What Next | Daily News and Analysis - One Year: 1990: Mandrake the Magician

It’s a holiday weekend, so the What Next team is taking a little break from the news, and dropping you one of our favorite other Slate podcasts. This time around, we’re listening to One Year: 1990. We'll be back in your feed tomorrow.

A middle-aged single dad in Chicago was outraged by all the cigarette billboards popping up in Black communities. In 1990, he picked up a paint roller and became an anti-tobacco vigilante. And he did it all under a secret identity.

This episode was written by Josh Levin, One Year’s editorial director. One Year’s senior producer is Evan Chung.

This episode was produced by Kelly Jones, Olivia Briley, and Evan Chung. It was edited by Joel Meyer and Derek John, Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts.

Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director. We had mixing help from Kevin Bendis.

Join Slate Plus to get a special behind-the-scenes conversation at the end of our season about how we put together our 1990 stories. Slate Plus members also get to listen to all Slate podcasts without any ads.

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Strict Scrutiny - The Legality of Presidents Doing Whatever They Want

Melissa, Kate, and Leah recap oral arguments in cases about the No Fly List, the confrontation clause, and what qualifies as a government taking. They also preview the cases the Supreme Court will hear this week about Chevron, the doctrine that gives federal agencies the authority to interpret statues. Plus, they recap the arguments in the DC Circuit in which Trump argues he's immune from criminal prosecution (and in which his lawyer suggests he could freely use SEAL team 6 to assassinate a political opponent).

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NPR's Book of the Day - Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel reimagines Hernán Cortés’ and Moctezuma’s empires

You Dreamed of Empires sets the scene for a violent historical encounter: the war between the Spanish and Aztec empires. But in a fictionalization of Hernán Cortés' arrival in the city of Tenochtitlan in 1519, author Álvaro Enrigue challenges ideas about colonialism, revolution and influential rulers. In today's episode, he speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about finding humor and humanity in the men he writes about — sometimes laughing about, but not with, the powerful ones.

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Opening Arguments - OA856: Trump Tries To Delay Carroll Trial (But Not Campaign Rally!) For Funeral

Today, Liz and Andrew document Donald Trump's latest (failed) shenanigans in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial set to begin in New York on Tuesday. Then, they break down in depth the motion to disappear the Fulton County, GA indictment on the grounds of DA Fani Willis's alleged relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. NotesTrump DC Docket https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67656595/united-states-v-trump   E. Jean Carroll v. Trump (Carroll I) docket https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18418220/carroll-v-trump/   Roman Motion to Dismiss GA https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24352568/roman-motion-to-dimiss-010824.pdf   Whitworth v. State, 622 S.E.2d 21 (Ga. App. 2005) https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3050238223814330373   Paragraph

 

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Honestly with Bari Weiss - The Silence of the Feminists

One hundred days ago, the world changed. October 7 has proven to be many things: the opening salvo in a brutal war between Israel and Hamas; an attack that could precipitate a broader, regional war; the beginning of a global, ongoing orgy of antisemitism; a wake-up call regarding the rot inside the West’s once-great sensemaking institutions; a possible realignment of our politics.


One of the things it has also been is a test. A moral test that many in the West have failed. That test of moral conscience is a continuing one considering there are still 136 hostages in Gaza. Two of them are babies; close to 20 of them are young women.


Across the Western world, these hostages have faded from view. And when it comes to the fate of the many young women abducted by Hamas and taken to Gaza, the silence from some corners has been deafening.


Today on Honestly, Bari argues that the groups you would expect to care most about these women and hostages—the celebrity feminists who are always the first to speak up in times of crisis, the prominent women’s organizations who protested loudly when it came to #MeToo, Donald Trump, or Brett Kavanaugh, and the international, supposedly “nonpolitical” human rights organizations—have said and done next to nothing about the murder, kidnap, and rape of Israeli girls.


What explains their silence—or worse, their downplaying or denial? 


When Michelle Obama, Oprah, Malala Yousafzai, Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian—and the rest of the civilized world—saw the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria by Boko Haram in April 2014, within days they took to Twitter and demanded “Bring Back Our Girls.”


Why isn’t the world demanding the same now? 


It’s been one hundred days in captivity: bring back our girls.

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The Economics of Everyday Things - 32. Used Golf Balls

American golfers lose 300 million balls a year — and all those bad swings are someone else’s business opportunity. Zachary Crockett hits the links.