Sam Adams owner Boston Beer shockingly doubled profits last quarter, but it’s not thanks to Boston Beer. Disney, Apple, and Netflix have made moves that just killed the summer blockbuster biz. And the biggest Special Purpose Acquisition Company ever just went public, officially making this the “Summer of the SPAC” (fun to say).
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Back in May, when House Democrats were teeing up additional coronavirus relief legislation, the Senate majority made a bet. Republicans waited to see if viral spread would diminish, making additional federal aid unnecessary. Instead, U.S. COVID-19 cases spiked. And economic problems mounted. Now, Senate Republicans are far from a consensus on a relief bill, even as coronavirus-related unemployment benefits run out.
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer. Sign up for his excellent newsletter, The Surge.
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What to know about more protests and riots around the country: where they're happening and what inspired them.
Also, the latest from a COVID-19 hot spot, and why the White House task force is going there today.
Plus, we're talking about two hurricanes, two meteor showers, and Taylor Swift's latest worldwide record...
Those stories and more in just 10 minutes!
Head to www.theNewsWorthy.com or see sources below to read more about any of the stories mentioned today.
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The pandemic has led to a drop in ship traffic around the world, which means the oceans are quieter. It could be momentary relief for marine mammals that are highly sensitive to noise. NPR's Lauren Sommer introduces us to scientists who are listening in, hoping to learn how whale communication is changing when the drone of ships is turned down.
Before Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race?
In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court(NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how highly (and often overly) qualified woman are shortlisted by presidents -- from Herbert Hoover to Donald Trump -- to create the appearance of diversity before a (white) man is selected to preserve the status quo. Short-listing isn’t success but symptom of a problem.
Jefferson and Johnson’s research in presidential libraries, private papers, oral histories, the Nixon tapes, and biographies reveals that presidents as early as Herbert Hoover began discussing female candidates – though presidents set aside overly qualified women for decades. The first half of this nuanced book explores the first woman considered (Florence Allen), five judges who were on the short lists of JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and female judges who were short-listed alongside Sandra Day O’Connor (including the first Black female judge, Amalya Lyle Kearse). The histories of each candidate map onto the waves of feminism, reflect on the role of marriage, motherhood, and sexuality, and allow the authors to identify the harms of short-listing.
The details are revealing about both past and present and the second half of the book addresses how to apply the lessons learned from these decades of paying lip-service to diversity. How can candidates transition from shortlisting to selection? Jefferson and Johnson discuss tokenism, the burdens of being a gender spokesperson, racism, ageism, and the binds of femininity and “respectability.” The authors demonstrate how the selection of women for the Supreme Court impacts other aspects of the legal system and beyond. Although the number of men and women entering law school and entry-level legal positions are equal, the rate at which men reach leadership positions is considerably faster than women. This phenomenon can be seen in many fields where there is a pursuit of professional advancement. The authors conclude with strategies such as “collaborating to compete” to reform the American legal system.
Florida has now passed New York in total known coronavirus cases, making it the second worst-hit state behind California which is nearly twice its size. In Europe, the UK is imposing a two week quarantine on anyone who’s been in Spain after an uptick in virus spread there.
Republicans are set to propose their bill for the next round of coronavirus relief today. As federal unemployment benefits expire, we examine how we got to $600 per week in federal aid, and why Republicans want to reduce that going forward.
And in headlines: the 30th anniversary of the ADA, a reduced-capacity Hajj, and more info on a government UFO program.
Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, joins the podcast to discuss his motivation for writing the book, why he always has been a conservative, and the bias of the left-wing media.
Also on today's show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a New York couple's cosmic engagement, which captured the attention of NASA.
If you answer that question, most likely you are giving an answer based on a calendar that goes all the way back to one put in place by Julius Caesar.
Caesar’s calendar, aka the Julian Calendar, was pretty good, but it developed problems over time, so it was modified in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.
This calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, what we’ve been using for the last several hundred years, and it works pretty well.
One year ago, the Financial Action Task Force, the global anti-money laundering watchdog, ruled that crypto transactions data should be controllable, and ever since the question has been not if you KYC your users but how you do it.
However, not all bitcoiners have surrendered to this norm. Hodl Hodl and Bisq don’t provide centralized custody and don’t check user’s identity. They also don’t employ the blockchain tracing tools to block the “tainted” coins (blacklisted as coming from illicit activities), which became a must for major exchanges these days.
What comes with this? A chance to buy and sell bitcoin without revealing your identity, as well as much more responsibility over how you buy and store your crypto. Max Keidun, the CEO of Hodl Hodl, and Steve Jain, contributor to Bisq, dig into why in the times of crypto-compliance people still might need (or maybe just lawfully want) to keep their bitcoin deals to themselves.
There are more questions to arise from such an old-school-cypherpunk situation: how can you make sure you don’t get scammed at these p2p platforms? What do you do if you buy “tainted” coins blacklisted by the FATF-abiding exchanges and vendors?
Max and Steve share their takes on this, and the main explanation is probably: “everything has a price.” Including freedom from surveillance and data leaks.
We also touch the matter of decentralization that is important to both Hodl Hodl and Bisq. Hodl Hodl is planning to open-source itself, so that everyone can clone and run their own p2p bitcoin exchange in case the regulators go after Keidun and his team. And Bisq has gone full decentralized last year when it turned all its decision making over to a DAO.
There's been encouraging news about the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine this week from a trial involving about 1,000 people. But how great is the challenge in scaling up from making a few thousand doses of the vaccine to manufacturing two billion by the end of this year? Sandy Douglas of Oxford's Jenner Institute explains how they plan to mass-produce the vaccine safely given the speed and magnitude of the scale up.
A new kind of treatment for Covid-19 may come from an unlikely source: llamas and alpacas, the South American relatives of the camel. Camelids produce unusually small and simple antibodies against viruses, including the coronavirus. This feature may make these molecules an effective Covid-19 therapy. Jane Chambers reports on research in Chile and the UK.
Also in the programme: what has made just a few mosquito species evolve a preference for biting humans, and the theory that 800 million years ago the Moon and the Earth were bombarded by a shower of asteroids which plunged the Earth into a global ice age - an event which changed the course of the evolution of life.
These days we're more acquainted with soap than ever before, as we lather up to help stop the spread of coronavirus. And for CrowdScience listener Sharon, this set off a steady stream of soapy questions: how does soap actually work? How was it discovered in the first place, long before anyone knew anything about germs? Are different things used for washing around the world, and are some soaps better than others?
We set up a CrowdScience home laboratory to explore the soap making process with advice from science-based beauty blogger Dr Michelle Wong, and find out what it is about soap's chemistry that gives it its germ-fighting superpowers. Soap has been around for at least 4000 years; we compare ancient soap making to modern methods, and hear about some of the soap alternatives used around the world, like the soap berries of India.
And as for the question of whether some soaps are better than others? We discover why antibacterial soaps aren't necessarily a good idea, and why putting a toy inside a bar of soap might be more important than tweaking its ingredients.
(Image: A team of experts at the University of Oxford are working to develop a vaccine that could prevent people from getting Covid-19. Credit: Press Association)
