Americans eat billions of dollars of Mexican avocados every year. Demand is such that drug cartels and other criminal elements have muscled in on the business, centered around the Mexican state of Michoacán. This reality got worldwide attention Super Bowl weekend, when the American government announced it was temporarily suspending any avocado imports from Mexico.
Today, we talk about this development — and why Americans are so obsessed with avocados in the first place.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times Mexico correspondent Leila Miller, and L.A. Times acting deputy food editor Daniel Hernandez.
Ukrainians woke to the sound of sirens. Volleys of cruise missiles, artillery, widespread reports of explosions: a large-scale invasion appears to be under way. Our correspondent in Kyiv reports on the mood and on what is known so far. And we examine the sharp rise in carjackings in America, asking why so many young people end up behind the wheel. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Raghav was a product developer, starting a young age. He was creating interesting products for science exhibitions as a kid. Once, this professor asked him to do a cancer research project, which introduced him to the story of Steve Jobs and his entrepreneurial journey. He was highly influenced by this story, and still is today. In the early days, he focused more on the hardware side of computers. But, slowly over time, he was introduced to the coding side of things and found it a much more thriving ecosystem in India. Outside of tech, Raghav likes to watch movies... so much so, that he reviews movies for his friends, and tells them what to see or not see. His favorite movies of all time is Troy, but he did admit he saw Inception twice (mostly, so he could understand all of it). One day, Raghav found himself fed up with the lack of tools out there, when it came to videos, animations, etc. He got so fed up that he'd decided to build something to solve his problem... and for 14 million others.
Ravi sits down with Matt Homewood, a dumper diver who is making it his mission to spread the word about the world's No. 1 solution to climate change: food waste. Born in the suburbs of west London, Matt started dumpster diving during a cross-country bike tour of the United States and later continued the trend while studying climate change in Denmark. Astonished by the sheer amount of perfectly suitable food heading to the landfill, Matt started an instagram account (@anurbanharvestor) to shed light on just how much supermarkets were tossing away. Matt and Ravi talk about what he’s learned about retail food waste and how our food system can become less wasteful.
It's hard to reconcile that the author of the most central and sacred words in the American experiment—that all men are created equal—enslaved people. Always game for a challenge (or possibly lacking the good judgment our mothers raised us to have), we've invited Jefferson scholar and host of "The Thomas Jefferson Hour" and author of the recently released "Repairing Jefferson's America" Clay Jenkinson to help us wrestle with a healthy and historically full picture of this man so deeply central to our story as a nation, in both its glory and its shame.
In which a two-time Nobel Prize winner believes he has discovered the cure for the common cold, and Ken wants cilantro to tell him what to do. Certificate #31531.
On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 am, 35 miles southwest of Socorro, New Mexico, the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated.
This was the culmination of the Manhattan Project, one of the largest, and most expensive programs in world history.
Yet, just before the event, the scientists and engineers who worked on the project weren’t entirely sure it would work, and if it did, just what the results would be.
Learn more about the Trinity Test, the world's first nuclear detonation, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City(University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career.
The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—all this to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
Dr. William Sites is Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban and community studies, political economy, social movements, immigration, race, culture, social theory, and historical methods.
Stephanie Khattak speaks with Dr. Linda Legarde Grover, an award-winning author whose latest book interweaves family and Ojibwe history with stories from Misaabekong (the place of the giants) on Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Dr. Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. She is a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her work, which spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, recounts stories of Ojibwe life in northeastern Minnesota individuals, families and communities set against the backdrop of indigenous tradition and impacts of historical and current events.
In this interview, Dr. Grover shares the importance of stories and folklore traditions; her perspective as a scholar and storyteller, and the intrinsic value of maintaining - and strengthening - connections with people, places and communities beyond ourselves.
