World War II was unquestionably the greatest bloodletting in world history. Never before had so many people lost their lives in such a short period of time.
Of all of the many tragedies during the war, one of the largest actually took place after the war.
It was the largest single migrations of people in human history, it resulted in millions of deaths, and almost no one knows about it.
Learn more about the Post-WWII German Expulsions on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Love it or hate it, London dominates the UK politically, economically and culturally. It’s nearly 200 years since one critic famously described the capital as ‘the Great Wen’ a monstrous cyst sucking the life blood from the rest of the country. And for many that belief still stands. In The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City the academic, and Londoner, Jack Brown untangles the complex strands of anti-London rhetoric, separating hyperbole from fact.
In 2019 the former special advisor Dominic Cummings told journalists to ‘get out of London. Go and talk to people who are not rich Remainers’, feeding into another perception of the capital. But the city is far from homogenous: 40% of Londoners voted for Brexit, and the population is the most ethnically and religiously diverse and has the greatest levels of poverty, compared to the rest of the country. The writer Jennifer Kavanagh spent two years getting out and talking to people on the streets of London – from beggars, to stall owners, to entertainers to thieves. Let Me Take You By The Hand tells the stories in their own words, of those who work and live in the capital.
The German composer George Frideric Handel moved to London in 1712 and made it his home. The countertenor Iestyn Davies celebrates Handel’s life in the capital, following his footsteps from his operatic triumphs in Covent Garden, past his local church in Hanover Square, to his Mayfair home. In Handel’s London Altos, at King’s Place on 24th June, Davies will perform a series of pieces showcasing his best work.
Love it or hate it, London dominates the UK politically, economically and culturally. It’s nearly 200 years since one critic famously described the capital as ‘the Great Wen’ a monstrous cyst sucking the life blood from the rest of the country. And for many that belief still stands. In The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City the academic, and Londoner, Jack Brown untangles the complex strands of anti-London rhetoric, separating hyperbole from fact.
In 2019 the former special advisor Dominic Cummings told journalists to ‘get out of London. Go and talk to people who are not rich Remainers’, feeding into another perception of the capital. But the city is far from homogenous: 40% of Londoners voted for Brexit, and the population is the most ethnically and religiously diverse and has the greatest levels of poverty, compared to the rest of the country. The writer Jennifer Kavanagh spent two years getting out and talking to people on the streets of London – from beggars, to stall owners, to entertainers to thieves. Let Me Take You By The Hand tells the stories in their own words, of those who work and live in the capital.
The German composer George Frideric Handel moved to London in 1712 and made it his home. The countertenor Iestyn Davies celebrates Handel’s life in the capital, following his footsteps from his operatic triumphs in Covent Garden, past his local church in Hanover Square, to his Mayfair home. In Handel’s London Altos, at King’s Place on 24th June, Davies will perform a series of pieces showcasing his best work.
In an “other world” composed of language—it could be a fathomless Martian well, a labyrinthine hotel, or forest—a narrative unfolds, and with it the experiences, memories, and dreams that constitute reality for Haruki Murakami’s characters and readers. Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts—people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer’s extraordinary fiction.
Fervently acclaimed worldwide, Haruki Murakami’s wildly imaginative work in many ways remains a mystery, its worlds within worlds uncharted territory. Finally in The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami(University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Matthew Carl Strecher providesreaders with a map to the strange realm that grounds virtually every aspect of Murakami’s writing. A journey through the enigmatic and baffling innermost mind, a metaphysical dimension where Murakami’s most bizarre scenes and characters lurk, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami exposes the psychological and mythological underpinnings of this other world. The author shows how these considerations color Murakami’s depictions of the individual and collective soul, which constantly shift between the tangible and intangible but in this literary landscape are undeniably real.
Through these otherworldly depths The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami also charts the writer’s vivid “inner world,” whether unconscious or underworld (what some Japanese critics call achiragawa あちら側, or “over there”), and its connectivity to language. Strecher covers all of Murakami’s work—including his efforts as a literary journalist—and concludes with the first full-length close reading of the writer’s recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience.
Every good story needs a villain, and some of the early chroniclers of the pilgrim and puritan settlements found all they needed for this type of character in Thomas Morton. Peter C. Mancall tells the story in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale UP, 2019), in what reads perhaps like a historical legal thriller novel. Most of our knowledge of Morton comes from the records left by his enemies, but Mancall's new research into this enigmatic figure unveils how this unlikely anti-hero can shed tremendous light on alternate possibilities in the contentious early years of the European-Native encounter. Morton's own writings portray a vision of an altogether different kind of indigenous–settler future. Yet Morton's continued antagonism of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonial governments led to his repeated exile. While he was repudiated by the earliest generations of readers for debauchery and political menace, subsequent generations continue to find in Thomas Morton a countercultural icon in a world dominated by religious dissidents.
We'll tell you about private emails and text messages seized by the U.S. government: who the targets were and what the Justice Department was looking for.
Also, President Biden's busy week continues. What he's accomplished so far on his trip abroad and what's next on the agenda.
Plus, another record-breaking heatwave affecting a large part of the U.S., how much a spare ticket to space went for at auction, and some exciting news that's personal to The NewsWorthy family.
The G7 summit ended on Sunday, with President Joe Biden and several other world leaders pledging to send one billion COVID vaccines to poorer nations and endorsing the idea of a global minimum tax. Today, Biden is set to meet with NATO leaders before meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva on Wednesday.
Yesterday in Israel, the Knesset voted to approve the new coalition government which includes eight different parties of varying politics who unified to oust former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Naftali Bennett was sworn in as the new prime minister. He and most of his cabinet worked in Netanyahu’s at various times during his 12 year tenure, indicating that massive changes won’t come quickly.
And in headlines: Darnella Frazier receives an honorary Pulitzer Prize, Nancy Pelosi promises to probe the Trump DOJ, and a ride on Bezos’s rocket sells for $28 million.
OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(08:05) – Aliens and UFOs
(26:50) – Collective intelligence of human civilization
(34:46) – Consciousness
(46:08) – How much computation does the human brain perform?
(49:47) – Humans vs ants
(57:04) – Humans are apex predators
(1:04:08) – Girard’s Mimetic Theory of Desire
(1:24:05) – We can never completely understand reality
(1:27:29) – Self-terminating systems
(1:37:52) – Catastrophic risk
(2:08:04) – Adding more love to the world
(2:35:29) – How to build a better world
(2:52:41) – Meaning of life
(3:00:23) – Death
(3:06:04) – The role of government in society
(3:23:29) – Exponential growth of technology
(4:09:10) – Lessons from my father
(4:14:46) – Even suffering is filled with beauty
Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon flourished because of America's free-enterprise system. Yet, the foundations that bear their names are today pursuing a much different agenda, warns Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation and chairman of the Philanthropy Roundtable.
"These foundations exist with their massive endowments because of these gentlemen that believed in free markets, took risks, and created just some incredible, incredible companies," Graber says. "It's hard to make the case that any of these foundations—Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon—are honoring donor intent. The founders would not be pleased."
Also on today's show, we also read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a Waffle House manager who went out of his way to make sure one of his youngest employees could attend his high school graduation.
It is one of the Earth's great migrations: each year, millions of monarch butterflies fly some 3,000 miles, from their summer breeding grounds as far north as Canada to their overwintering sites in the central Mexico. It's one of the best-studied migrations and in recent years, ecologists like Sonia Altizer have been able to better answer how and why these intrepid butterflies make the journey. Short Wave brings this episode from the TED Radio Hour's episode with Sonia Altizer, with the University of Georgia.
