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As the economy has deteriorated and the internet has bypassed television, persecution of opponents has become the president’s main tool of political control. Even the pandemic has been harnessed to silence dissent. An Economist film reports on the young women standing up to Vladimir Putin. And in China, there’s a more subdued background to the Singles’ Day online shopping splurge.
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Guillermo Rauch is originally from Argentina. He has always been involved in the open source world, starting out working in Linux and native tooling. After a while, he feel in love with the web and the front end web system, working in the early days of AJAX, JS Animation and jQuery competition. When I asked him what he does for fun, he laughed - because he really enjoys what is does professionally on the web .
On a personal level though, he has three kiddos so he stays pretty busu. He is into fitness, and does calisthenics and gymnastics. Beyond that, he is into coffee - though I don't know many tech people who aren't into coffee.
Having been a JS person, he saw an opportunity to build out the frontend layer of the web. To put that in context, think about what Stripe, Twilio, etc. have done for the industry with their foundational, developer first API's. He decided to create a framework that had no opinion about how you got your data. Along side of this, he created the optimal ecosystem for developers to build very fast - specifically, to develop, preview, and ship.
This is the creation story of Next.js and Vercel.
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Bay Curious listener Ron Hewlett heard a rumor that several alleys in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood are named for Gold Rush era sex workers. He wondered if it was true. Plus, why does San Francisco stamp the names of streets into the sidewalks? There's a lot in a name, folks!
Additional Reading:
Reported by Katrina Schwartz. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Jessica Placzek, Kyana Moghadam, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Carly Severn, Lina Blanco, Ethan Lindsey, Vinnee Tong and Jenny Pritchett.
One enduring reality makes every challenge of democratic self-governance more difficult: human beings. The founders integrated their deep understanding of our flawed nature into the form of government they designed — the checks and balances, the rights of the minority to control the power and excess of majority factions. Now that those dudes are no longer around and it’s our job to steer the ship of state, are we adequately contemplating how the most essential truths of our psychology as a species affect our ability to live and govern together? Are we making good decisions given, uh, humans?
Add to the complex stew of human nature the politics of power – who’s in (and likes order), and who’s out (and will flirt with the change that chaos can bring) – and all the disruption we’re currently experiencing starts to have a story arc.
Making everything just that much worse, we’ve effectively (though accidentally) used technology to weaponize human nature. In today’s angry partisan throwdown, we’re remarkably able to overlook human error in “us” even as we make a hobby out of obsessively pointing out what’s wrong with “them.” (Turns out this is human nature too.)
We’re joined by psychologists Dr. Paul Conway and Dr. Bo Winegard — who have different worldviews, but talk anyway — whose verbal jousting we’ve found truly riveting. We talk people, partisanship, power, and presidents. (No topics that don’t start with a “p”.) Tune in to see if our facilitator, Jovita Woodrich, can get a word in edgewise.
This program is part of the Created Equal and Breathing Free podcast series presented in partnership with Florida Humanities.
Find this event, including speaker bios, online at The Village Square.
In which a burned-out ferry becomes an art deco American icon of the future and then a derelict eyesore, and Ken blames Seattle for the great San Francisco fire of 1906. Certificate #19361.
Last Friday, a surging crowd killed at least eight people and left hundreds injured at Travis Scott’s music festival Astroworld in Houston. Public uproar over the needless deaths has placed responsibility at the rapper’s feet - and at those of police officers who failed to intervene and shut the show down.
How did Scott’s signature “raging” spill over into a mass casualty event? And how do we tease out blame between Scott himself, and the way music festivals are run?
Guest: Tom Breihan, senior editor at Stereogum.
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On November 11th, 1918, the first world war came to an end. Or to be more precise, the fighting stopped. For the next eight months, a final peace treaty was hammered out, and hanging over the negotiations was the very real threat that fighting could break out again. In the end, the treaty ended the world’s greatest war and might have been the starting point for an even worse one. Learn more about the Treaty of Versailles on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity.
Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits.
Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.
Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.
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