China’s zero-covid policy is being stretched to breaking point as the virus makes its way through the city. Supplies are low, residents are angry and there is no end in sight. The debate about air conditioning in America’s sweltering prisons will only heat up further. And how a dispute about time from exactly a century ago remains timely today. Additional audio provided courtesy of Matthew Florianz. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Algis Valiunas to talk about his article from the April print edition, “Nihilism for the Ironhearted.” They discuss the tragically short life and the brilliant poetic output of Giacomo Leopardi, contrasting his bleak nihilism with the more life-affirming nihilism found in Nietzsche and Vattimo.
Perry Zheng graduated in 2010 from Duke University. He became a software engineer, working for big name companies like Amazon, Twitter and Lyft. During his time at Lyft, he started tinkering with Real Estate investment, buying single family dwellings here and there. Outside of tech and real estate, he likes to travel a lot, and find the best food around. When asked what was the best restaurant he'd been to, he promptly noted that Le Bernardin in New York City was top notch.
Once he had a few single family dwellings in his portfolio, he decided to syndicate a deal for a multi family complex. In doing this, he quickly realized how complicated the process was to get this done. He decided to apply his tech knowledge and create something to solve his problem.
In 1973, Leonard Cohen announced he was done with music for good. The same year, in October, war broke out in Israel.
The Yom Kippur War would become the bloodiest in Israel’s young history—and Cohen was there to witness it. As the war broke out, he left his home on the Greek island of Hydra to fly into the warzone.
Leonard Cohen never said much about why he went to the front. What we know is that in the months that followed, he would write “Who By Fire.” Five decades later, on Spotify and in synagogue, you can still hear the echoes of this trip.
So what was it that happened in the desert in October of 1973 between this depressed musician and these too young soldiers going off to battle? How did it remake Leonard Cohen? How did it transform those who heard him play? And how did the war transform Israel itself?
In 1992, in the midst of the LA riots, Oprah moved her show to Los Angeles to tackle the ongoing fallout of the Rodney King verdict. The result? One of the most memorable - and boisterous - Oprah episodes.
Special guest: Elizabeth Hinton, historian and author of “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s”
Amazon’s next big product? It’s the internet… delivered from space. Honest Kitchen just hit a $500M valuation to make human-grade dog food a thing (Fido likey truffle). And for the 1st time in 25 years, Tiger Woods didn’t wear Nike shoes before the Masters — Now Nike stock is on the Injured Reserve list.
$CHWY $NKE $AMZN
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From the CDC’s admission that lockdowns caused a mental health crisis among teens to Jennifer Rubin’s worst column ever (yeah, it’s really that bad), we’ve got quite an uplifting lineup for a very important day: Mary Katharine’s birthday!
Times
00:12 - Segment: Welcome to the Show
12:23 - Segment: The News You Need to Know
12:31 - Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson goes to final floor vote
15:59 - Elon Musk buys more than 73 million shares of Twitter stock, now a member of the platform’s board of directors
21:40 - The CDC releases information on the impact Covid lockdowns had on teen mental health
31:49 - President Joe Biden shares a story—about what, we don’t know…
42:01 - Jennifer Rubin’s worst column yet: A defense of Biden’s economy
Links
Suzy Weiss piece for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack on teen girls’ experience with Covid lockdowns
This groundbreaking book examines the role of rulers with nomadic roots in transforming the great societies of Eurasia, especially from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. Distinguished historian Pamela Kyle Crossley, drawing on the long history of nomadic confrontation with Eurasia’s densely populated civilizations, argues that the distinctive changes we associate with modernity were founded on vernacular literature and arts, rising literacy, mercantile and financial economies, religious dissidence, independent learning, and self-legitimating rulership. Crossley finds that political traditions of Central Asia insulated rulers from established religious authority and promoted the objectification of cultural identities marked by language and faith, which created a mutual encouragement of cultural and political change. As religious and social hierarchies weakened, political centralization and militarization advanced. But in the spheres of religion and philosophy, iconoclasm enjoyed a new life.
The changes cumulatively defined a threshold of the modern world, beyond which lay early nationalism, imperialism, and the novel divisions of Eurasia into “East” and “West.” Synthesizing new interpretive approaches and grand themes of world history from 1000 to 1500, Crossley reveals the unique importance of Turkic and Mongol regimes in shaping Eurasia’s economic, technological, and political evolution toward our modern world.
Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of the Modern World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019) is an expansive work of global history that implies a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualise not only the nomadic peripheries of sedentary societies, but those very sedentary societies themselves. An eye-opening read for those interested in the premodern history of the Eurasian continent.
Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially. They can be reached at lance.pursey@abdn.ac.uk.
Andy speaks with former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch about how she anticipates the Russian invasion of Ukraine playing out and why the fight for democracy can take decades. She explains how her parents' experience fleeing totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany led her to join the U.S. Foreign Service, and relives her painful role as a key witness in the 2020 impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump in which she testified that the President pressured the State Department to remove her based on what she called unfounded and false claims.
Throughout the pandemic, CVS Health has been there, bringing quality, affordable health care closer to home—so it’s never out of reach for anyone. Because at CVS Health, healthier happens together. Learn more at cvshealth.com.
Order Andy’s book, “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response,” here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250770165
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