Snowflake dazzles with the biggest software IPO ever. Adobe reports record revenue. Lennar Corp raises the roof with big earnings. Nvidia makes a $40 billion buy. Telehealth company AmWell makes its debut on Wall Street. FedEx hits a new all-time high. Dave & Buster’s declines on bankruptcy concerns. And the nation prepares for a Peeps-free Halloween. Motley Fool analysts Andy Cross and Jason Moser discuss those stories and share a couple of stocks on their radar: Nike and Freshpet. Plus, award-winning personal finance expert Laura Adams offers helpful tips for anyone starting a business and shares other insights from her new book, Money-Smart Solopreneur: A Personal Finance System for Freelancers, Entrepreneurs, and Side-Hustlers.
Today's Noah-less podcast features the Commentary crew's horrified disbelief at Alex Ross's astounding claim in the New Yorker that American classical music originates from white supremacy, moves on to the justice or lack thereof in the coming ban on Chinese social media platforms in the United States, and then judges Joe Biden's town hall performance on CNN. Give a listen.
For millennia, people in civilizations across the planet have claimed to perceive intangible energy emanating from people, animals, plants -- and even inanimate objects. And, in recent centuries, scientists and mystics alike have sought to explain this phenomenon. As you might imagine, not everyone agrees on what an aura could be -- or whether it exists -- in the modern day.
Orders governing individual behavior during this pandemic have been, to say the least, inconsistent and have often violated individual rights. Ilya Shapiro discusses his essay in Pandemics and Policy.
Orders governing individual behavior during this pandemic have been, to say the least, inconsistent and have often violated individual rights. Ilya Shapiro discusses his essay in Pandemics and Policy.
President Trump and Joe Biden hit the swing states as Election 2020 heats up. Portions of Florida's panhandle cut off by flooding. 50 years since the death of Jimi Hendrix. CBS News Correspondent Peter King has today's World News Roundup.
For pregnant women in the U.S., there are plenty of reasons to mistrust the medical establishment. Mortality rates are high compared to other western countries, and one-third of women in the U.S. give birth by C-section. It’s no wonder that many women turn to the internet for alternatives.
This week, the story of one woman who was drawn into a network of private Facebook groups dedicated to the idea of ‘freebirth,’ or unassisted birth. And what happens when the misinformation shared in these private groups has real-life consequences.
Guest: Brandy Zadrozny, reporter for NBC News. You can read her reporting on ‘freebirth’ here.
Thailand is bracing for a large anti-government protest, with some of the anger directed at the usually-revered monarchy. Some fear that the establishment’s patience will snap, with bloody results. Freemasonry has been one of the most contagious ideas of the modern age, spreading to every corner of the world. But the number of masons is shrinking. And in Britain, social distancing may have shut nightclubs. But many ravers don’t tech-no for an answer. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Snowflake’s business is kind of boring, but their IPO reveals everything that’s wrong with IPOs right now. Facebook is whipping up a Zuck-free Ray-Ban partnership to win Wearables. And NextEra is now the most valuable utility stock in the USA thanks to renewable energy and a hint of monopoly.
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The title of Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar,’s new book poses the question that comes up every presidential election cycle: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (Harvard University Press, 2020). Keyssar presents the reader with a deep, layered, and complex analysis not only of the institution of the Electoral College itself, drawing out how it came about at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but of the many attempts over more than two centuries to reform it or get rid of it. This is an historical subject with keenly contemporary relevance, as we move into the final stretch of the 2020 election cycle, and we consider how the political landscape, party platforms, and the shape of the presidential race all look the way they do because of the Electoral College. Keyssar unpacks the discussions and debates at the Constitutional Convention about how to elect a president, and then dives into the immediate response to the Electoral College as it was implemented in the new system.
In going through the history of the Electoral College itself, and the points of contention between the popular vote tallies and the Electoral College results, as well as the many, many attempts to reform or eliminate the Electoral College, Keyssar highlights the two points in American political history when we came closest to doing away with this means of electing the president. The Era of Good Feeling (1815-1825)—when there was really only one functioning party, and the party system itself was in flux as party competition shifted—saw a significant effort to revise the Electoral College and the contingent election system that had been used when no candidate received a majority of the votes and the House of Representatives must designate a winner. Keyssar also maps out the efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s to pass an amendment to the Constitution to replace the Electoral College with direct popular vote. This legislation was filibustered in the Senate by senior Southern Democratic and Dixiecrat senators who saw the disproportional voice that the Electoral College gave to the Southern states—states where the Black vote had been significantly diminished because of regulations and threats that made it extraordinarily difficult and dangerous for African Americans to vote. Keyssar explains that this was known as the “5/5 rule”—in contrast to the 3/5th rule in the Constitution—whereas the southern states were able to count all Black citizens are part of their populations and preclude all of them from voting.
Why Do We Still Have The Electoral College also traces the internal shifts within the states as they moved from their initial approach to the distribution of electoral college votes to the establishment of the “unit rule” or “general ticket” that allocates all of a state’s electoral college votes to the winner in that particular state. Not only have there been attempts to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, but there is a long history of the efforts to reform or eliminate the general ticket/unit rule. Keyssar brings the reader forward to the contemporary period through a number of different threads as he outlines multiple dimensions of reform attempts and their failure, all while providing the reader with a deep history of debate about the structure and function of the Electoral College. This unique aspect of the American constitutional system also reflects the continuing impact of the role of race in American politics and political institutions. For those interested, curious, or confused, this book is truly a tour de force on the Electoral College.
