PayPal hit an all-time high after saying “cash is dead,” but Venmo’s getting all the attention. While the rest of the brew industry douses itself in hard seltzer, Molson Coors figured out how to make beer flourish in the moment. And SiriusXM is a lot like cable TV, but for audio. We hope it doesn’t accept its fate of decline, like cable has.
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The past couple of weeks have seen some alarming developments in the U.S.-China relationship. Among them is how the United States plans to deal with the wildly popular Chinese social media app TikTok. The debate over the social giant has reached the White House and discussions of what to do about it have ranged from an outright ban to Microsoft acquiring U.S. operations of the app.
What makes TikTok a threat to national security? And what does this whole episode say about where U.S.-China relations are heading?
How dangerous is COVID-19 for pregnant women and their babies? The research has been scant and the data spotty. Dr. Laura Riley, the chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Obstetrician-in-Chief at New York-Presbyterian, explains what we know at this point and what pregnant women can do to protect themselves.
How did a group of charismatic, apocalyptic Jewish missionaries, working to prepare their world for the impending realization of God's promises to Israel, end up inaugurating a movement that would grow into the gentile church? Committed to Jesus’s prophecy—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—they were, in their own eyes, history's last generation. But in history's eyes, they became the first Christians.
In When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (Yale University Press, 2018), Paula Fredriksen answers this question by reconstructing the life of the earliest Jerusalem community. As her account arcs from this group’s hopeful celebration of Passover with Jesus, through their bitter controversies that fragmented the movement’s midcentury missions, to the city’s fiery end in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, she brings this vibrant apostolic community to life. Fredriksen offers a vivid portrait both of this temple-centered messianic movement and of the bedrock convictions that animated and sustained it.
Disruptions and delays to the postal service have prompted concern since so many people are planning to vote by mail this year. We break down what’s behind the delay, and how to ensure your vote is counted.
Congress still can’t agree on how to structure unemployment benefits in the next relief bill. Midwestern states like Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin are emerging as coronavirus hotspots.
And in headlines: NASA astronauts safely return to Earth aboard SpaceX’s shuttle, three hackers charged in July Twitter breach, and over 750 criminal cases are under review after LAPD officers are charged with falsifying documents.
A cybersecurity battle is raging. In recent weeks, Chinese hackers stole, or attempted to steal, terabytes of data from the U.S. government, businesses, and private individuals. Digital predators gained access to the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, former President Barack Obama, and other high-profile individuals. And President Donald Trump says he is considering banning the Chinese-made app TikTok over security concerns.
Klon Kitchen, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy, joins the podcast to explain the severity of America’s cybersecurity threats, what actions the government should take, and how you can keep your personal information safe from hackers.
Also on today’s show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a mom who won a little money playing the lottery but decided to give it all to a police officer in Kansas City, Missouri, who recently was shot in the line of duty.
For years a story had circulated that the rock and roll group Van Halen had a contract that required that a bowl of M&Ms be left backstage wherever they performed, with all the brown M&Ms removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would use it as an excuse to trash the room.
Is this just an urban legend, or was there something behind the story?
NASA launches its new robotic mission to Mars. The rover, Perseverance, will land in a 50 kilometre wide crater which looks like it was filled by a lake about 4 billion years ago - the time when life on Earth was getting started. Mission scientist Melissa Rice explains why this is one of the most promising places on Mars to continue the search for past life on the red planet.
Japanese and US scientists have revived microbes that have been buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 100 million years. Sampled from compacted mud 70 metres below the seafloor and beneath 6 kilometre of water, Yuki Morono and Steve D'Hondt admit they struggle to understand how the bacteria have survived for so long.
Science in Action celebrates the little unknown oceanographer Marie Tharp who in the late 1950s discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge which helped to launch the plate tectonics revolution in earth sciences. It would be Tharp's 100th birthday this week.
New research this week suggests that coronaviruses capable of infecting humans have been in bats for 40 to 70 years, and that there may be numerous and as yet undetected viruses like the Covid-19 virus in bat populations with the potential to cause future pandemics. Their message is that we should be sampling and testing wild bat colonies much more extensively than currently. Their findings provide further evidence against the unfounded claim that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Roland Pease talks to Dr Maciej Boni at Pennsylvania State University.
Listener Avalon from Australia wants to know why people use conspiracy theories to explain shocking events. Are we more likely to believe conspiracy theories in times of adversity? What purpose do conspiracy theories serve in society?
Marnie Chesterton speaks to the scientists to explain their popularity, even in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence.
(Image: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: Illustration provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS)
Bitcoin started as a rebellious, anti-establishment technology. In many parts of the world, and for many people, it remains exactly that.
At the same time, however, there is a wave of traditionalists and institutional players moving into the space.
Are they buying into the revolution, or are they trying to capture value while fitting the disruption into a box that maintains the current power structure they lead?
Those are the key questions explored by Meltem Demirors in her new essay “Unintended Architecture.” The piece is our selection for this week’s “Long Reads Sunday.”
