The First World War wasn’t just fought on the fields of France and Belgium. There were lesser battles fought on the homefronts of the nations which were fighting.
In the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries, this battle was fought on the streets of cities and towns between men who didn’t wear a uniform and women who tried to shame them into joining the military.
These street conflicts got so bad that the governments eventually had to take action.
Learn more about the White Feather Girls and how they shaped World War One on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us(Princeton UP, 2022) shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism.
Kim Haines-Eitzen draws on ancient monastic texts from Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine to explore how noise offered desert monks an opportunity to cultivate inner quietude, and shows how the desert quests of ancient monastics offer profound lessons for us about what it means to search for silence. Drawing on her own experiences making field recordings in the deserts of North America and Israel, she reveals how mountains, canyons, caves, rocky escarpments, and lush oases are deeply resonant places. Haines-Eitzen discusses how the desert is a place of paradoxes, both silent and noisy, pulling us toward contemplative isolation yet giving rise to vibrant collectives of fellow seekers.
Accompanied by Haines-Eitzen’s evocative audio recordings of desert environments, Sonorous Desert reveals how desert sounds taught ancient monks about solitude, silence, and the life of community, and how they can help us understand ourselves if we slow down and listen.
You can listen to a series of recordings that go with each chapter of the book here.
In many ways, Black Elk and John Neihardt lived very different lives. Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota holy man. Neihartd was a European-American literary critic. Black Elk performed for Queen Victoria with Buffalo Bills’s Wild West Show. Neihartd was Poet Laureate of Nebraska. But in other ways, they weren’t different at all. “By all accounts, they really, truly felt like they had a kind of spiritual affinity for one another,” says Harvard Professor Philip Deloria. In this episode, Professor Deloria discusses Black Elk Speaks, the book that Black Elk and Neihardt co-authored in 1932, which shaped the way both white and Native Americans understood Native culture. Philip Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian and Indians in Unexpected Places. His most recent book is American Studies: A User's Guide, co-authored with Alexander Olson. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod
COVID is definitely not over, but life is still going on. As we emerge from our bubbles (with no lack of trepidation), Andy calls up comedian Patton Oswalt to talk about what life is like back on the road, making movies again and talking to people in real life, not on Twitter. Then Patton and Andy riff on what justice really looks like for people like Alex Jones and Josh Hawley. Can we find humor in their demise? Will either of them even have a demise? Patton and Andy debate that and more in this laugh-filled episode.
Find vaccines, masks, testing, treatments, and other resources in your community: https://www.covid.gov/
Order Andy’s book, “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response”: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250770165
Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.
We're talking about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act: how the multi-billion-dollar bill passed the Senate and what it's supposed to do.
Also, there's new fighting in the middle east. Will it end with a truce?
Plus, the latest, better-than-expected American jobs data, which company Amazon is buying in its 4th-largest deal ever, and the most valuable sports team in the world.
Hot Take’s Mary Annaïse Heglar joins us to talk about the Senate passing the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday. It now heads to the House this week where it’s expected to pass. One of the main pieces of the legislation addresses the climate crisis, but the bill ultimately falls short of many activists’ demands.
And in headlines: Indiana’s banned nearly all abortions, President Biden is now negative for COVID, and Lake Mead revealed another set of human skeletal remains.
Show Notes:
NPR: “Democrats passed a major climate, health and tax bill. Here's what's in it” – https://n.pr/3zCXpmn
Crooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffee
Last week, congressional Democrats from Minnesota and New York cast doubt on Biden's political future, suggesting it was time for a new generation to step forward. Those public statements came on the heels of Gallup's poll, which put Biden's job approval rating at a personal low 38%.
History doesn't bode well for incumbent presidents who face intraparty challenges, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy. His recent Washington Examiner cover story, "Biden faces a mutiny," examined six examples of 20th-century presidents who faced intraparty challengers—all losers.
Troy, director of the Presidential Leadership Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former senior White House aide, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to talk about Biden's future, frustrations plaguing his White House, and interesting tidbits about presidential history.
With an ongoing labor shortage, companies turn to third-party labor brokers to fill jobs. But with little oversight and a surge of immigrants, the line between “ recruiter” and “ trafficker” gets blurred as vulnerable children are sent to work in dangerous conditions.
Guest: Mica Rosenberg, national immigration reporter for Reuters.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
Leah talks with Lee Kovarsky of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas about the Supreme Court's treatment of death penalty cases. Before 2020, there hadn't been a federal execution since 2003. In the last six months of the Trump presidency, there were 13. Lee tells us how that came to be, and what the justices' writings signal for future death penalty cases.
Read Lee's article, "The Trump Executions," in the University of Texas Law Review
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