While different countries may debate as to what sport should really be called ‘football’, the reality is that the word football describes a broad family of sports all of whom have a very similar background and origin.
Just like species with a common ancestor can evolve in ways where they look totally unlike each other, so too did the football sports evolve from a common ancestor into very different forms today.
Could human dreams really, in some way, predict the future? At first, it sounds like the stuff of science fiction... but the real-life answer may not be as clear-cut as the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster. Instead, it turns out that probability, bias and, perhaps, the bleeding edge of physics may all play a role in the strange phenomenon known as precognitive dreams. Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they search for a scientific take on precognition in the second part of this two-part series.
This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, quell anxiety and calm brain frenzies by replacing your interior monologue with words detached from significance. In this case: the list of HGTV original programming, and lawnmower adverts from before I was born.
Find this episode and a transcript and some pics of lawnmower ads at theallusionist.org/homeandgarden, and all the Allusionist episodes - other Tranquillusionists and also ones that are actually about something - at theallusionist.org.
The original music is by Martin Austwick. Hear Martin’s songs at palebirdmusic.com or on Spotify, and he’s @martinaustwick on Twitter and Instagram. He also composed the music for the new kids’ science podcast Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
I make two other podcasts, Veronica Mars Investigations and Answer Me This, which are also soothingly escapist.
Today we’re presenting a conversation between myself (Andy) and my college friend Merlin Chowkwanyun, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
For years I’ve peppered Merlin with questions about how to understand the never-ending debate over “race versus class” in the US -- for instance, this New York Times piece from two weeks ago -- a subject that he’s studied for years.
We focus on a critique of “racial disparity” discourse that he has written about several times, co-authored with the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (University of Pennsylvania). Across discussions of public health, economics, and policing (for instance, their NEJM paper on Covid-19 disparities this spring), they argue that we too often view “race” as a natural and absolute trait, and “racism” as a question of primordial individual prejudice. Racial thinking, they argue, is in fact inseparable from an analysis of the dynamics of economics and class. “Race” as ideology is certainly real, but we should not mistake it as natural.
2:34 -- How did Merlin, a Thai-Chinese-American from the Asian SoCal suburbs find himself studying a primarily “black-white” story of race and racism in US history? Why not Asian American studies? How do his students make sense of the “black-white binary”?
18:20 -- We’ve all memorized the mantra “race is a social construct,” but Merlin argues that many old-fashioned nineteenth-century beliefs in the biological reality of race remain in circulation today, even among good liberals (think about the craze for 23andMe).
22:15 -- We touch on a recent New York Times article on the “race versus class” debate within the US left. Merlin has collaborated with Adolph Reed Jr. on several articles, but rather than take sides, we discuss their basic criticism of mainstream social science and its simplistic presentation of “racial disparities,” which often wind up stuck in individualized, psychologized notions of prejudice divorced from broader dynamics. Nate Silver-style quantitative regression analysis has helped reify “race” and “class” as static and natural variables of human existence.
30:40 -- Merlin and Reed’s co-authored articles on racial disparity reporting, both for Covid-19 and more generally. How did they come together to co-author these articles? Why is it dangerous to harp on “racial disparity” in a vacuum?
48:20 -- Missing from most discussions of “racial disparity” are the specific political-economic dynamics of capitalism. Specifically, modern “race” ideology originated in efforts to legitimize, justify, and naturalize slavery and Jim Crow in US history.
(In short: it’s not that white planters, because they were motivated by the racist ideas in their heads, therefore set up the slavery system; rather, because they profited off slavery and sought to defend it, planters then naturalized “race” as a scientific ideology.)
At stake today is this: a primordial account of racism (viz., “everyone’s just born a little racist”) is one that does not challenge the inequities of capitalism and is thus easily embraced by ultra-rich institutions and corporations.
57:20 -- Merlin warns (Andy) against going too far with “the Marxism” and reducing everything to capitalism. But also a warning against “white fragility”-style characterizations of 400 years of continuous white supremacy.
1:01:20 -- Is this historical and economic account of “racism” useful for comparative thinking, both with and beyond the black-white binary? For instance, understanding ethnic and racialized hatred between Dominicans and Haitians, or, further away, can “racial capitalism” be applied to understand China today? Asian American history? What about anti-Semitism?
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A massive cleanup after Hurricane Laura ripped through Louisiana. President Trump accepts the nomination for a second term. More players walk off the field. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble.” These famous lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth elicit popular images of sinister witches over their cauldrons, boiling evil potions. Today on New Books in History we’re talking with Paul Moyer, author of Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Cornell University Press), which places New England’s battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective.
In this accessible and comprehensive study of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies, Moyer explores how English colonists understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.
Paul Moyer received a BA from Bowdoin College in 1992 and earned his PhD in History from the College of William and Mary in 1999. He has taught at the University of Central Arkansas and the College of William and Mary as a Visiting Assistant Professor and is currently a Professor of History at SUNY Brockport. He is the author of several books including Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier (2007) and The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm in Revolutionary America (2015) both by Cornell University Press.
Dr. Julia Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University.
Not long ago, the QAnon conspiracy theory seemed to have lost momentum. Social media mentions had decreased. 8chan had gone offline. But since March, fueled by the pandemic and social media giants, the conspiracy has taken on new life.
What’s responsible for the rapid uptake of the movement? And now that QAnon has spilled over to the mainstream, how far can it go?
Another shooting of an unarmed black man by police has reopened wounds still not healed after George Floyd’s killing—and, like all else, the unrest is being politicised. Montenegro’s president is Europe’s longest-serving leader, but anti-government sentiment has mounted ahead of Sunday’s election. And a look back on the life of Julian Bream, who restored the reputation of the classical guitar.
