After years of policy work in Washington, Neera Tanden is more than qualified to serve as Biden’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. But her open scorn for conservatives and progressives alike, often expressed through aggressive Twitter barbs, has made her confirmation the most tenuous of the new president’s picks.
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer.
Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now.
In which we consider an alternate timeline where the Beatles' third movie was a psychedelic Tolkien adaptation instead of a bummer documentary, and Ken sticks up for sanitation. Certificate #51290.
Snapchat’s stock is at an all-time high, but the real story here is Snap Maps. The US Postal Service played kingmaker with 2 stocks. And fresh off of bottling your White Claw, Ardagh is going public via SPAC, catching 2 trends at once.
$SNAP $GRSV $OSK $WKHS
Got a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYork
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After years of policy work in Washington, Neera Tanden is more than qualified to serve as Biden’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. But her open scorn for conservatives and progressives alike, often expressed through aggressive Twitter barbs, has made her confirmation the most tenuous of the new president’s picks.
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer.
Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now.
Descendants of trauma victims seem to have worse health outcomes. Could epigenetics help explain why? Bianca Jones Marlin and Brian Dias walk us through the field of epigenetics and its potential implications in trauma inheritance.
Lori Cox Han and Caroline Heldman, both scholars of gender and politics as well as scholars of the American Presidency, have assembled a wide array of essays[*] to revisit the question about whether “we” are ready for the first female president of the United States, and what the path might look like to arrive at that glass-ceiling shattering event. Cox Han and Heldman had edited a previous version of this concept in 2007 (Rethinking Madam President: Are We Ready for the First Woman in the White House? Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007) and they and their contributing authors had concluded that, in 2007, the United States was not yet ready to give “female presidential candidates a fair run.”
But much has shifted and changed over the years since the publication of that previous interrogation of this perennial consideration and Madam President? Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House(Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020) revisits this consideration having seen Hillary Clinton as the standard bearer for the Democratic Party in 2016, even while she lost the Electoral College vote to Donald Trump. Cox Han and Heldman, and the contributing authors to Madam President? are evaluating the political landscape following Clinton’s loss and exploring what changed as a result of the presidential race in 2016, including the Women’s Movement/March that came together following Trump’s Inauguration and the rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements as well.
The chapters that make up Madam President? Gender and Politics on the Road to the White House cover quite a few different dimensions of presidential politics and gender politics, including examining where female candidates have been able to compete on a more equal playing field with male candidates, such as in their capacity to fundraise, as Victoria Farrar-Myers explains in her chapter on “Money and Candidate Viability.” Other chapters explore the masculine nature of the presidency itself and the difficulty this poses for candidates and for voters. Authors approach this complicated foundation of the American presidency from a variety of perspectives, including Meredith Conroy’s chapter on masculinity and media coverage during the course of the campaign, and Karen Hult’s and Meena Bose’s respective chapters on sex, gender, and leadership within the Executive Branch, and key areas of presidential responsibility. Madam President? helps us think about the newly elected female Vice President, Kamala Harris, and her husband’s role as first spouse. As Cox Han and Heldman explain during the course of our conversation, there is some cause of optimism that we may already be seeing the first woman president of the United States, it just may be a few years before she takes office.
The FDA put out analyses yesterday showing that Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine is highly effective, setting the stage for its approval as early as this weekend.
The CDC put out new guidelines for safely reopening schools earlier this month, and it comes as the Biden administration has said they are working to get a majority of K-8 schools open in their first 100 days. We spoke to Washington Post education reporter Moriah Balingit about the new guidelines, the COVID risk in schools, and what it all means for teachers and parents.
And in headlines: Ghana became the first country to get free COVID-19 vaccines through COVAX, an update on Tiger Woods condition following his car crash, and California beats a legal challenge to its net neutrality law.
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Read more from Moriah Balingit in the Washington Post:
The narrative that a child only needs love and safety to thrive is being challenged by Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us, a nonprofit organization that promotes social policies to protect the rights of children.
Faust joins the “Problematic Women” podcast to share her story and why it's critical that the needs of the child play a key role in debates about same-sex parenting, divorce, sperm- or egg-donor children, and so on.
We also cover these stories:
The Biden administration announces that the government will distribute 25 million masks.
A federal judge in Texas blocks President Joe Biden’s deportation pause in a nationwide order.
Lindsay Boylan, a former aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, details sexual harassment allegations against the governor.
Paris Marx is joined by Gavin Mueller to discuss who the Luddites really were, what they can teach us about how we think about technology today, and why they show the need for a decelerationist politics of the future.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.
