Last year, UNC Chapel Hill began courting Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to come teach at the Hussman School of Journalism. But when her tenure recommendation landed in front of the school’s board of trustees, they refused to take a vote, leaving her application in limbo. After months of public pressure and lobbying by students and faculty, Hannah-Jones was offered tenure - but not before she’d decided to teach at Howard University instead.
How did UNC’s board of trustees cost the school such a coveted appointment? And how deep did the political divisions over Hannah-Jones’ hiring get?
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On August 4, 1997, Jeanne Calment passed away in Arles, France. At the time, it was reported that she was 122 years and 164 days old. No one else has ever been verified to have ever even lived to the age of 120.
However, in the years since her passing, many people have begun to question her story. Not only might she not have been a supercentenarian, but she might not have even been a centenarian at all.
Political Theorist Sara Rushing’s new book, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity (Oxford UP, 2020), examines the very real experiences that individuals have in the context of healthcare, especially healthcare and medical approaches to the most human of all experiences, birth, illness, and death. Rushing’s analysis posits that the corporal bodies that we all inhabit are also sites of politics—not the problem for politics, as others have theorized, but rather a place and space where politics transpires. Instead of beginning an exploration from an abstract position, Rushing starts from her own experiences, since her encounters with birth, death, mourning, and grief engaged her thinking about how we as citizens, as individuals, engage and face medical experiences and all of the settings where these experiences take place. Rushing focuses the theoretical framework around these issues of humility and vulnerability, which is often how we find ourselves in context of these human experiences that engage the “medical-industrial complex.” We often consider humility as a quality associated with a religious bearing but Rushing urges a reconsideration of the concept of humility, as a means to embrace one’s vulnerability and thus move towards a redefined understanding of autonomy. This is the context into whichThe Virtues of Vulnerability then examines three distinct human experiences, birth, illness—in this case, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as suffered by American military veterans—and death, exploring how we encounter these life experiences and how politics essentially happens in these medicalized spaces.
A substantial component of the theoretical analysis in The Virtues of Vulnerability is wrestling with the way that choice and freedom are presented within the medical environment but are delimited in what we can actually choose and what we understand and know about these choices as well. This concept of freedom and choice are also connected to the way that neoliberalism frames our experiences, thus we perceive of our autonomy in these medicalized environments through the appearance of choices we get to make, or options provided to us, but often these are actually quite narrow in scope, constrained by the demands of health insurance and healthcare/medical marketplace. Rushing’s analysis gets at these many competing dimensions of healthcare and how it is operationalized, leading the reader to consider how we experience our interactions and how we might reconsider our autonomy within these environments by understanding how our vulnerability and humility can help us work more collaboratively with those who are engaging in this ethics of care with us.
One of the first police shootings to be captured on cell phone, millions saw Bay Area Rapid Transit police Officer Johannes Mehserle fire a single, fatal gunshot into Oscar Grant's back as the 22-year-old lay face down on the train station platform. Now, a lawsuit filed by NPR member station KQED has forced BART to comply with California's 2019 police transparency law, and release never-before-heard tapes from inside that investigation.
Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his home by a team of mercenaries amid claims by opposition groups that he tried to illegally extend his presidential term by one year. Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph is calling for an international investigation, and Biden promised assistance to fight for a safe and secure Haiti in a time of growing gun violence.
Texas State Republicans start a special legislative session on Thursday to discuss 11 conservative agenda items that didn’t pass the last session. These include a bill banning drive-through and 24-hour voting, a bill restricting critical race theory education, a bill preventing transgender students from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity, and more.
And in headlines: Darnella Frazier’s uncle is killed in a Minneapolis police car chase, Tokyo will declare a state of COVID emergency, and the ship that blocked the Suez Canal is back in the water.
Show Notes:
NYT: "How the Assassination of Haiti’s President Follows Years of Strife and Gridlock" – https://nyti.ms/3ho8n7t
The Texas Tribune: "Gov. Greg Abbott introduces special legislative session agenda" – https://bit.ly/3xuMwRq
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
We'll tell you about a worsening crisis in Haiti. The country's president was assassinated and now the U.S. and other world leaders could be stepping in to help.
Also, a couple of big lawsuits over big tech: dozens of states are suing over Google's app store and former President Trump is suing over his frozen social media accounts.
Plus, security warning from Microsoft, how to apply for a job on TikTok, and why Tampa Bay sports fans are celebrating this morning.
When it comes to fighting back against woke indoctrination and critical race theory in schools, Ian Prior is perhaps the happiest of warriors.
Prior is executive director of Fight for Schools, an organization dedicated to exposing bad actors in the public school system in Loudoun County, Virginia and mobilizing parents to improve education for their children.
“We want to have a school system where our teachers are shaping future leaders, mentally tough leaders, hardworking leaders, people that will do the best that they can to get where they need to be. And we don’t need to be dividing along these identity group lines,” Prior says.
Prior joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his fight against a woke school board and offer advice to others addressing these and similar issues in their school districts.
We also cover these stories:
Former President Donald Trump announces a class action lawsuit against tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
President Joe Biden condemns the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and the wounding of his wife as a “heinous act.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets virtually with Uyghur Muslims detained in Chinese reeducation camps.
Paris Marx is joined by Zachary Loeb to discuss the history of tech criticism with a focus on Joseph Weizenbaum and Lewis Mumford, as well as why the techlash is a narrative that suits Silicon Valley.
Zachary Loeb is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania whose dissertation research looks at Y2K. Follow Zachary on Twitter as @libshipwreck, and check out his Librarian Shipwreck blog.
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.
FEMA acknowledges that the way it distributes aid often benefits some people more than others--and those who receive less aid are those people with the fewest resources to begin with. Rhitu Chatterjee talks with NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher about her investigation into FEMA and why the federal government's response to disasters may disproportionately hurt people of color and their communities.
It’s that time of the year where we can all finally hit the beach. But our listeners have a lot of questions about Chicago’s beaches. Like, how clean is the water? How much poop is in there? And why are some flotation devices banned? Curious City’s Monica Eng puts on her sun visor and a good deal of sunscreen and tracks down the answers.
