This week, Congress passed a bill that effectively imposed an agreement between rail workers and their companies and prohibited a strike. Politicians feared that any work stoppage would cripple the U.S. economy for the holidays, costing the country billions of dollars.
Today, we talk about the unique, violent history of rail workers trying to fight for better union contracts. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis
South Africa’s leader says a pile of cash stashed in a sofa represents no wrongdoing. The outcome of an investigation could be the undoing of his presidency and his party. We examine Britain’s hydrogen-economy plans as representing the tradeoffs that many countries will face. And remembering Jay Pasachoff, the world’s foremost expert on and exponent of eclipses.
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Finally, the price of 1 thing in the economy has fallen — The Chicken Wing. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of fraud, yet he just sat down for an interview in a Shakespearean drama. And Loop just made a major hire for its baby gear rental company, but it has us wondering the ancient question: Rent or Buy?
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In The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (White Crow Books, 2022), historian of religions Gregory Shushan explores the relationships between extraordinary experiences and beliefs in life after death. He first shows how throughout history and around the world, near-death experiences have influenced ideas about the afterlife. Shushan also takes a deep dive into the problem of similarities and differences between NDE accounts. Not only do they vary widely, but so does a culture’s way of responding to them and integrating them into their belief systems.
In this book, Shushan also compares NDEs with accounts of shamanic spirit journeys to afterlife realms, intermission states between reincarnations from people who remember past lives, and descriptions of otherworlds by souls of the dead communicating through mediums. Accounts of all these phenomena bear striking similarities to NDEs, though they also have significant differences. Examining them each in relation to the other results in a kind of reciprocal illumination in which each type of extraordinary experience sheds light on the other.
Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.
What to know about what could be a massive overhaul in the presidential election season: why President Biden is reportedly calling for a change.
Also, Congress' final decision on a deal to avert a rail strike and a new development in the Justice Department's investigation into documents found at former President Trump's home.
Plus, what's behind a big drop in gas prices, why the rapper Ye was suspended from Twitter again, and how one celebrity decided to pay it forward in his hometown.
Those stories and more news to know in around 10 minutes!
The widespread protests against the Chinese government are the most extensive since Tiananmen Square in 1989. The demonstrations are against both the severe zero-COVID policies and Xi Jinping’s rule. But the consequences of protesting in China are harsh. Andy speaks with two China experts, Xiao Qiang at the University of California Berkeley and Michael Beckley at Tufts University, about whether COVID rules will loosen, why these protests could mark the start of an even more authoritarian era, and what a coming crackdown on the Chinese people might look like.
Keep up with Andy on Post and Twitter at @ASlavitt.
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