Ed Catmull is a computer scientist – and a force of creativity. He helped bring to life beloved, generation-defining movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and more.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history’s most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children’s and Household Tales – is one of the world’s most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers were also passionate German nationalists. They insisted that Germans must reject alien regimes and only accept rulers who spoke their language and cherished their traditions.
The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first book-length study of the Grimms’ political attitudes and ideas. It shows how the Grimms believed that their groundbreaking philological knowledge of grammar and folk narratives allowed them to disentangle cultural and linguistic groups from each other, criticize imperial rule, and even counsel kings and princes. The brothers sought to revive a neglected Germanic culture for a contemporary audience, but they also wished to provide the traditional political elite with an understanding of the resurgent national collective. Through detailed analysis, Norberg reconstructs how the Grimms wished to mediate between culture and politics as well as between sovereigns and peoples.
Jakob Norberg is a Professor of German at Duke University. He is the author of Sociability and Its Enemies (Northwestern University Press, 2014), The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Schopenhauer’s Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, Arcadia, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, Textual Practice, Telos, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. His book on the Grimms won the 2023 Best Book award of the Brothers Grimm Society of North America and a recent article, “Schopenhauer and the Injustice of Slavery,” won the 2023 essay prize of the Schopenhauer Society.
Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-GermanOccultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition.
Medical errors happen all the time. They can be overlooked or they can lead to big lawsuits and settlements. But what they rarely lead to is an apology. Doctors and hospitals have long responded to medical mistakes with silence. There are many reasons for this approach: fear of legal liability, loss of status, even shame. But increasingly, patients, families, and yes, doctors, are calling for a new approach, one that acknowledges the lasting damage that comes from a failure to address medical mistakes. This week on The Sunday Story, we talk to Tradeoffs health reporters about a family with a nightmarish story of a what they say was a medical error, and a look at what's being done to keep others from suffering in the same way.
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In this installment of Best Of The Gist, protests of the video game Hogwarts Legacy dealt a blow to the financial empire of J.K. Rowlings’ in 2023 … Oh wait, actually, Hogwarts Legacy was the highest grossing game of last year. Nevermind. We listen back to Mike’s February 2023 Spiel about the protests. Then we listen to our recent Spiel about Spirit Airlines failure to merge with JetBlue.
Weight loss drugs are taking center spotlight, but other developing treatments could change how we live. Deidre Woollard caught up with Motley Fool biotech analyst Karl Thiel to discuss:
- Biogen’s next shot at an Alzheimer’s treatment.
- Why companies can’t “muscle their way” into making new molecules.
The “brothers-in-law” Vik and Akhil Amar have filed an amicus brief in Trump v. Anderson et al. The brief contains a dramatic historic episode that you almost certainly knew nothing about, and which is highly relevant - perhaps decisive - to the case. Prepare to be amazed by this story of the “First Insurrection,” which preceded and was distinguishable from the Civil War itself, and which makes clear the certain intent of the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment - and the course the Supreme Court should take in this case. This, and the episodes to follow, may be the most important episodes we have offered in the more than three years of this podcast. CLE credit is available from podcast.njsba.com.
Interview with Robert Sapolsky; News Items: Betavolt 50 Year Battery, Moon Landing Delayed, Cloned Monkeys, Converting CO2 into Carbon Nanofibers, Bad Fen Shui; Who's That Noisy; From TikTok: Jellyfish UFO; Science or Fiction
Former President Donald Trump gets an endorsement from Senator Tim Scott just ahead of the NH primary. Also, several dozen countries hold elections this year - we take a step-back to consider what's at stake for global democracy.
