Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon CEO because of 1 word: “yawn.” Uber splurges $1.1B for Drizly’s booze delivery because there’s an alcohol arbitrage opportunity. And GamesStop’s stock re-pop dropped, so we’re looking at why trading gets halted on stock markets.
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This week, Senate Republicans offered President Biden a stimulus deal one-third the size of the administration’s plan. With a compromise looking less likely, Democrats might have to resort to reconciliation to get it passed - a process fraught with headaches.
Guest: Jordan Weissmann, Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.
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Prominent Labour politicians have claimed teachers are more likely to catch Covid-19, is that true?
England?s Test and Trace programme has been widely criticised, has it raised its game in recent months? A ferocious row has broken out between scientists about how effective fast turnaround Lateral Flow tests are, and how they should be used. We examine the data.
Plus, we examine a claim from Extinction Rebellion that British butterflies have declined by 50% since 1976.
Drug overdose deaths are on the rise all around the country, including in Chicago, Illinois. ProPublica Illinois reporter Duaa Eldeib explains how the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the opioid epidemic, and the challenges that public health officials are facing as they work to reduce opioid-related deaths.
In his book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity (Baylor UP, 2016), Sheldon George treats an old idea--that African Americans must transform their relationship to the history of slavery and to their identification with race—in an entirely new way.
What follows is a quite truncated encapsulation of the book’s central argument which I will attempt if only because it struck me as a very original use of Lacanian thought. It also produced something I value very much: the development of fresh ideas for this psychoanalyst to ponder.
George argues that owning human property, slaves, offered a surplus of "jouissance" to slave owners. Meanwhile the enslaved, denuded of family, of history and claims to nationality, were often valued solely for muscle mass and fecundity. Psychically emptied--seen only for their capacity to serve the master's needs, and I want to add, also emptying preemptively, and defensively their psychic lives, enslaved people were forbidden access to being, from which flows, following Lacan, crucial early fantasies of a wholeness that must be shattered if one is to become subjectivized. Fantasies of repletion provide a kind of protective “crested shield" with which to endure the rough first brush with the Symbolic.
Living under a racist, white animating Master Signifier, slaves were often absent of the requisite psychic buffering with which to enter the Symbolic without undue suffering. Barred from the rudiments of being and lacking a constructive Master Signifier from which to generate vitalizing associations, the gaze of the enslaved was horrifyingly riveted to the “very lack that is masked in the Lacanian subject,” (p.21). Here George offers an apt description of what the sociologist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, refers to as "social death."
Rather than celebrate the ways in which the burden of “double consciousness” aided African Americans in generating new linguistic vistas, we find no fan of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s “signifying monkey” here. George declares the project of "resignification" as not going far enough, and crucially, as missing the impact of the unconscious on language. Arguing against a powerful trend in African-American studies to value African-American racial identity as such, George boldly declares, “insistences on race perform a rite, an endless repeated act as a means to commemorate the not very memorable encounter that I call the trauma of slavery.” (p.42) How, George asks, can one have an identity based on insult, negation, and injury? Following his argument, the lure of racial pride loses its force majeur. Suddenly we see it as but papering over a potentially productive encounter with lack. And if it is lack that must be faced so as to open the door to a life driven by enlivening, elusive yet worthwhile desire, at what cost is it avoided?
The idea of having love of the race and “the race man” become rather quickly tragic in George’s intellectual hands. Furthermore, embracing the narrative that “we come from slavery”, like Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, (a novel George writes beautifully about in this text) one is quickly cornered, metonymically, by the suffocating relationship between race and enslavement. The need for the space to metaphorize is undeniable.
To learn more about the work of Sheldon George please go here.
