In our first episode, host Zachary Crockett sidles up to the pump to ask: Who owns your local gas station, and where do their profits really come from?
You wouldn't know it from its recent struggles, but for most of the 20th century General Electric was one of the most important companies (and stocks) in America. William D. Cohan is a founding partner of digital news business Puck and the author of “Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon.” Cohan joined Ricky Mulvey to discuss: - The mythology behind General Electric’s birth - How corporations struggle mightily with CEO succession - Jack Welch and the religion of earnings consistency - Why he believes a combination between Warner Brothers Discovery and NBCUniversal is “inevitable” Companies discussed: GE, DIS, WBD, CMCSA Host: Ricky Mulvey Guest: William D. Cohan Engineer: Rick Engdahl, Tim Sparks, Annie Franks
Climate researcher, Rose Abramoff took to the stage at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meetings, not as a guest speaker but in protest. Whilst her demonstration only lasted 15 seconds, she found her employment terminated from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and research stripped from the AGU programme. She was attempting to persuade other climate scientists to ‘get out of the lab and into the street’. Whilst Rose’s protest hit the headlines in the media, potentially less attention was paid to the session that was taking place at the conference, hosted by Mika Tosca, climate scientist-turn-artist, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ronald brings the two together to discuss the event and how climate scientists should approach activism.
Although there is no one solution to the climate crisis, Roland loves a brainstorm on Science in Action. Climate activist Stuart Capstick, a Cardiff University psychologist specialising in public attitudes to environmental issues and environmental scientist Robert Young from Western Carolina University take the conversation one step further. Questioning how public perceptions of scientists change when they take evasive action and protest.
And finally, we usually hear of seismology reports coming from dense, urban areas prone to earthquakes, delicately perched atop of tectonic plates. But this week, Roland speaks to Professor of Geophysics Zhongwen Zhan from the California Institute of Technology, who’s collecting data from a very unusual place...
When CrowdScience listener Eric spotted a few gnats flying around on a milder day in mid-winter it really surprised him - Eric had assumed they just died out with the colder weather. It got him wondering where the insects had come from, how they had survived the previous cold snap and what the implications of climate change might be for insect over-wintering behaviour? So he asked CrowdScience to do some bug investigation.
CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton takes up the challenge and heads out into the British countryside – currently teeming with buzzes and eight legged tiny beasties - to learn about the quite amazing array of tactics these small creatures use to survive the arduous days of cold.
She hears how some insects change their chemical structure to enhance their frost resistance whist others hanker down in warmer microclimates or rely on their community and food stocks to keep them warm.
But cold isn’t the only climatic change insects have to endure, in the tropics the seasons tend to fluctuate more around wet and dry so what happens then? Marnie talks with a Kenyan aquatic insect expert who describes how mosquitoes utilise the rains and shares his worry climate change could have a big impact on insect populations.
Join the most important conversation in crypto and Web3 at Consensus 2023, happening April 26–28 in Austin, Texas. Come and immerse yourself in all that Web3, crypto, blockchain and the metaverse have to offer. Use code BREAKDOWN to get 15% off your pass. Visit consensus.coindesk.com.
-
“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 sponsor today is “Swoon” by Falls. Image credit: Mikhail Seleznev/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.
In 2022 the NFL's Buffalo Bills announced a deal with the state of New York to build a brand new $1.4 Billion stadium in Erie County. The passage of funding between the state, the Buffalo Bills, and the NFL requires that New York taxpayers front a whopping 60% of the project - or about $850 dollars. This reignited a debate that has been raging in the US for the past two decades: Should taxpayers front the costs of large scale stadiums for billionaire owners? The answer is not easy, as every major sports league in the country has leveraged their teams to push secure taxpayer funding and the problem only seems to be getting worse.
In this episode Ravi speaks with Victor Matheson, a sports economist and professor at the College of Holy Cross, who has studied stadium financing for over two decades. They discuss the history of sports stadiums in America, the arguments for and against public financing, and why this disturbing trend may not be going away. You won’t need to be a sports fan to enjoy this conversation.
There is nothing faster in the entire universe than the speed of light. Not only is it the fastest thing, but nothing can be faster than light.
For the longest time, humans didn’t even know that light had a speed, and once they figured out that light wasn’t instantaneous, it took several centuries to figure out what that speed was.
Learn more about the speed of light and its implications for physics and engineering on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves.
And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City’s Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan.
Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman’s new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide(SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan’s early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan’s New York years in a rich context.
Bob Dylan’s New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan’s early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan’s apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan’s New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s.
The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan’s New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer.
Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.
This week, host June Thomas talks to poet Chip Livingston, who recently compiled a collection of letters titled, Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie. It documents the friendship between the writer Lucia Berlin, who is now well-regarded for her short stories but was underappreciated during her lifetime, and the poet and librettist Kenward Elmslie. In the interview, Chip shares how he put the collection together and talks about his personal relationships with both Berlin and Elmslie. He also explains how the book can serve as a useful depiction of what it’s like to live as an artist.
After the interview, June and co-host Isaac Butler talk more about what we can learn from the letters of great writers. They also discuss overly confessional writing and how to determine the audience for your work.
In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Chip talks about how his love of poetry blossomed in part thanks to his friendship with Kenward Elmslie.
Do you have a question about creative work? Call us and leave a message at (304) 933-9675 or email us at working@slate.com.
Podcast production by Cameron Drews.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Working. Sign up now at slate.com/workingplus to help support our work.