When California became a state in 1850, it entered the union as a state that would not allow slavery. That's the history most people know. But in reality, California did allow slavery and its early leaders sided with the South and the rights of enslavers through a litany of early laws. The effects of that racist foundation are still being felt by people of color in California today.
Reported by Otis Taylor and Lakshmi Sarah. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Sebastian Miño-Bucheli and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Kyana Moghadam, Jessica Placzek, Natalia Aldana, Carly Severn, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, Ethan Lindsey, Vinnee Tong and Jenny Pritchett.
In which 1990s America becomes convinced that the world's least cuddly stuffed animals are the road to financial freedom, and Ken's very valuable comic book gets covered with jelly. Certificate #47159.
Wild: 80% of America’s avocados come from Mexico… and the US just paused imports of avocados from Mexico. So your guac could become extra, extra, extra. Facebook is renaming its employees “MetaMates” because Zuck is pulling a Regina George from Mean Girls. And Roblox stock plummeted 25% because ya can’t Roblox from Mrs. Meyers’ algebra class.
$AVO $RBLX $FB
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In the year 73 BC, Rome faced one of its greatest threats to its existence. An army of over 100,000 liberated slaves rose up in revolt and threatened the very fabric of the Roman Republic.
The revolt was led by a gladiator slave who lead his motley army and, to the astonishment of Rome, managed to defeat many Roman legions.
The end of this rebellion resulted in one of the most horrific displays in all ancient history.
Learn more about Spartacus and the Third Servile War, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
As a kid, Jasmin Graham was endlessly curious about the ocean. That eventually led her to a career in marine science studying sharks and rays. But until relatively recently, she had never met another Black woman in her field.
That all changed in 2020 when she connected with a group of Black women studying sharks through the Twitter hashtag #BlackInNature. Finding a community was so powerful that the women decided to start a group.
On today's show, Jasmin talks with host Maddie Sofia about Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS) and how it's supporting women of color through hands-on workshops and community building. (Encore)
To see pictures of MISS's first workshop check out their website.
Today we are joined by Dr. Michella Marino, the Deputy Director of the Indiana Historical Bureau, a division of the Indiana State Library, and the author ofRoller Derby: The History of an American Sport(University of Texas Press, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Roller Derby, its radically progressive politics in mid-century America, and its reinvention in the 21st century.
In Roller Derby, Marino charts the rise, fall, and rise again of one of America’s most unique sports. It began as an endurance competition akin to pedestrianism and weeklong cycling races and in many ways it never left those beginnings. Roller Derby always mixed sport and spectacle, eventually becoming on of the most popular entertainments in the country. Unlike any other sports at the time, Roller Derby included men and women skaters on the same team and even in some circumstances on the track at the same time. Both men and women contributed equally to the score, but changes to the game in the 1930s that made physical contact, including fighting, more common produced unease among some spectators. Roller Derby’s mixed gender composition and its violence both helped ensure its popularity with male and female fans, but also raised significant challenges to mid-century norms.
To make the sport palatable to a more conservative middle America, Leo Seltzer, Roller Derby’s founder, promoted normative gender images of the skaters. Roller Derby crowned an annual king and a queen: a popularity contest that usually rewarded the most likable man and the most beautiful woman skater. Marino shows how these performative showcases both mollified critics of the game even as they limited the participation of some of the skaters – non-white and non-traditionally feminine skaters could not perform mid-century beauty in the same way. These contests also undermined the image of Roller Derby as a sport among many journalists who refused to cover it.
Even so, Marino shows that most fans could see the athleticism of the skaters on the track and Roller Derby quickly became popular among in-person fans from across the social spectrum and later on television. Roller Derby was tough work. To keep his skaters happy, Seltzer instituted radically progressive, encouraging families to compete as families, equal pay for its skaters, maternity leave, and day care. When the league folded, it paid out the remaining skaters from a pension fund.
The final chapter details the rejuvenation of Roller Derby as an explicitly female-led and feminist sport that continues to face challenges around the sexualization of competitors, the integration of male competitors and spectators, and the challenges and opportunities provided by becoming an Olympic sport. Fun and full of life, Marino’s Roller Derby will appeal to scholars interested in American sport, gender, and spectacle, but also to the broad audience of skaters and sports fans.
Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter.
On Wednesday, federal officials announced upcoming guidance changes, which reflects yet another new stage of the pandemic. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, epidemiologist and host of Crooked Media’s “America Dissected,” joins us to discuss what these new policies might look like and answers other questions about the future of COVID.
And in headlines: Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva took first place in the women’s short program, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly ousted three members of the city’s school board, and President Joe Biden ordered the National Archives to hand over the Trump administration’s White House visitor logs to the January 6th committee.
What to know about the U.S. and other nations accusing Russia of lying and more cyberattacks that have been uncovered.
Also, Americans across several states are in the path of more severe weather. We'll tell you where the biggest threats are today.
Plus, millions of dollars in student debt will be erased, there's a new subscription service for flights, and Disney wants to come to a neighborhood near you.
Paris Marx is joined by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai to discuss the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan for trying to launder the $5 billion in Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack, how they were moving the money, how the authorities found them, and what lessons the case might hold.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is senior staff writer at Motherboard. Follow Lorenzo on Twitter at @lorenzofb.
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.
Olympic athletes and commentators were stunned this week to learn that 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva will be allowed to compete in Beijing’s Winter Games, despite testing positive in December for a banned substance. The controversy has kicked up raw feelings about Russia’s history of doping and the fecklessness of Olympics officials to apply rules evenly across countries.
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