosing to grow those we liked the most.

Tomatoes have been transformed from a small prickly desert plant in Peru into a water guzzler with round, juicy, sweet fruits. But with breeding – and sometimes cloning – of plants we have also created genetic bottlenecks in many of the crops we rely heavily on. This has left many of our vegetables across the world vulnerable to shifts in climate, natural disasters, wars and diseases.

To find solutions to this massive breach in food security, CrowdScience heads to the Millennium Seed-bank in England. By collecting and storing our most precious seeds in vaults beneath the ground, scientists are protecting the genetic diversity that we will need to overcome the challenges ahead.

Presenter: Gareth Barlow Producer: Louisa Field

Picture: Man holding basket of vegetables Credit: Getty Images/valentinrussanov

Posted on

Motley Fool Money - Investing Misconceptions & Popsicle Hotlines

“Investing is not the study of finance, it’s the study of how people behave with money.” Award-winning financial columnist Morgan Housel stops by Fool HQ to share how psychology drives financial decisions, why long tails drive everything, and some of the biggest misconceptions in investing. Plus, we revisit our conversation with best-selling author Dan Heath, discussing his latest book The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Posted on

More or Less: Behind the Stats - Are there more stars than grains of beach sand?

The astronomer, Carl Sagan, famously said that there were more stars in our Universe than grains of sand on the Earth?s beaches. But was it actually true? More or Less tries to count the nearly uncountable. Content warning: This episode includes gigantically large numbers. (Photo: The barred spiral galaxy M83. Credit: Nasa).