What to know today about President Trump’s promise to end riots, even if it takes military force.
Also, the different findings from two different autopsy reports about how George Floyd died.
Plus, there’s new guidance for protesters to avoid spreading COVID-19, why Facebook employees walked out, and where customer service is taking on a new meaning.
Those stories and more in less than 10 minutes!
Head to www.TheNewsWorthy.com under the section titled 'Episodes' to read more about any of the stories mentioned or see sources below...
In San Francisco, the coronavirus has disproportionately affected Hispanic and Latinx communities. This is especially true in the Mission District — a neighborhood known for its art and food culture. To understand more about how the virus has penetrated the neighborhood, a group of collaborators known as Unidos En Salud carried out a massive testing initiative focused on community and collaboration.
Follow Maddie on Twitter for more coronavirus coverage. Her Twitter handle is @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, launched NASA astronauts into orbit over the weekend. But they face competition from Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin. Christian Davenport, author of the best-selling book The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos., shares how Bezos has had cosmic ambitions his entire life.
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)
Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.
John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.
Protests against racial violence continued in well over 100 cities, leading local officials to continue to take drastic measures like curfews and calling up the National Guard. Police in Washington, DC charged a group of peaceful protestors so that Trump could take a bad photo in front of a church.
The organization Campaign Zero gathers data on policies aimed at ending police violence. We discuss the policy changes they’ve found to be successful and unsuccessful.
And in headlines: the United States sends a dubious COVID-19 drug to Brazil, seven states hold their primaries today, and Trump brings big bridezilla energy to planning the RNC.
Growing up in a small rural city in Germany, Dominic Obermaier was not exposed too much when it comes to computers. After studying computer science in college, he was hooked. A frequent reader of ancient philosophy, he likes to hang out with friends and play board games, specifically long-lasting games such as Arkham horror. Obermaier started a company with his college friends with the goal to broker data from connected devices, and not just a few, but millions following his very own standardized IoT protocol MQTT. This solution is now known as HiveMQ.
In the midst of outrage and shock over the death of George Floyd, many Americans want to respond in a way that will bring about positive change - they just don’t know how.
Has there ever been a tech startup that raised shy of $3 billion, inflation-adjusted for any era, while barely making a ripple with actual customers? Magic Leap just pocketed a fresh $350 million in funding, on the condition that its co-founder and CEO Rony Abovitz, agree to step aside and allow new leadership to take the reins. We chat AR/VR, dot-com flameouts, and why crazy tech is worth believing in.
Sara hips us to the 11th anniversary of Node.js and the 25th anniversary of Javascript. The latter has the distinction of being the only language to appear in the top 10 for most loved and most hated languages on our 2020 developer survey.
Paul and Sara reminisce about Javascript callbacks. Hard work builds character, don't ya know.
This episode was recorded before the recent protests, and so does not contain any discussion of current events in the United States. We will touch on it in future episodes, but you can find Stack Overflow's statement on it here.
Amanda Holmes reads Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem, “Eros Turannos.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
It’s a scene you might recall from a music video or TV shows where a young alpha male goes to the club with his crew. They’re parked at a table, order bottle service while flanked by a bevy of attractive if faceless young women, and after some overindulgence start spraying Cristal like dish soap in a squirt gun.
Mears, an associate professor of sociology and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Boston University, describes her 18 months of field work, and her findings, to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast.
Their talk starts with a description of club life at the VIP level and the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption, its “ritualized squandering” in Mears words, that is its hallmark.
Addressing ‘bottle service,’ in which a customer essentially rents a table for the night and buys expensive alcohol by the bottle (and not drink-by drink), Mears offers a vivid picture:
“The real action of the night happens when these bottles are bought in excess. The crowd will start to cheer and take pictures. The club has kinds of theatrics for the display of big purchases: DJs stopping the music to make an announcement, bottles and bottles coming out with these fireworks, really large bottles that come out and require really strong people to be able to carry them. Some people buy so many bottles of champagne that they can’t even drink them – they’ll gift them to everybody in the club, so everybody gets a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. They can’t drink it, it’s too much to be consumed, so people will start shaking the bottles up and spraying them and spraying each other, turning them up in the air and just dumping them – it’s ritualized waste.”
It’s a ritual that costs the “bread and butter” type VIP customers a couple thousand dollars an outing, but where a “whale” – one of the cadre of super-rich who often travel the party circuit around the planet – often drop substantially more. Mears cites the exploits of Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian businessman popularly known as Jho Low (and now on the run for allegedly looting his country’s sovereign wealth fund) who spent more than a million U.S. dollars in just one night in San Tropez.
It is, she explains, an esoteric world that has “made it into the mainstream as a sort of emblem of elite consumption.” Still, she adds, it’s a subculture of a subculture; the mobile and transnational whales represent a “very small, rarefied tribe of people that are partying together.” And yet “most elites in the world wouldn’t be caught dead in these places!”
Mears describes an ecosystem with three main species – the rich men who do the spending, the pretty girls who draw the rich men, and the promoters who find and display the pretty girls (and ‘girls’ is the term used). Mears’ own entry into the scenes came through associations with promoters – she interviewed 44 for the book – and tagging along on their peripatetic gyrations through New York, Miami and San Tropez.
“The way that I got into it was by following this group of mostly men that work for the clubs to bring a so-called ‘quality crowd’ – mostly beautiful women – to sit at their tables. The idea is that the beautiful women will attract the big spenders. The ‘quality’ of a crowd comes down to two gendered components: men with money and women with beauty.”
That beauty is “the kind championed by the fashion model industry”: young, thin, often white, and with that certain look championed by the fashion industry. And while the promoters do get paid, the women do not. Their compensation is the night on the town, or possibly a trip to some exotic place for a night on the town. That may sound like another profession … “It looks like sex work,” Mears says, “even though [the promoters are] very clear that it’s not.” The promoters insist they are not pimps by another name, and while hookups do happen, that’s not how they generate income.
That said, the women in this triangle trade are, in essence, the coin of the realm.
What turns Mears’ work into more than an HBO series is the sociological lens she brings to the proceedings. She cites the roots of study into displays of wealth from Thorstein Veblen and Claude Lévi-Strauss to more modern scholars like the late Pierre Bourdieu and Gayle Rubin. She also discusses some of the methodology of ethnography, and how she opted for ‘participatory observation’ at some points to fully understand the terrain.
She took a similar approach for her first book, 2011’s Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, which drew on her own experiences in the industry.
