On the week of July 1, 1946, there were two explosions that shook the world. One was a physical explosion and the other was cultural.
These two events, seemingly unrelated, are now linked forever due to the circumstances of that week.
Learn more about what an atomic bomb test and a two-piece swimsuit have in common, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Political Scientist Ursula Hackett’s new book, America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State(Cambridge UP, 2020), is the winner of the APSA 2021 Education Policy and Politics Section Best Book Award. America’s Voucher Politics examines the way that the approach to vouchers, as a policy design and as a point of advocacy, has evolved over the past decades, and, in the process, this policy area has shifted strategic losses into strategic and growing wins. School vouchers, essentially the central case study in Hackett’s book, are a perfect example of what Hackett describes as “attenuated governance.” Attenuated governance is the form that a particular policy design and often the associated rhetoric with that policy take in an effort to disconnect the policy itself from the state, so as to avoid or elide constitutional conflicts that may strike down the policy that was passed by state or national legislative bodies. Attenuated governance is the umbrella concept that includes both the attenuated delivery of the goods or services and the rhetoric to accompany the policy design and delivery. As Hackett notes, school vouchers are the perfect lens for this exploration of American political development and examining the shifting approaches that courts and judges have taken to how the policies work within public and private institutions.
As the subtitle of the book indicates, the story of school vouchers is the tale of hiding the role of the state in shifting funds from public schools to private and parochial schools and doing so in such a way so that the courts would decide in favor of the constitutionality of these new policy designs. Many of the initial attempts at this form of attenuated governance were unsuccessfully made in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and other moves to desegregate schools, and other public entities and spaces. But these early failures in court provided the blueprint for subsequent successes, not just in designing policy that would be more attenuated or disconnected from the state itself, but also in the way that these policies were publicly discussed and argued. America’s Voucher Politics is a fascinating study not only of this particular policy area as it developed over the past 70 years, but also of this concept of attenuated governance, which builds on America’s foundational identity struggles around religion, race and racism, and civic institutions.
Therese Chan, an actual vet (though not a horse doctor) is here to talk about Ivermectin. What is it, what does it do, what does it not do, why are so many people taking it, will it turn you into a horse, will it turn you back from a horse to a human, is this a simulation, no really is it, how is any of this real, and more!
The news to know for Thursday, September 9th, 2021!
What to know about another major storm hitting the U.S.
Also, what a new study says about how many people really had COVID-19 even if they didn't know it.
Plus, which company is putting unvaccinated workers on unpaid leave, how Twitter has created a version of Facebook Groups, and what's different about the new NFL season starting today.
Yesterday marked the beginning of the federal criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing startup Theranos. She and her former boyfriend Sunny Balwani were charged with about a dozen counts that include wire fraud for lying to investors as well as patients about what Theranos technology could actually do.
The weekly pediatric coronavirus cases in the U.S. surpassed 250,000 this week for the first time since the pandemic began. The uptick in young people testing positive comes during Back to School week for many, and that is NOT a good sign.
And in headlines: the Biden administration announced its plan to expand the use of solar energy, LAPD officers have been instructed to record the social media information of any civilian they stop, and Starbucks is reportedly trying to stop a unionization effort.
Show Notes:
Wall Street Journal: “Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes’s Trial: Prosecutors Must Show Intent” – https://on.wsj.com/3toFZqh
Politico: “Get vaccinated or else: Colleges roll out new punishments for holdouts” – https://politi.co/3toVvSY
See Steve from Blue’s Clues’s heart-felt message for the show’s 25th anniversary – https://bit.ly/3l4pjjX
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
Voters in 20 states have the option of tossing their governor out of office before the end of his or her term.
Still, since 1921, gubernatorial recalls have made it to the ballot in only three states—North Dakota, California, and Wisconsin. However, recalling local officials and state legislators has been more common.
The concept of recalling politicians commonly is thought of as part of the progressive movement of the early 20th century. But the debate over recall goes back much further, and states do it differently.
"Some have what's called a political recall law, like California, like Wisconsin, like Arizona, where you could do it for whatever reason you want to," Joshua Spivak, an authority on recall elections, says. "Other states have a very severe limit and those states ... rarely have recalls or have many fewer recalls, and then have almost none on the state level."
Spivak, senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in New York, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss the history of recall elections just days before California holds another one. Spivak is the author of a new book on the topic, "Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom."
We also cover these stories:
America is on track to default on the national debt if Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling by mid-October, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns.
Top Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee express concern over the fate of Americans and Afghan allies stranded in Afghanistan.
Workers remove a large statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy.
Paris Marx is joined by André Brock to discuss the history of Black people’s online activity, the internet’s association with whiteness, and what Black Twitter can tell us about the centrality of Black people to digital culture.
André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked digital technologies. You can get if from NYU Press, and it’s available through open access. Follow André on Twitter at @DocDre.
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.
Another destructive fire season has Western states searching for ways to prevent it. As climate correspondent Lauren Sommer reports, some answers might lie in the Southeastern U.S. The region leads the country in setting controlled fires — burns to clear vegetation that becomes the fuel for extreme fires.
