Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.
Adam Rutherford is a geneticist and author who just wrote a new book about the history of eugenics, and he tells NPR's Rebecca Ramirez that the political ideology is not just a relic of the past, but very much still relevant today. In this episode, Rutherford explains how anti-immigrant fear in the 19th century spurred popularity for an unscientific practice that was eventually embraced by Nazis – and has a complicated relationship with today's reproductive rights movement.
The idea came to Uma Valeti while he was working on regrowing human tissue to help heart attack patients: If we can grow tissue from cells in a lab, why not use animal cells to grow meat?
Food production accounts for as much as a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The idea behind cultivated meat is to help feed the world while dramatically reducing human contributions to global warming and avoiding killing animals. NPR Health Correspondent Allison Aubrey has been visiting production facilities and talking with both food and climate scientists to understand how far away lab-grown meat is from store shelves, and what a meal of cultivated chicken tastes like.
Amanda Holmes reads Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “We Lived Happily During the War.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
A viral meme claims that a fake Eli Lilly tweet declaring insulin to be free tanked the stock to the tune of billions and billions. Ignoring for a moment the fact that it seems incredibly unlikely that an easily debunkable fake tweet on fake tweet day would send a bunch of investors into a frenzy, could Eli Lilly sue the tweeter? Or the Twitter? It's another Section 230 deep dive!
We catch up with World Cup news, engage in some vile orientalism about Qatar, and take a look at American colleges and universities partnering with gambling sites to wring some more profit out of their students and sports programs. Then, an in-depth reading series on a Peter Thiel-aligned movement of eugenics, biological optimization, “secular Calvinism,” and more dubious effective altruism, all wrapped up in one couple and their plans to out-breed the world.
Find all of the programming and subscriber announcements mentioned at the end of the episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/announcing-hell-74753159
The Biden White House continues to delay a return to normalcy in the Medicaid program, and that's putting states on the hook for more spending. Marc Joffe comments.
When Lula da Silva edged out Jair Bolsonaro to retake the Presidency of Brazil by less than two percent of the popular vote back in October, it was an amazing comeback story for Lula. But maybe more amazing was that Bolsonaro (sometimes called “Tropical Trump”) recognized the results and actually admitted defeat. We talk with the Editor in Chief of Americas Quarter, Brian Winter, about what happened and what it says about election denialism. Also on the show, climate justice gets a win at the UN … sort of. And Mike details his weekend of Mastadrama.
To read the beginning of Adam Davidson and Mike’s exchange about Cancel Culture, click here.
The most valuable crypto stories for Monday, Nov. 21, 2022.
"The Hash" hosts discuss the culprit behind the $600 million exploit of crypto exchange FTX started exchanging millions of dollars worth of ether (ETH) to Ren Bitcoin (renBTC), a token that represents bitcoin on other blockchains, early on Sunday. Plus, one of TradFi’s better-known investors, Bill Ackman, revealed on Twitter that he has turned a leaf and is now endorsing crypto.
This episode has been edited by Nia Freeman. Our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”
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