In 1877, Eloosykasit was on his way Tolo Lake, a gathering place frequented by the Nez Perce, when he heard news of the Wallowa band's flight from the U.S. Army. Only seventeen at the time, Eloosykasit elected to remain with the migrant Nez Perce, arming himself with a rifle abandoned at White Bird Canyon, and following Chief Joseph on toward Montana. Over a century later, in the summer of 1989, Eloosykasit's descendant, Josiah Pinkham, traced the same path as part of an immersive summer program organized entirely around the Chief Joseph Trail. The trip was but one of many ways that the Upward Bound Program - based out of University of Idaho and known regionally as "the Indian Program" - provided Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike with experiences that recentered Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) and Skitswish (Coeur D'Alene) history and culture. Well-known across the Nez Perce Reservation, Coeur D'Alene Reservation, and nearby communities, Idaho's Upward Bound Program serves as the focus of journalist Tony Tekaroniake Evans' latest book, Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond (Washington State University Press, 2020).
Drawing on dozens of interviews with former Upward Bound participants and instructors, Evans traces the development of the program under longtime coordinator Isabel Bond, who has spent decades working to support local Indigenous youth through education. Evans weaves historical narratives both old and recent into a story of community-building and cultural appreciation. Though situated deeply in Nez Perce and Coeur D'Alene history and homelands, Evans' Teaching Native Pride shows the ways that Bond's Upward Bound Program, in many ways, serves as a model for educational experiences that highlight the importance of Indigenous pasts, persistence, experiences, and expertise.
Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.
CCI: Cyber Crime Investigation. Another day, another email attack - something smells “phishy” in the network. *Slowly puts on sunglasses and flips up trench coat collar* Time to go to work.
Just how easy is it for someone to steal your credentials? Because once they’re stolen, and sold for pocket change, it’s open season. Homoglyphs, drop accounts, email forwarding… is it any wonder billions of dollars have been lost to BEC (business email compromise)?
Join hosts Nic Fillingham and Natalia Godyla for a fascinating conversation with Peter Anaman, Director and Principal Investigator of the CELA Digital Crimes Unit, as they unpack the cybercrime section of the Microsoft Digital Defense Report to see what these phishers are up to. Scott Christiansen joins us later in the show to recount his journey to security and his role as an Adjunct Professor for Bellevue University's Master of Science in Cybersecurity, along with some great advice for choosing security as a profession.
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
The difference between consumer and enterprise phishing
The types of people and professions that are usually targeted in cyber attacks
How putting policies on backups and policies to protect the organization in place will help prevent digital crimes
The four categories of the internet: the dark web, the surface web, the deep web, and the vetted web
Some Questions We Ask:
What would an example of credential phishing look like?
What is the end goal for phishers?
How are phishing and business email compromise techniques leveraged during the pandemic?
What patterns are being seen when it comes to credential phishing?
How do you use ML to classify whether a bug is security-related or not?
Dr. Bob calls up infectious disease epidemiologist Julia Marcus to discuss risk, a concept many of us thought more about in the past year than ever before. Julia, a Harvard professor and contributor to The Atlantic, talks about why people take risks, the danger in stigmatizing risk-taking, and how to weigh the benefits and costs surrounding risk during the pandemic. They also cover pandemic fatigue and how Julia envisions the return to a new normal. Plus, the first Andy update from Lana!
Follow Dr. Bob on Twitter @Bob_Wachter and check out In the Bubble’s new Twitter account @inthebubblepod.
Follow Julia Marcus on Twitter @JuliaLMarcus.
Keep up with Andy in D.C. on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt.
In the Bubble is supported in part by listeners like you. Become a member, get exclusive bonus content, ask Andy questions, and get discounted merch at https://www.lemonadamedia.com/inthebubble/
Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia. For additional resources, information, and a transcript of the episode, visit lemonadamedia.com.
Trump’s second impeachment trial starts next week in the Senate, and yesterday we got a preview of the arguments both sides will be making. We go through the details of legal filings from the House Managers, and the response from Trump's team.
Democrats in the Senate voted yesterday to get the budget reconciliation process started, which they could use to pass coronavirus relief. Meanwhile, Biden signed three executive orders focused on immigration, including one to reunite families that were separated by Trump's immigration policies.
And in headlines: Russia’s COVID vaccine is highly safe and effective, Wikipedia rolls out new code of conduct, and Jeff Bezos steps down as Amazon’s CEO.
