Bay Curious listener Lorraine Page likes to comb the Pescadero beaches for treasures in her spare time. She used to find abalone shells often, but says in the last ten years she hasn't seen any. She wants to know: what happened to all the abalone?
This story was reported by Dana Cronin. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Cesar Saldana, Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Jasmine Garnett, Carly Severn, Joshua Ling, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED family.
Politics has never been stranger – or more online. Each week on WIRED Politics Lab, our reporters guide you through the exciting, challenging and sometimes entertaining vortex of internet extremism, conspiracies, and disinformation. Expect in-depth analysis and conversations based on facts and research. Plus, we’ll give you information you can actually use to lift the fog of disinformation we find ourselves in today.
Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024) acclaimed historian Dr. Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.
The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Dr. Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.
As Dr. Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with US warfare.
The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror.
Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.
Stefan B. Aune is a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Williams College.
On April 15, 1947, a young, promising second baseman took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
All eyes in the world of baseball, and indeed the United States, were focused on this player and this game. However, this wasn’t the normal debut of a rookie player.
This game marked the breaking of the long-standing color barrier that had kept hundreds of the greatest baseball players out of the major leagues.
Learn more about Jackie Robinson and the breaking of baseball’s color barrier on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We're talking about 75 years of the world's largest defense alliance and the top item on its agenda today.
Also, a new government report is blaming a top tech company for breaches that may have put U.S. government secrets at risk.
And we'll fill you in on outbreaks of bird flu found in animal populations around the country.
Plus, a storm could end up bringing feet of snow to New England; a popular streaming service is raising prices again, and what's become the fastest-growing high school sport in the country? The answer may surprise you.
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
José Andrés, the celebrity chef and founder of World Central Kitchen, said that Israel “targeted” his aid workers when the country killed seven of them this week. He gave an interview to Reuters on Wednesday, and he also rebuked the claims by the Israeli and U.S. governments, which both say the strikes were a tragic accident. In a statement issued late Tuesday, President Biden said he was “outraged” by the deaths, and he criticized Israel for failing to protect aid workers and civilians during the war in Gaza. But the White House still hasn’t announced any plans to change its policies in support of Israel.
Nearly 50,000 Wisconsinites voted “uninstructed” in Tuesday night’s Democratic Primary instead of voting for Biden. That’s more than double the goal set by organizers, who hoped to send a message to the president over his handling of the war in Gaza. It’s also more than double the margin by which Biden won the state in 2020. Reema Ahmad, the campaign manager for Listen to Wisconsin, explained what’s next for the movement.
And in headlines: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed legislation to lower the draft age for men, the prosecutor in the classified documents case against Trump criticized the judge for entertaining a “flawed legal premise,” and LSU’s Angel Reese declared for the WNBA draft.
Show Notes:
NYT: “José Andrés: Let People Eat” – https://tinyurl.com/279vyjkh
Buddhist Tzu Chi, the largest Taiwan-based disaster relief organization – https://tzuchi.us/
Taiwan Red Cross – https://www.redcross.org.tw/english/index.jsp
What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/
For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday
There is a rare bipartisan agreement in Washington D.C. around the social media app TikTok. The app’s parent company, ByteDance, is headquartered in Beijing and is subject to Chinese law that requires companies to make their users’ data available to the Chinese Communist Party.
In March, the House passed a bill in a 352-65 vote, with the help of 197 Republicans and 155 Democrats, that gives TikTok a choice: either break from ByteDance or cease to operate in the U.S.
Biden says he will sign the bill if it land on his desk, so that just leaves the Senate.
“I'm hopeful that the Senate will act swiftly,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., says. “I believe that it is important that they do to address this immediate threat and get this on the president's desk. This legislation is our best chance to end the Chinese Communist Party's abuse of these apps that are targeting, surveilling, and manipulating Americans.”
McMorris Rodgers, who also serves as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain where the bill stands and why TikTok poses a threat to national security interests.
