Located just a few miles away from Alice Springs, Australia, Pine Gap is known as one of the country's hotbeds of surveillance and secrecy -- but what exactly goes on there? What is it these over 800 Australian and U.S. employees do every day? Join the guys as they delve into the fact and fiction surrounding Australia's Pine Gap.
Today we discuss unforgivable acts of Jew-hatred—including a riot outside a synagogue where money was being raised to help a Jewish burial society—and forgivable tragic events that occur during war. There is a difference. A big difference. Also, a beautiful statement by a grieving Israeli father and Donald Trump's very good day in and out of court. Give a listen.
Somalia's parliament has approved several constitutional changes which the government says are necessary to establish a stable political system. So what are the changes and why is it causing concern?
Also why was Stanis Bujakera, a well known journalist in the Democratic Republic of Congo detained? And what's it like being a journalist in the DRC?
And a conversation with wheelchair user, Adebola Daniel in Nigeria, on the discrimination he faced at the KFC at Lagos airport.
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers: Yvette Twagiramariya, Stefania Okereke and Bella Hassan
Technical Producer: Danny Cox
Senior Producer: Karnie Sharp
Editors: Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi
On this morning's CBS World News Round-up: Israeli airstrike kills aid workers in Gaza. Trump secures $175 million dollar bond in civil fraud case. Devastating tornados in Oklahoma. CBS Correspondent Steve Kathan reports:
Jay, the 17-year-old at the heart of Daniel Kraus' novel Whalefall, has an hour of oxygen left on his tank. He's been diving in the ocean off the coast of Monterey, California trying to recover a skeleton — but his mission is complicated when he's swallowed whole by a sperm whale. In today's episode, Kraus speaks with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about how a book that's so enmeshed in death also reveals quite a lot about life, and how he conceptualized the pacing of his chapters to emphasize Jay's race against time.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
A new report from the ACLU of Illinois and the Women’s Justice Institute details the inadequate care pregnant women receive in jails across the state. Reset digs into those details with Women’s Justice Institute’s Alexis Mansfield, Alliyah Thomas who was pregnant while incarcerated, and the Marshall Project’s Shannon Heffernan.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
Luxor's Matt Williams on a new era for miners and traditional finance integration
Follow along on your favorite podcast player of choice by clicking here.
Matt Williams of Luxor discusses the launch of their hashrate futures product, bridging traditional finance and mining. They explore the need for miners to hedge volatility, the process of creating mining derivatives, and future possibilities like options contracts and transaction fee hedging.
Thank you to our sponsor, CleanSpark, America’s Bitcoin miner!
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"The Mining Pod" is produced by Sunnyside Honey LLC with Senior Producer, Damien Somerset. Distributed by CoinDesk with Senior Producer Michele Musso and Executive Producer Jared Schwartz.
As yet more aid workers die in Gaza and an airstrike levels an Iranian consulate, pressure on Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu mounts. But all that chaos is paradoxically protective. We take an economist’s view on the “superfakes” that are chipping away at the luxury-handbag industry (10:18). And French winemakers face the twin challenges of brewers and abstemious youth (18:37).
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Podcast transcripts are available upon request at podcasts@economist.com. We are committed to improving accessibility even further and are exploring new ways to expand our podcast-transcript offering.
Two airstrikes in the last 24 hours are drawing new scrutiny to Israel's military actions in the Middle East. Florida's Supreme Court has pretty much ensured that abortion will be the issue on the state's November ballot. And it turns out Google's "incognito" web browsing mode hasn't been incognito after all.
Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.
Today's episode of Up First was edited by Ryland Barton, Mark Katkov, Uri Berliner, Alice Woelfle and Ben Adler. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Kaity Kline. We get engineering support from Phil Edfors, and our technical director is Zac Coleman.
How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala - “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This is why confirmation can be so strong, it's so hardwired within us, we see evidence we don't like as being like attacked by a tiger.”
“So, what is confirmation bias?” he asks host David Edmonds. “This is the temptation to accept something uncritically because we'd like it to be true. On the flip side, to reject a study, even if it's really careful, because we don't like the conclusions.”
Edmans made his professional name studying social responsibility in corporations; his 2020 book Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit was a Financial Times Book of the Year. Yet he himself encountered the temptation to both quickly embrace findings, even flimsy ones, that support our thesis and to reject or even tear apart research, even robust results, that doesn’t.
While that might seem like an obviously critical thinking pitfall, surely knowing that it’s likely makes it easier to avoid. You might think so, but not necessarily. “So smart people can find things to nitpick with, even if the study is completely watertight,” Edmans details. “But then the same critical thinking facilities are suddenly switched off when they see something they like. So intelligence is, unfortunately, something deployed only selectively.”
Meanwhile, he views the glut of information and the accompanying glut of polarization as only making confirmation bias more prevalent, and not less.
Edmans, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Fulbright Scholar, was previously a tenured professor at the Wharton Business School and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He has spoken to policymakers at the World Economic Forum and UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “What to Trust in a Post-Truth World." He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.
