All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.
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In this installment of Best Of The Gist, we listen back to Mike’s December 6, 2023 interview with Aric Toler about the storied Hamas tunnel network, which, depending on where you get your news, is either a "vast labyrinth" or a 160-yard tunnel with little room for a command center capable of orchestrating the October 7th attack. Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times, where he combines traditional reporting techniques with "open-source" reporting practices, and he recently contributed to a Times investigation about the tunnels. Then we rewind to this past Tuesday so Mike can again ask the question, “Would a ‘Winter Wonderland’ occur to any songwriter today?”
James Keyes is the former CEO of Blockbuster and 7-Eleven, and the author of “Education is Freedom: The Future Is in Your Hands.” Deidre Woollard caught up Keyes to discuss:
- What it is like to be a CEO at a company facing bankruptcy.
Quickie with Bob - Metalenses; News Items: Flow Batteries, Green Roofs, LEGO MRI scanner, The Future Circular Collider, Mayo Clinic and Reiki; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction
Family and allies of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny say he was murdered. A New York judge ordered Trump Organization leaders to pay $364 million for fraud. President Joe Biden's tough words on Israel raise questions over the extent of his influence.
Chicago folk singer Naomi Ashley’s new album Love Bug explores the different stages of love, from infatuation to obsession to heartbreak and beyond. Reset sits down with the artist for more on what it takes to turn heartbreak into a love song.
With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.
Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs.
In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (UNC Press, 2023), he shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality.
Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency.
In the Pacific Theater in World War II, the leader of the combined Japanese fleet was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto was villanized as the arch-enemy of the American forces in the Pacific, and to be fair, he was their enemy.
But there is actually much more to the story. Yamamoto was the loudest voice against war with the United States and was one of the only officials in the Japanese leadership who spent time in the United States and understood it.
Learn more about Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, his rise and tragic end on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
When Alexei Navalny flew back to Russia in 2021 he never made it through passport control. In an excerpt from Next Year in Moscow, The Economist’s series on Russian opposition to the war, today’s episode chronicles this period of his life. It’s an account of what turned out to be the last three years of Navalny’s life - peppered with his own words, and told by people who knew him well.