All three of the holy books from great monotheistic faiths share a similar story about a Queen from a land in the south who traveled to Jerusalem to meet King Solomon.
This queen, who is said to have come from a land called Sheba, held not only the fascination of Solomon but of people for almost 3000 years.
But did she really exist, and if she did, where exactly did she come from?
Learn more about the Queen of Sheba on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Today I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022).
In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.
Don J. Wyatt (Ph.D. Harvard University) is the John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont, USA, where he has taught history and philosophy since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research interests most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery.
Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, incoming visiting fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
We're telling you about a new court ruling that could put the abortion issue back before the Supreme Court this year.
And we have more information about why there were no sirens as the Maui fires spread.
Plus, a virtual Holocaust museum opened in a popular video game, there's promising data about a recently-added safety feature for NFL players, and pumpkin spice is back.
A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that it would impose restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, including preventing it from being prescribed via telehealth or sent through the mail. But those restrictions won’t go into effect immediately due to a previous stay by the Supreme Court.
Republican state leaders like Texas Governor Greg Abbott continue the inhumane practice of busing and flying migrants to Democratic-led states and cities. We’re joined by Jacob Love, a staff attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, to talk about the migrants' experience, specifically those who were flown to Martha's Vineyard by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
And in headlines: prosecutors in Georgia want their racketeering case against Trump to start as soon as March 4th, the death toll from the deadly Maui wildfires rose to 110, and dozens of protestors in Miami took to the streets Wednesday to protest the state’s new restrictions on how Black history can be taught in public schools.
Show Notes:
Help Maui Rise: Directly Aid ʻOhana Displaced by Fires – https://tinyurl.com/23cnpvqz
Maui Mutual Aid Fund - https://www.bit.ly/mauimutualaide
Hawai'i' Community Foundation Maui Strong Fund - https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/maui-strong
Fundraiser for Nā ‘Āikane O Maui Cultural Center, which burned down: https://www.instagram.com/p/CvvJeNzy2WM/?img_index=1
What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
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Loaded with attractions such as bacon pecan pie on a stick, dairy cows, a tractor pull, and presidential candidates, the Iowa State Fair truly offers something for everyone.
Over a million visitors are expected this year for the annual fair, which runs Aug. 10-20, so it’s a magnet for presidential hopefuls ahead of Iowa’s Republican presidential caucuses Jan. 15.
Presidential candidates “know that this is a place that they need to come in order to socialize with the Iowa voter, answer very hard questions coming from those Iowa voters, and it really sets the stage as we ramp up towards those January caucuses,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, tells The Daily Signal.
Voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina traditionally go first in casting their ballots during primary season, so it’s no surprise that politicians spend time in all three states.
Iowan voters “hope that we can get our country back on track” following the Biden administration, Ernst says.
“What we see with this president is a president who appeases our adversaries all around the globe,” Ernst says. “It’s a president who has focused so far left on green ideology and climate ideology that he’s hurting middle America. They just want to trample over the American people and do whatever he wants to do regardless of the consequences.”
Iowa’s junior senator joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” from the State Fair to discuss the visiting GOP presidential candidates and the effects on voters of the four indictments of former President Donald Trump.
Paris Marx is joined by Molly White to discuss Sam Bankman-Fried having his bail revoked and Sam Altman’s plan to scan all of our irises to get us into crypto and supposedly protect us from AI.
Molly White is the creator of Web3 Is Going Just Great and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. You can follow Molly on Twitter at @molly0xFFF.
Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.
Hawaii is in flames, with the death toll from fires on Maui exceeding 100. Now, the search for where the failure—or multiple failures—occurred begins.
Guest: Brianna Sacks, reporter covering climate change and extreme weather for the Washington Post.
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. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
Music
Halcyon and Photosynteses and Embryo by H. Takehashi
Intro by Library Tapes
The Florist Wears Knee Breeches by M. Sage
Notes
I found Andrew Isenberg's book, The Destruction of the Bison, An Environmental History, completely fascinating.
If you want to do a deep dive on Madison Grant, I'd recommend Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant by John Peter Spiro.
If you want to do a deep dive on the Catalina Buffalo, this site is a fun place to start.
The conversation this week starts off on corruption. There are allegations of political or corporate malfeasance in the news regularly throughout the world. But can science bring anything to the investigators? We look at some efforts to bring empirical rigour to the fight.
But corruption of sorts is also a big thing in our online lives. Algorithms can deliver duff results, maybe because they are poorly conceived, or perhaps because they are fed corrupt data.
So when our cellular biological algorithms are corrupted, our health is affected. Can cancerous tumours be considered corrupt organs, co-opting healthy cells to assist in their nefarious ends? Dr Ilaria Malanchi of the Crick Institute in London muses on the commonalities.
Also, a look at the politicisation of pre-human palaeontology and how our stories of human origins have been, and in some ways still are, connected with nationalist geographical identities that mainstream science doesn't recognize.
Presenter: Caroline Steel, with Yangyang Chen and Meral Jamal
Producer: Alex Mansfield, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins, Ben Motley, and Sophie Ormiston
