Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country and you noticed that one of the country options was the “United States Minor Outlying Islands”? If you have you might have wondered, what are these island? Who lives there? And why are these islands considered minor? Learn more about the United States Minor Outlying Islands and how they ended up on almost every drop down list of countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Offline is here to stay and the show has moved to its own feed. To listen to Jon's interview with Jia Tolentino, and the many great episodes to come, search Offline with Jon Favreau and click subscribe. See you there!
Jia Tolentino, New Yorker staff writer and author of Trick Mirror, talks to Jon about how the internet has turned life into an endless performance, why that makes politics hard and virtue signaling easy, and what being online during the pandemic has done to our collective psyche.
It’s a good old TMK where we get mad talking about two stories. First, the increasingly influential “state-as-a-platform” model of governance that France is leaning super hard into, which goes beyond neoliberalism by taking seriously the premise: “What if instead of a government, we had AWS.” Second, schools in the UK are rolling-out facial recognition in secondary school cafeterias. Teaching kids that access to anything in life, even just lunch, must be mediated by intrusive systems of surveillance and control – oh, I mean, speed and convenience.
Some stuff we reference:
••• France finds growth prescription with health app Doctolib https://www.ft.com/content/ca41f61e-2513-41d2-9adf-d94b5af302a1
••• Facial recognition cameras arrive in UK school canteens https://www.ft.com/content/af08fe55-39f3-4894-9b2f-4115732395b9
••• Marc Benioff: We Need a New Capitalism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/opinion/benioff-salesforce-capitalism.html
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)
We’ve talked a huge amount the past 18 months, for obvious reasons, about the way that white blood cells protect us from infection. But red blood cells – it’s probably among the earliest things I learned in human biology that they’re simple bags for carrying oxygen around the body. But over recent years, immunologist Nilam Mangalmurti, University of Pennsylvania, has been finding several clues to challenge that dogma – including molecules on the surface of red blood cells known from other parts of the immune system.
The Last Ice Area, home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, is expected to act as the last refuge for ice-dependent wildlife as the rest of the Arctic melts. Kent Moore, University of Toronto-Mississauga, tells us that the formation of a 3,000 square kilometre rift in the area means the ice is not as resilient as we once thought.
Also on the programme, an obituary for the renowned Dutch climate scientist and physicist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (October 22, 1961 – October 12, 2021), and, Dominique Gonçalves, Gorongosa National Park, explains how ivory poaching during the Mozambican civil war led to the rapid evolution of tusklessness in African elephants.
'To be or not to be' was never your decision. No one alive today is an 'exister' by consent - your parents made that call for you. But who can blame them? Animals are hardwired with strong impulses towards their procreative goals, and we humans, by and large, are no different. But for some conscientious people alive today, this most fundamental of biological impulses is butting up against a rational pessimism about the future...
With apocalyptic scenes of natural disasters, rising sea levels and global pandemics causing existential dread and actual suffering, it's understandable that CrowdScience listener Philine Hoven from Austria wrote to us asking for help her make sense of what she sees as the most difficult question she faces - should she have children.
In this episode, presenter Geoff Marsh helps Philine to predict what kind of a world her hypothetical child might inhabit, and explores the impact their existence, or indeed non-existence might have on society and the planet. Plus, we'll explore how medical ethicists can help us to navigate the moral landscape of the unborn. Brooding or broody, this is essential listening for any prospective parents.
Image: Confocal microscopy of CpG-treated human RBCs stained for Band 3. Credit: Mangalmurti Lab / Nilam Mangalmurti, MD)
If you’re looking for hype, fake outrage, and groupthink, kindly keep moving. Our mission at What a Day is simple: to be your guide to what truly matters each morning (and the fun stuff you might have missed) in just 20 minutes. Host Jane Coaston brings you in-depth reporting and substantive analysis on the big stories shaping today and the creeping trends shaping tomorrow—and when she doesn’t know the answers, she asks someone even smarter to fill us all in. Radical, right? New episodes at 5:00 a.m. EST, Monday–Saturday in your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. Being informed was never this easy.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show and independent media, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate.
A note on notes: We’d much rather you just went into each episode of The Memory Palace cold. And just let the story take you where it well. So, we don’t suggest looking into the show notes first.
Music
By the Ash Tree and Semolina by Slow Meadow
Opals by Catching Flies
Mechanical Fair by Ola Kvernberg and the Trondheim Singers
La Copla by the great Atahualpa Yupanqui
Holm Sound by Erland Cooper
Notes
You can find the original recordings, photos, and film clips taken on the 1935 expedition and after in the remarkable online library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Of the many books on the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the one I enjoyed and relied upon most here is Phillip Hoose’s The Race to Save the Good Lord Bird.
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
(07:33) – The experience of drugs
(18:38) – Drug use for grownups
(24:21) – Studies on drugs
(25:31) – Negative effects of drugs
(30:59) – Should all drugs be legalized
(36:27) – War on drugs: positive or negative
(42:19) – Proper, positive, and misuse of drugs
(46:40) – Recovery
(53:34) – Drug depiction in movies
(57:05) – How the study of drugs changed Carl
(59:28) – Formative memories
(1:03:57) – Greatest hip hop artist of all time
(1:07:19) – What mind altering drugs teach us
(1:11:26) – Advice for young people
(1:13:31) – The meaning of life
Interview with David Copperfield and Richard Wiseman; News Items: Pig Kidney Transplant, Scientists Abused for Discussing COVID, Synthetic Biology, AGW Consensus, Dark Skies; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Propaganda; Science or Fiction
On this edition of “The Breakdown’s Weekly Recap,” NLW covers:
The record-setting performance of the first bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund and what happens next as new ETFs come to market
A massive spate of fundraising, particularly for crypto-focused venture capital funds
New institutional and mainstream adoption of crypto by $2 trillion asset manager PIMCO and Walmart
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NYDIG, the institutional-grade platform for bitcoin, is making it possible for thousands of banks who have trusted relationships with hundreds of millions of customers, to offer Bitcoin. Learn more at NYDIG.com/NLW.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Only in Time” by Abloom. Image credit: MicroStockHub/E+/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
