Spotting a stock fraud is extremely difficult, but finding some smoke is significantly easier.
Founded by Eddie Antar, Crazy Eddie was a chain of consumer electronic stores in the Northeast. After going public in the 1980s, the stock became nearly a ten-bagger before investigators found it to be a fraud. Investors may not have suspected that the retailer boosted profit margins by manipulating a cash skim, but there were some other signs that the soaring stock price didn’t tell the whole story.
Ricky Mulvey talked with Gary Weiss, author of “Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie” about: - Why investors bought into Eddie Antar’s hype - How criminals save money on sales tax - The eventual downfall of Crazy Eddie
Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: Gary Weiss Engineers: Rick Engdahl, Dan Boyd
It’s been an unusual week for astronomers, with telescopes swivelled off course to observe GRB221009A, the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded. Gamma ray bursts aren’t unusual, the by-product of some supernovae are recorded weekly. Whilst the afterglow of these bursts usually lasts hours or days, the aftermath of, what has been dubbed ‘BOAT’, brightest of all time, is expected to linger for years to come. Harvard University’s Edo Berger and Yvette Cendas believe there’s lots to be learnt in the coming months.
Back in the primordial oceans, tiny, wriggling worms and shimmering jellyfish invented ever better ways to strip resources from their environment deep in the murky depths. The ability to efficiently take up oxygen from a marine environment acted as a gateway for a dramatic explosion in species diversity. But according to Michael Sackville, Postdoctoral Fellow University of Cambridge and Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, when the gills first appeared they may have carried out a rather different function.
Plastics litter our oceans, and after time return to the shores. In order to predict and better understand where these plastic hotspots are, Professor Bhavani Narayanaswamy, Benthic Ecologist for Scottish Association for Marine Science, travels all over the globe to gather data and model these plastic hotspots.
In the future, this plastic waste could be broken down by a biological organisms. Chemical biologist Dr Federica Bertocchini at the University of Cantabria has identified enzymes responsible for munching through resilient polymers in waxworms.
Why do some people pick up accents without even trying, while others can live in another country for decades without ever losing the sound of their mother tongue?
It’s a question that's been bothering CrowdScience listener Monica who, despite 45 years of living in the US, is still answering questions about where her accent is from. Presenter Marnie Chesterton sets off to discover why learning a new language is possible but perfecting the accent is so much harder.
Marnie speaks to a linguist about how we learn language and develop our first accent, and what we can - and can't change - about our accents. A phonetician explains to Marnie the difficulty of even hearing sounds that are not from our mother tongue, let alone replicating them. And Marnie enlists some expert help to learn some of the pitch sounds of Japanese – with mixed success.
Finally Marnie asks why people so dearly want to change their accents when doing so is such hard work. She hears from a sociolinguist about stereotypes and the impact of accent bias, and Shalu Yadav reports from the front line of Delhi call centres where workers experience prejudice about their accents regularly.
(Image: Gamma Rays in Galactic Nuclei. Credit: Getty Images)
Here’s a preview of a new podcast, Story of the Week.
Each week, journalist Joel Stein chooses an article that fascinates him, convinces the writer to tell him about it, and then interrupts a good conversation by talking about himself. Sometimes the story will be the one everyone is talking about, like the New Yorker article on smoking hallucinogenic toads. Other times we’ll find a story you might have missed, like the one in the Verge about the rock groupie turned hacker who had huge corporations at her mercy. Stories that stick with you long after you forget whatever headline you just doom-scrolled through. In this preview, Joel is joined by Douglas Rushkoff to talk about his experience speaking to a group of tech billionaires in the middle of the desert. He thought he’d be chatting about the latest in tech advancements, but all these guys wanted to talk about was building doomsday bunkers. Hear the full episode, and more from Story of the Week, at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/sotw?sid=gist.
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsors today is “War” by Enoch Yang and “The Life We Had” by Moments. Image credit: Craig Barritt/Getty Images for CARE For Special Children, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.
Alzheimer’s treatment hasn’t changed much in the past two decades, and the way researchers have been thinking about and approaching the disease may be to blame.
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 TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
To celebrate the announcement of the upcoming launch of Peach Fish's newest podcast, Not Even Mad, in this installment of Best Of The Gist, we are replaying Mike’s January 18, 2017 interview with Heather Hendershot. Heather watched nearly 1,500 episodes of William F. Buckley’s pioneering TV show Firing Line, and though she still doesn’t agree with Buckley, she admires how he created a place for high-minded argument. Then we will listen to some bonus content from Mike’s Thursday interview with David Priess, former CIA intelligence briefer and current Publisher of Lawfare about the work of the January 6th Committee.
This week, politics in the UK looked a little — crazy.
Outraged members of Parliament yelled their demands for Prime Minister Liz Truss to resign, a head of iceberg lettuce managed to outlast her, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson -who was just ousted a few months ago over the "partygate" scandal- is back in play as a possible replacement for Truss.
It feels like political theater, but the consequences are very real as people in the U.K. continue to struggle through an economic crisis.
As the very "un-British" chaos continues to unfold, is it proof that the British political system, at its messiest, is still less dysfunctional than U.S. politics?
Quickie with Jay: Hiding Anti-Vaccine Misinformation; News Items: Electric Universe, Neanderthal Clan, Gorillas and Chimps Friends, Brightest Gamma Ray Burst, Cheating Scandals; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: COVID Vaccines and Bell's Palsy; Science or Fiction
