Gabriel Attal, France’s youthful new prime minister, represents President Emmanuel Macron’s renewed push to pass policy reforms and to counter a resurgent far-right. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a landslide re-election of President Félix Tshisekedi has raised eyebrows—and tempers (7:41). And a look at how “The Wicker Man” may be the force behind a rise in paganism (15:30).
Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.
Understand the pros and cons of using a 401(k) when you have an employer or work for yourself so you have plenty of money when you’re ready to kick back and enjoy retirement.
Money Girl is hosted by Laura Adams. A transcript is available at Simplecast
Today, we are discussing the latest election news as we gear up for the Iowa caucuses. Claudine Gay is leaving Harvard, Fetterman breaks from the left, and one zoomer teaches us about economics.
Did London see a 2500% increase in gun crime? Are taxes in the UK the highest since the 1950s? Did the UK have high excess deaths from Covid, compared to the rest of Europe? Do three cats go missing every second in the UK?
Tim and the team investigate a few of the numbers in the news.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Nathan Gower
Series Producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
How could a good life include one with anger, or jealousy, or spite? In Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good(Oxford UP, 2023), Krista Thomason flips the script on popular ways of dealing with our emotions, including neo-Stoicism, mindfulness, and even the prosperity gospel. She makes the case that we should get rid of the double standard we have towards "good" and "bad" emotions, and that we should not aim to be emotional saints. Instead, because "bad" emotions are an essential part of our attachments to our selves, they help us discover what we care about. Thomason, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College, guides the reader through philosophical traditions regarding the relation of emotion to reason and the various approaches thinkers have come up with to deal with our "bad" emotions.
Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.
By putting the Midwest at the center of Vast Early America, University of Illinois historian Robert Morrissey reconfigures the power dynamics in the story of North America during the era of colonialism. In his award-winning People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America (U Washington Press, 2022), Morrissey tells a story that centers the edge - the places where the vast American prairies meet the forests of the Great Lakes. This "ecotone" region is a zone of environmental wealth and dynamism, where successive Native societies were able to build powerful societies based on an understanding of the region's ecologies. Rather than European empires of eastern Native people like the Iroquois acting upon people at the center of the continent, Morrissey centers the Meskwaki, the Illiniwek, and other groups usually kept at the margins of the story. By combining ethnohistory, environmental history, and colonial history, People of the Ecotone tells a genuinely new story that shifts our perspective of who and what matters in early American history in unexpected ways.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.
One of the most important inventions in human history was artificial lighting.
With the electric lightbulb, the night could be illuminated, allowing people to extend their productive hours in the day and to work in places that were otherwise difficult or impossible.
While the incandescent bulb was a breakthrough, it wasn’t actually very efficient. It wouldn’t be until decades later that a radically more efficient way of producing artificial light would be developed.
Learn more about LEDs or light-emitting diodes and how they work on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We're telling you about the impact of snow, rain, and tornadoes across several states and where the winter storm system is headed next.
Also, we have an update on the Pentagon chief's health, and the world is paying close attention to a crisis in Ecuador.
Plus, how popular social media sites are changing for teens, why NASA is delaying missions to the moon, and another round of interesting gadgets was unveiled at tech's biggest trade show.
The most people in history will vote in 2024, with 78 countries going to the polls. Is democracy really on the ballot, as some say? What new state laws are coming into effect, and is a new space race heating up? Zachary Karabell and Emma Varvaloucas are back to discuss the latest news stories we might have missed.
