How reliable are the figures coming out of the conflict in Ukraine?
Following Russia?s invasion of Ukraine, we consider claims about the numbers of troops involved, people killed, and planes downed.
Also: are the prime minister?s parliamentary claims about growing numbers of NHS staff backed up by data? We investigate the perplexing claim that the Chagos Islands are 100 metres below sea level. How long do you have to drive an electric car to offset the pollution from making the battery? And do we really make 35,000 decisions a day?
Most of us give little thought to the back of the book--it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in Index, a History of The: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age(W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and--of course--indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart--and we have been for eight hundred years.
Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.
Andy digs into the global sanctions levied against Vladimir Putin and Russia as a result of the invasion of Ukraine with Atlantic staff writer David Frum. They get into how the sanctions are already affecting Russians, how they may play out here, and if David thinks there's a point at which they could go too far.
Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt.
Follow David on Twitter @davidfrum.
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We'll talk about President Biden's first State of the Union address: new announcements he made and how Republicans responded.
And how some elections in Texas are testing the influence of former President Trump.
Also, how dozens of countries are trying to keep gas prices down, despite the impact of Russia attacking Ukraine.
Plus, why Major League Baseball has officially canceled Opening Day and beyond, how Read Across America has changed in recent years, and what the pope is asking people to pray for this Ash Wednesday.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued into its sixth day, with explosions shaking the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv, and the death toll rising. According to the United Nations, approximately 660,000 people have fled Ukraine already, and this could become “Europe’s largest refugee crisis this century.”
President Biden gave his first State of the Union address last night. In it, he devoted large sections to address Ukraine along with the course of the pandemic, the economy and inflation, a “unity agenda,” and more. Jon Favreau, co-host of Pod Save America and the host of Offline, joins us to discuss his takeaways as someone who used to be in charge of writing State of the Union speeches for former President Barack Obama.
And in headlines: Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that four Palestinian families facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah can stay in their homes, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is investigating one of its own employees who has a transgender daughter, and Major League Baseball canceled the first two games of the season.
How did corporate media become so biased and corrupt, and why isn't it being held accountable?
Corporate media exists “to support corrupt regimes,” Mollie Hemingway, editor-in-chief of The Federalist, says.
She is optimistic because “a lot of people have lost trust in corporate media in recent years, [and] that's a good thing," Hemingway says. "It's bad if people believe the propaganda.”
Hemingway joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the state of the media today and to share her reaction to President Joe Biden's nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.
No one knows what’s going on in Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s head – and while that’s a worrisome idea during the best of times, it’s an especially grim one during a war of his own creation. Putin is increasingly isolated, away from his inner circle and the oligarchs who once had some influence with him.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has framed his recent invasion of Ukraine as a "de-nazification" of the country. This is not a new move by Putin. In fact, he used this same rhetoric to attack the Ukranian protesters during the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Back in 2014 historian Timothy Snyder talked to NPR's Robert Siegel about fascism in Ukraine and the rise of Stalinism in Russia. He told Siegel that calling Ukranians Nazis is both a way to confuse the European Union - because they know Nazis were bad - and a way to garner pro-Russian sentiment.
What bird has a ten-foot wingspan and breeds almost exclusively on a single island in the Pacific Ocean? Find out in this special quiz episode of Short Wave. Host Emily Kwong tests the bird knowledge of musician and nature enthusiast Anthony Albrecht. He recently produced an album of 53 calls from threatened Australian birds to bring awareness to their vulnerable status.
Listen to the album, titled Songs of Disappearance, released by the Bowerbird Collective and BirdLife Australia, here.
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What bird has a ten-foot wingspan and breeds almost exclusively on a single island in the Pacific Ocean? Find out in this special quiz episode of Short Wave. Host Emily Kwong tests the bird knowledge of musician and nature enthusiast Anthony Albrecht. He recently produced an album of 53 calls from threatened Australian birds to bring awareness to their vulnerable status.
Listen to the album, titled Songs of Disappearance, released by the Bowerbird Collective and BirdLife Australia, here.
