my private podcast channel
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Packed stadiums. Hard-fought games. Boisterous, mostly maskless fans. The National Football League kicked off its season this past weekend almost as if the coronavirus had never existed. But it didn’t get to this point by ignoring the pandemic — far from it. With careful planning and close attention to who in the league was getting sick, the NFL helped advance science and show us all how to live in a world with COVID-19.
Today, as the 2021 football season begins, L.A. Times reporter Sam Farmer delves into the NFL’s coronavirus experiment: its successes, its failures and lessons for the rest of us.
More reading:
The NFL had a secret COVID-19 plan. Here’s why the league didn’t need it
Five things we learned from behind-the-scenes look at the NFL’s COVID-19 season in 2020
Vaccine debate heats up amid word approval could come for younger kids by Halloween. Down to the wire for California recall. North Korean missile test. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The neuroscientist Anil Seth is a leading researcher into consciousness. In his book, Being You, he explores why we experience life in the first person. He tells Tom Sutcliffe how our perceptual experiences are less a reflection of an objective external reality, and more a kind of controlled hallucination. He argues that perception is a brain-based ‘best guess’ – including our core sense of self – designed by evolution to keep the body alive.
Tiffany Watt Smith is interested in how the individual self can feel swept up and subsumed in crowds, and the tension between ‘feeling yourself’ and ‘losing yourself’. This has taken on added significance during a pandemic when collective experience has become tinged with anxiety. As Director of the Centre of the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, she has also looked at how far being able to name an emotion makes it more real.
Emotional turmoil, from revenge to love, are writ large in Rigoletto – the season opener at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It’s the first production by the company’s Director, Oliver Mears, and the first new show since the opera house closed because of Covid-19. Mears sees Verdi’s masterpiece as a modern morality play that pits power against innocence, in a pitiless world of decadence, corruption and decay.
Producer: Katy Hickman
(Photo: Gilda) Lisette Oropesa (c) ROH 2021. Rigoletto Studio Rehearsal. Photograph by Ellie Kurttz.)
President Joe Biden’s requirements for employers to insist on vaccinations are a bold move amid flatlining inoculation rates. But will they work? For decades the world’s cities seemed invincible, but the pandemic has hastened and hardened a shift in urban demographics and economics. And an ancient Finnish burial site scrambles notions of gender roles in the distant past.
For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Mike tells Sarah how a tragic story became a national punchline and a decades-long moral panic. Digressions include a sympathetic psychic, a paternalistic principal and a manure mishap. Mike appears to be unaware of the difference between a cousin and a nephew.
Support us:
Hear bonus episodes on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy stickers, magnets, T-shirts and more
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Links!
The coronavirus pandemic has left no part of the world untouched, including global manufacturing supply chains. The complex system that keeps goods moving throughout the world has struggled to catch up ever since it was disrupted in early 2020. Now, 18 months later, product delays aren’t going anywhere.
Guest: Austen Hufford, U.S. manufacturing reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices