During his time in office, former president Donald Trump talked a great deal about all of the positive changes he was making to improve the economy.
When he gave his final State of the Union address in February 2020, employers had added more than six million jobs, unemployment was at three-and-a-half percent and the stock market was soaring.
But by March all of that ended as coronavirus spread rapidly across the globe.
Donald Trump is poised to capture the Republican presidential nomination. As president, some of his economic policies came out of the traditional Republican playbook. But other policies were more populist, more nativist and more unpredictable.
NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Chief Economics Correspondent Scott Horsley about what might change, and what might stay the same, under a second Trump administration.
In the spring of 2017, a police corruption scandal rocked the city of Baltimore. And at the heart of it was an elite undercover unit called the Gun Trace Task Force.
American Scandal is a podcast from Wondery that takes you deep into the most infamous scandals in American history, from presidential lies to environmental disasters and corporate fraud. Their new season looks at a Baltimore police unit that was supposed to reduce violence in the community. But they operated with little oversight, and instead became a breeding ground for rogue cops who were abusing their power.
This is just a preview of American Scandal. You can listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or at Wondery.fm/AS_TheGist.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to create a utopia? A place where all your wants and needs were taken care of and there was never any fear of harm?
Creating such a world for humans may be far off, but one man did try to create a utopia for rats. He created a world that had everything they would want and where all their needs are taken care of.
It didn’t turn out like anyone expected.
Learn more about Universe 25, and how a utopia turned into a dystopia, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots.
The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.
It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.
Across fifty essays, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time(U Chicago Press, 2023) chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.
In Amazonian Cosmopolitans: Navigating a Shamanic Cosmos, Shifting Indigenous Policies, and Other Modern Projects(U Nebraska Press, 2022), Suzanne Oakdale focuses on the autobiographical accounts of two Brazilian Indigenous leaders, Prepori and Sabino, Kawaiwete men whose lives spanned the twentieth century, when Amazonia increasingly became the context of large-scale state projects. Both give accounts of how they worked in a range of interethnic enterprises from the 1920s to the 1960s in central Brazil. Prepori, a shaman, also gives an account of his relations with spirit beings that populate the Kawaiwete cosmos as he participated in these projects.
Like other Indigenous Amazonians, Kawaiwete value engagement with outsiders, particularly for leaders and shamanic healers. These social engagements encourage a careful watching and learning of others’ habits, customs, and sometimes languages, what could be called a kind of cosmopolitanism or an attitude of openness, leading to an expansion of the boundaries of community. The historical consciousness presented by these narrators centers on how transformations in social relations were experienced in bodily terms—how their bodies changed as new relationships formed. Amazonian Cosmopolitans offers Indigenous perspectives on twentieth-century Brazilian history as well as a way to reimagine lowland peoples as living within vast networks, bridging wide social and cosmological divides.
Suzanne Oakdale is Professor of Anthropology at The University of New Mexico. She specializes in Brazil, with research focused on Amazonian indigenous peoples. She explores the dynamics of ritual practice; history; and the social anthropology of the person and personal experience, particularly how these genres reflect and are used to address large scale social shifts. She is the editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research.
Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of the anthropology of state, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.
Primary season has just begun but for most Republicans, it's a wrap. The question now is not who the party will pick as its presidential candidate but who former President Donald Trump will choose as his running mate. Today on The Sunday Story, we turn to our colleagues at NPR's Politics Podcast as they consider the vice presidency and who might be on Trump's short list.
Are we still paying off our pandemic-induced “immunity debt,” or is there another reason that it feels like we’re all sniffling and coughing and just feeling sick?
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 TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
Lipreading has been in the news this month, thanks to gossip-stoking mouth movements at the Golden Globes that the amateur lipreaders of The Internet rushed to interpret. But lipreading tutor Helen Barrow describes how reading lips really works - the confusable consonants, the importance of context and body language - and gossip maven Lainey Lui explains why these regularly occurring lipreading gossip stories are unworthy of a second or even first glance.
Get the transcript of this episode, and find links to the guests and more information about the topics therein, at theallusionist.org/lipread.
Content note: this episode contains three Category B swears.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com.
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In this installment of Best Of The Gist, upon hearing the news that researchers had discovered four previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins with the help of satellite imagery, we give to you Mike’s 2017 interview with penguin researcher Michelle LeRue. Then we replay Mike’s January 24, 2024 Spiel about The Los Angeles Times, which isn’t his favorite news source.