Today we feature an interview our colleague Kelsey Bolar did with Virginia Walden Ford, a mom of three whose activism brought school choice to the kids of Washington, D.C. Now her story is being made into a major movie, “Miss Virginia,” which will be released Oct. 18.
We also cover these stories:
• The Education Department is fining Michigan State University $4.5 million over its handling of sexual misconduct.
• The Labor Department reinstated a political appointee who had resigned over a sarcastic Facebook post that a reporter suggested was anti-Semitic.
• Walgreens is now following the trend set by other big retail chains in asking customers to no longer open carry firearms in their stores.
The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
This week's episode breaks down the 357-page state court gerrymandering decision in North Carolina striking down that state's legislative districts. We explain in depth exactly what happened -- and exactly why cases like there are the future for political gerrymandering claims in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Rucho v. Common Cause.
We begin, however, with a couple of Andrew Was Wrong segments, including a sad update on Gavin Grimm as well as feedback from the entire state of Idaho!
Then, it's time for a deep dive into the recent ruling in North Carolina, which includes an analysis of both the facts -- featuring "Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" Dr. Evil stand-in Thomas Hofeller -- and the law. If political gerrymandering is now perfectly okay by the U.S. Supreme Court, what can we do? Listen and find out!
After that, it's time for a brief Yodel Mountain update regarding Don McGahn, as well as a Jeffrey Epstein update.
And then it's time for #T3BE on the formation of contract: when, exactly, does a contract to buy a truck get made? You won't want to miss this one.
Appearances
None! If you’d like to have either of us as a guest on your show, drop us an email at openarguments@gmail.com.
Show Notes & Links
We last discussed Gavin Grimm's case in Episode 306.
In the interview, it’s internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch on how the language we use has been shaped by the information superhighway—and for starters, people never say “information superhighway” anymore. They also write more (everyone’s a writer on the internet) and less formally, though without shedding whatever regional dialect they may have. McCulloch is the author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.
In the Spiel, the climate change debate.
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A note on shownotes. In a perfect world, you go into each episode of the Memory Palace knowing nothing about what's coming. It's pretentious, sure, but that's the intention. So, if you don't want any spoilers or anything, you can click play without reading ahead.
The House's impeachment inquiry ambles on as Trump’s crimes pile up, a North Carolina special election looms, and the Democratic presidential candidates talk about the climate crisis for seven hours on CNN.
There may be some benefit to expanding the pay rates at which workers are eligible for overtime, but Ryan Bourne argues those benefits will be short term.
On a recent visit to San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, KQED listener Michelle Morby didn’t like what she saw. In the middle of the champagne-sipping, pre-performance throng, she spotted someone wearing jeans and white sneakers.
“That to me is completely offensive,” Morby said.
Morby is someone who likes to dress up when she goes out.
“If I got a ticket to the opera tonight, I would pull out a silk jumpsuit. I would wear it with the tallest platform sandals that I have. And I would do my makeup, and I would wear all my jewelry,” she said.
Like beauty, fashion is very much in the eye of the beholder.
So the fashion faux-pas prompted Morby to ask Bay Curious the question, “Why has the Bay Area become the Casual Capital of the World?”
Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Maggie Galloway, Robert Speight, Katie McMurran, Paul Lancour and Ryan Levi. Additional support from Julie Caine, Suzie Racho, Ethan Lindsey, Pat Yollin and David Weir.
An isotopic fingerprint is reported of a nuclear explosion in Russia last month. Researchers ask people living in the area or nearby to send them samples of dust or soil before the radioactive clues therein decay beyond recognition. Also, a near miss between an ESA satellite and a SpaceX/Starlink module in crowded near space strengthens the case for some sort of international Space Traffic Management treaty, whilst in the arctic circle, melting permafrost is disinterring the graves of long-dead whalers.
(Photo:Tell-tale radioactive isotopes could still be in dust on cars near the site of the blast. Credit: Humonia/iStock / Getty Images Plus)
One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that you can’t tell from the actions themselves why they have to be done that way – and that fascinates anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. By his own admission, what intrigues the statutory chair in social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford is that ritual is “behavior that is ‘causally opaque’ – by which I mean it has no transparent rational causal structure.
“[Rituals] are that way,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Space podcast, “simply because by cultural convention and general stipulation that is the done and proper way to carry out the behavior.”
Rituals can range from collective events like funerals, initiations, political installations and liturgies to private acts like bedtime prayers or self-crossing before a crucial meeting. One thing that unites all of these is that they are faithfully copied and passed down through the generations.
While the psychological causes of the ritual impulse are inherently interesting, Whitehouse’s work also examines the consequences of ritual, and how rites can produce different intensities of social glue depending on their frequency and emotionality.
For example, painful or frightening initiations tend to produce very strong “social glue,” “fusing” individuals into a larger whole. This insight, partially derived from a visit to Libya in 2011 to study the groups engaged in the effort to overthrow Moammar Ghadafi, has implications, for example, in addressing extremism.
By contrast some groups use “high frequency but relatively dull and boring rituals in order to establish a set of identity markers that can be maintained without radical mutation”. Here the focus is more on ensuring conformity across a large population.
Whitehouse’s own journey into studying religiosity (“I’m not religious myself but deeply fascinated by what makes people religious”) and ritual also are covered in the podcast. As a young academic, Whitehouse started by doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea focused on economic anthropology. “The people I ended up living with for two years, deep in the rain forest, were very interested in telling me about their religious ideas and ritual practices. They were the ones who got me into the topic.”
It was less, he added, that they wanted to proselytize and more that “they got bored with my questions about production and consumption and exchange and all these boring economic things. I think people were starting to want to avoid me when they saw me coming with my notebooks.”
