James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature. It is both celebrated and commemorated annually on the 16th June – Bloomsday – the day on which the novel is set. The traditional celebrations held in Dublin since the 1950s have been curtailed this year because of COVID-19, but Andrew Marr discusses the legacy of Joyce with the writers Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín and Mary Costello.
Edna O’Brien first encountered Joyce’s work in the 1950s, and his writings of ‘the rough and tumble of everyday life’ spurred her extraordinary writing career. She has written a biography of Joyce, and her portrait of his marriage, James and Nora, has just been reissued.
Colm Tóibín encounters the spirit of Joyce and his creation, Leopold Bloom, constantly as he walks the streets of Dublin. In his collection of essays, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, he looks at Joyce in relation to the writer's father.
Mary Costello is a self-confessed Joyce obsessive. In her latest novel, The River Capture, she pays homage to Ulysses.
A federal court recently ordered farmers to stop spraying one of the country's most widely used herbicides, dicamba. NPR's food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles tells us the ruling has turned the world of Midwestern agriculture upside down. Then the Environmental Protection Agency came out with its own order.
Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by a white officer in Atlanta this weekend, in another horrific instance of police violence. Atlanta’s police chief subsequently announced she would step down and the officer who shot Brooks was fired.
Tens of thousands of people protested violence against Black trans people this weekend in cities across America. These protests came just as the Trump administration moved to revoke discrimination protections for trans people in health care and health insurance.
And in headlines: an update on COVID-19 in the US and around the world, African nations call on the UN to address racism and police brutality, and FKA Lady Antebellum just can’t get it right.
Follow and donate to groups working to protect black trans people:
The Okra Project pays Black trans chefs to go into the homes of Black trans people to cook them a healthy and home-cooked meal: theokraproject.com
Black and Pink is an LGBTQ prison abolitionist organization working to support LGBTQ and HIV positive prisoners: blackandpink.org
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute protects and defends the human rights of Black trans people through organizing and advocacy: marshap.org
In Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect, Recode’s Peter Kafka and Rani Molla examine how Netflix got where it is today and whether or not it can maintain its streaming supremacy. Hear from Netflix’s founders and top executives as well as its competitors, critics and more - covering everything from its unusual internal culture to its battle with Blockbuster, its disruption of Hollywood and the upcoming streaming wars.
The series comes out on Tuesdays starting June 23rd.
Andy calls comedian and director Judd Apatow to talk about how to get through this long crisis day by day with some harmony. Working through trauma is also the topic of Judd’s latest movie The King of Staten Island. This is a talk that’s both deep and funny.
Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt, and find Judd @JuddApatow on Twitter and Instagram.
Rent the King of Staten Island now on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and more! https://bit.ly/37tOk10
In the Bubble is supported in part by listeners like you. You can become a member, get exclusive bonus content, ask Andy questions, and get discounted merch at https://www.lemonadamedia.com/inthebubble/
Check out our amazing show sponsors!
Teladoc is our show sponsor for this episode! Teladoc provides access to certified doctors from the comfort and safety of home. Register now at https://www.teladoc.com/
Feel overwhelmed trying to shop for insurance? Gabi helps you compare over 40 providers for car insurance, homeowners insurance and more. Go to gabi.com/bubble to learn more.
Find guidance on how to keep our communities safe from COVID-19 in the months ahead at Open-Safely.us and follow #opensafely.
America needs a way forward after the unjust killing of George Floyd. Pastor Miles McPherson, author of "The Third Option: Hope for a Racially Divided Nation," joins the podcast to share his personal story of experiencing racism and how we can all move past the us versus them mentality to build relationships with those who look different from ourselves.
Also on today show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about daily prayer and worship gatherings that are taking place at the site of George Floyd’s death.
Learn more about Pastor Miles McPherson and buy his book here.
Will contact tracing for COVID-19 inevitably become a new police power to be used to track or generate criminal suspects? Patrick Eddington and Matthew Feeney comment.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic efforts to counter massive swarms of locusts across East Africa have continued. In many places this has been very effective, killing up to 90% of locusts. However, the threat of repeated waves of locusts remains says Cyril Ferrand, who leads the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Resilience Team in East Africa.
Conversely West Africa is unaffected by locusts and with a block on imports local producers have seen demand grow for their produce, an unusual positive effect from the pandemic according to Sandrine Dury from the French agricultural research agency CIRAD.
We examine the potential for a second wave of coronavirus as many countries relax lockdown measures, businesses reopen and mass protests take to the streets. Epidemiologist Carl Bergstrom is interested in working out which of these movements is likely to have the most impact.
And from South Africa, how radio telescope engineers there have turned their hands to developing new ventilators appropriate for regional needs.
And we were bowled over by a question from one CrowdScience listener in Australia wants to know how likely it is that the atoms in his body have been used in someone else’s body? We all like to think we are unique; no one is quite like us. But is that really true?
Presenter Marnie Chesterton tackles Moshe’s question with help from every area of science. From geologists helping us work out how many atoms are on the Earth’s surface to biologists helping us work out how many atoms each body uses. Perhaps we are much less special than we think.
Richard Myers says the future of ad-hoc mesh networks for SMS messages and bitcoin transactions on your smart phone is here, but it needs the lightning network to succeed.
On today's episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! you're invited to join Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murpy and special guest Richard Myers for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of 'Mobile Mesh Networking' technology.
Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't rely on static infrastructure and professional providers, mobile mesh networking allows the creation of inexpensive, high range, low bandwidth and power consumption ad-hoc networks that'll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.
According to Richard, Bitcoin's lightning network is a what's needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.
"...the Lightning Network currently sends payments from A to B to C and then all those intermediate nodes can connect a small fee if the payment is delivered at the end. All we're doing is saying 'Not [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it'd be a SMS message. So you sending an SMS message along with a lightning payment from A to B to C to D, and when D receives that message they return proof that it was delivered and that's what flows back through the network. In the lightning sense, that's your pre-image. It's computed from the message, that's how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it."
But the way the lightning network uses data isn't ideal for mobile mesh. The open source Lot49 protocol is another layer on top of lightning that Richard says is necessary to make it work at scale while using mesh devices as an extremely low-bandwidth TOR-like privacy layer.
"In many ways we're not making a new protocol, we're literally using lightning. Lot49 is custom communication protocol that's optimized for mesh. For example, right now there's a 1300 byte onion that's used to route messages over the internet and that's very important because you lose a lot of privacy... you lose all your privacy... if you were to just send messages over the internet without onion routing.
We're sending over more or less a physical TOR network since it's going from node to node, not through a central ISP who can associate who you're trying to pay. We're also doing it over a low bandwidth network, so if you were sending 1300 bytes it may not sound like much in the age of the internet but we're talking about devices that [have a maximum data transmission capacity of] about a kilobyte a minute so that's a significant amount of the bandwidth that you have [tied up just in the web's onion routing]
So for example with LOT49, we take out the onion and we use the native routing at the mesh device [level] which is optimized for mesh communications. And there's a few other little changes we make like that in order to reduce the bandwidth by chunking up messages... the ultimate goal is to minimize the lightning protocol overhead so that there is more bandwidth available for data... For things like sending an SMS and as bandwidth increases there may be things like internet protocol..."
This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Richard Myers. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.
