“The Breakdown” is written, produced by, and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with today’s editing by Michele Musso and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Image credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.
Long before Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or the birth of “fake news,” Americans had already started to lose their faith in American journalism. The feeling that something had shifted in the media’s discourse had become hard to ignore because mainstream news was no longer just liberal; it was “Woke.”
In this episode of Regressives, Ravi interviews Batya Unger-Sargon - the Deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and author of the book “Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy” - which examines how over the course of a century, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly-educated peers. We discuss that shift, whether the media truly has a bias, and whether it can even be described as a monolith anymore.
In the year 1900, a crew of sponge divers was looking for sponges off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. While they were searching, they found the remains of an ancient shipwreck.
The wreck contained over 30 marble statues, pieces of glasswork, and one corroded metal object that no one could identify.
75 years later, using new technology, they discovered what that hunk of metal was designed for.
Learn more about the Antikythera Mechanism and how it forever changed our views of the ancient world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society(University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations.
When Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation.
Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.
Philippe-Richard Marius is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). Marius has conducted extensive fieldwork in Haiti. He is writer, producer, and codirector of the film A City Called Heaven.
Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.
Roughly 95 percent of advanced semiconductor chip manufacturing happens in Taiwan, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to supply chain shocks and national security threats. Is the Biden administration’s $280 billion bill, signed in August last year, enough to boost domestic chip manufacturing?
Guest: Don Clark, freelance reporter specializing on chips and enterprise tech.
Host: Emily Peck
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We do a postmortem on 2022, the year of Web3, talking about the goofs and grifts, speed and scale, crashes and canaries, with our major takeaway and theme being that just as FTX is not anomalous for Web3, nor is Web3 anomalous for Silicon Valley. It is, instead, a product and paragon of the structural conditions and systemic imperatives that define how the political economy of technology operates within capitalism.
Stuff we reference
••• In 2022, web3 went just great https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/in-2022-web3-went-just-great
••• Web3 grift leaderboard https://web3isgoinggreat.com/charts/top
••• Imprinting the economy: The structural power of venture capital https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X221136559
••• MicroStrategy Hit Lowest Since 2020 After Bitcoin Sale https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-29/microstrategy-mstr-hits-lowest-since-2020-after-bitcoin-sale-announcement?srnd=technology-vp
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)
'Tis the season for lists! Best films of the year, best albums, best podcasts. Lists can provoke strong emotions- from spirited debate to outrage - over who or what made the cut or ranked higher.
This week, Rolling Stone magazine faced backlash over their list of the 200 greatest singers of all time, which omitted some big names (Celine Dion, Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole to name a few)
Lists! We love to hate them. and yet they are almost irresistible. Can they function as more than just clickbait?
NPR's Andrew Limbong talks to Aisha Harris and Stephen Thompson, hosts of Pop Culture Happy Hour.
In this installment of Best Of The Gist, we are featuring two questions asked of Alec Baldwin (the movie star) by our guest host Bob Garfield (non-movie star), which had originally been left on the cutting room floor, but hey, that's what weekend shows are for, right? After Alec, we dig into The Gist archives and listen back to Mike’s 2017 interview with Bob Garfield about his one-man show, Ruggedly Jewish. Yeah, that one-man show. Guest host week is now officially over.
Just because a stock lost 98% of its value doesn’t mean it's cheap. Sometimes the market becomes efficient.
Asit Sharma joins Ricky Mulvey to look at some justifiable reasons why stocks dropped last year and which strong businesses that may have been swept up in the tide. They discuss:
- Carvana’s boom and bust, and the takeaways for investors - If Zoom has a sticky product - How Roku is addressing a tougher advertisement landscape - Meta’s valuation, and questions about its leadership - Mindset advice if you want to be a contrarian investor
Companies discussed: LULU, ZM, MSFT, CVNA, ROKU, NFLX, META
