The annual United Nations General Assembly is more than just worthy pledges and fancy dinners; we ask where the tensions and the opportunities lie this time around. Last year’s fears of a crippling “twindemic” of covid-19 and influenza proved unfounded—and that provides more reason to worry this year. And why “like” is, like, really useful.
Congressional Democrats are struggling to bring together their moderate and progressive factions to pass an infrastructure bill and its gigantic sidecar, a budget plan filled with tax hikes, climate-related legislation, and social spending. With the party divided, is Biden’s agenda about to hit the skids?
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer and author of the weekly newsletter, The Surge.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
In which America's richest men invent many, many types of securities fraud while tussling over a New York State railroad, and Ken imagines a zoo full of cows. Certificate #32641.
Congressional Democrats are struggling to bring together their moderate and progressive factions to pass an infrastructure bill and its gigantic sidecar, a budget plan filled with tax hikes, climate-related legislation, and social spending. With the party divided, is Biden’s agenda about to hit the skids?
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer and author of the weekly newsletter, The Surge.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, also known as the Great Pyramid of Khufu, is a structure in which superlatives don’t really do justice.
It isn’t just old, it’s really old. It isn’t just big, it’s really big.
It has served as a sentinel to some of the most important people and events in history, and it has also been the focal point of speculation about the past.
Learn more about the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the seven ancient wonders of the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere
Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely entertaining foray into the heart of such questions.
With generous helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of the world’s most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer, and our own sociality. Along the way, you will learn about the taste receptors you didn’t even know you had, the best way to ferment a mastodon, the relationship between Paleolithic art and cheese, and much more.
Blending irresistible storytelling with the latest science, Delicious: The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human(Princeton UP, 2021) is a deep history of flavor that will transform the way you think about human evolution and the gustatory pleasures of the foods we eat.
Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.
In addition to Gabrielle Petito’s tragic murder, we discuss the horrific rates of people of color who’ve gone missing in America. For example in Wyoming, where Petito’s body was found, 710 Indigenous people went missing between 2011 and 2020, and over half of them were women.
In COVID news, President Biden pledged to donate 500 million vaccine doses to lower income countries. The FDA also authorized a Pfizer-BioNTech booster vaccine for people 65 and older and for those at risk of severe disease.
And in headlines: nearly 1,000 Haitian migrants in Del Rio, TX, were released into the United States, bipartisan Congressional negotiations on a sweeping police reform bill broke down, and Trump filed a lawsuit against his niece and reporters at The New York Times.
The word "knitting" normally evokes quaint images of grandma sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace, needles and yarn in hand, as she makes a pair of mittens for her grandchildren to wear while they play in the snow.
Less likely are images of self-appointed social justice warriors demanding fealty to a cause as they systematically expunge conservatives from online forums. Even less likely are images of physical confrontations occurring at in-person knitting gatherings.
In 2019, a blog post about a knitting enthusiast going to India exploded into a debate about "colonialism" and "white supremacy" in the pastime. A series of commentaries posted on the website Quillette detailed how the online social justice squabble bled out into the real world, resulting in real-life altercations between knitting enthusiasts in England.
Jon Kay, a senior editor at Quillette and editor of the new book, "Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age,” has his own thoughts on this epic yarn.
"It's tragi-comic," explains Kay, "It's hilarious because these are people who knit, but it's also tragic in the sense that a lot of these people, like, this is their life and their community. Their social community is other people who knit on these Instagram groups and other social media, and they're getting thrown out."
Kay joins "The Daily Signal Podcast” to talk about the absurdity of the knitting incident, as well as cancel culture more generally.
We also cover these stories:
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas whether he was warned about the flood of Haitian migrants arriving at the southern border.
After a phone call between President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron, France's ambassador to the United States, Philippe Etienne, who had been recalled, will be returning to Washington next week.
Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against his niece and The New York Times over tax documents of his that she leaked.
Paris Marx is joined by Sara Mojtehedzadeh to discuss the Teamsters’ organizing at Amazon warehouses in Canada and the working conditions that workers face at those facilities.
Sara Mojtehedzadeh is a labour reporter at the Toronto Star and the host of Hustled, a podcast about Foodora workers’ fight for a union. Follow Sara on Twitter at @SaraMojtehedz.
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.