Today’s episode of “The Breakdown” is a grab bag of news stories from the past several days. NLW covers:
The Bank for International Settlements report “DeFi Risk and the Decentralization Illusion”
Regulatory updates from the Biden administration, Japan, the U.K. and India
Institutions leading the selling last week
OpenSea appears headed for IPO
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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 Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell, research by Scott Hill 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 “Dark Crazed Cap” by Isaac Joel. Image credit: Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus, modified by CoinDesk.
Not all history is learned - or taught - in school. In today's first interview, Robert Jones Jr. tells NPR's Scott Simon that he wanted to be 'a witness to [those] testimonies that have not made it into the official record.' His novel, The Prophets, is about enslaved Black queer people in America. The second interview is about the seemingly mundane day-to-day that makes up a person's history in Zorrie. Author Laird Hunt told NPR's Scott Simon that just because someone's story seems unremarkable doesn't mean it isn't rich.
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, journalist Alex Berenson joins Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his new book "Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives."
At least 38 people have died and scores more have been injured in a fire which tore through a prison in Burundi. At least 600 women and girls have been kidnapped and enslaved in the last three years by militants in Mozambique northern province of Cabo Delgado, a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) says. US Senator Chris Coons says he advised Ethiopia's PM Abiy Ahmed against waging war on TPLF in Tigray for fear that a 'fracturing conflict' might lead to genocide in Ethiopia.
This is just to let everyone know that the second volume of the book based on the podcast should be available by the time you get this episode in your podcast app. It's been a long, long, time coming, because the last year and a bit has been far more difficult, for far more reasons, than I can go into here, but the book is now done. It's called "From the Million Dollar Quartet to the Fab Four", and contains versions of the scripts for episodes fifty-one through one hundred, revised for the book format rather than audio, along with a rewritten version of the Patreon episode on the Big Bopper, an introduction summarising the first book, and a bibliography.
The ebook should be available from every major ebook store, though it might take time to filter through to all of them. I'll be including a link in the blog post for this episode which, if you click it, will take you to your preferred ebook store if the book's available there.
The paperback is currently only available from Amazon. It should eventually also be available from other retailers, as it will enter all the standard distribution catalogues, but it's self-published through Amazon's service, so those of you who boycott Amazon, completely understandably, might not want to buy that version. The ebook link will also take you to the Amazon page for the paperback.
The hardback is available from lulu.com. That too will eventually also be available from other online bookstores, but I make more money, and you get it quicker, if you buy it from Lulu rather than a third party. Again, I'll link that in the notes here.
The physical books are relatively expensive -- twenty-five dollars for the paperback, and fifty dollars for the hardback -- but they're *big* books -- six hundred and fifty-three pages counting the indexes -- and paper is expensive right now because of supply chain issues, so I hope you'll consider them good value for money, as they're literally priced as low as I can make them. If money's tight, the ebook is only $5.
And speaking of good value for money, for one week only I've reduced the cost of the ebook of the first book to just one dollar. That's a limited-time offer to promote the series, so if you've not got that and want it, now's your chance.
Patreon backers at the five-dollar-a-month level and higher have already received copies of the ebook. Those at higher levels will be receiving their copies of the physical books shortly -- they'll be being sent out in waves over the next few weeks. It's because of those backers that I am able to do this podcast at all, and I can't thank them enough for their generosity.See you all in a couple of days, when we'll be looking at the Byrds, and "Eight Miles High".
On December 1st, 1948, Somerton beachgoers discovered a well-dressed, anonymous corpse. More than 50 years later, investigators still aren't sure what happened.
"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added an option for people to register their official gender as X; with it, the country's strictly binary-gendered naming laws were suddenly transformed. Other changes, like a new genderfree pronoun, are catching on; but overhauling a whole grammatically gendered language is no easy undertaking.
Find out more about the topics covered in this episode, and a transcript, at theallusionist.org/todaytomorrow2; and browse down your podfeed to listen to Today, Tomorrow part 1 about how Icelandic officially obtains new words, and navigates the challenges of being an old language in the present day; and the episode Name V Law, about the Icelandic Naming Committee and the strict laws before the updates discusssed in this episode.
Sign up to be a patron at patreon.com/allusionist and as well as supporting the show, you get behind the scenes glimpses, bonus etymologies, a trip around Iceland's museums via me, AND a delightful community of Teamlusionists!
The music is by Martin Austwick. Hear Martin’s own songs at palebirdmusic.com or search for Pale Bird on Bandcamp and Spotify, and he’s @martinaustwick on Twitter and Instagram.
A report out of South Africa confirms the rumors: the Omicron variant is less severe even though it is more contagious. That is good news, so why isn’t it being treated as such? Also, the national crime wave continues to build and Joe Biden’s existential test in Europe. Source
Are Americans really suited to self-government? If so, why do so many who study politics seem to think otherwise? Tony Woodlief is author of I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance.
