It seems like every year we hear the same thing: that this will be the busiest summer travel season ever. But this one really stands out. AAA projects that this Memorial Day weekend will see the highest number of travelers in nearly two decades. What will that mean? Congested roads, crowded airports and a lot of headaches. Hannah Sampson, who covers travel news for The Washington Post, shares some tips to survive summer vacation season.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
It seems like every year we hear the same thing: that this will be the busiest summer travel season ever. But this one really stands out. AAA projects that this Memorial Day weekend will see the highest number of travelers in nearly two decades. What will that mean? Congested roads, crowded airports and a lot of headaches. Hannah Sampson, who covers travel news for The Washington Post, shares some tips to survive summer vacation season.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
It seems like every year we hear the same thing: that this will be the busiest summer travel season ever. But this one really stands out. AAA projects that this Memorial Day weekend will see the highest number of travelers in nearly two decades. What will that mean? Congested roads, crowded airports and a lot of headaches. Hannah Sampson, who covers travel news for The Washington Post, shares some tips to survive summer vacation season.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
Venture capitalists don’t mind strike-outs, so long as they get their home runs. What can stock investors learn from that approach?
Ricky Mulvey talks with Ilya Strebulaev and Alex Dang, co-authors of “The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth,” about:
The benefits of building an “anti-portfolio”
Why it pays to get outside of your own four walls
Lessons from a piggy bank auction
Strebulaev is also the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and a Professor of Private Equity and Finance at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Dang is a CEO, technology executive, and advisor who’s worked with Amazon, McKinsey, and across Silicon Valley.
A few weeks ago, there was an awesome event in Brooklyn in partnership with UnHerd called Dissident Dialogues. It was exactly what it sounds like: debates and discussions on the most pressing questions facing our society today. Questions like: Have we reached peak woke? Can universities be saved? Can liberalism be saved? Is government censorship justified? Is this the end of mainstream media? and What is the future of feminism? So basically, just the light stuff.
But probably the most contentious debate of the weekend was: Is Israel’s war on Hamas a just war?
This is not an easy debate. Emotions run hot, the stakes are high, people’s morality is called into question, and there are a lot of competing narratives. Which is all the more reason to debate the topic in public, something we always advocate for at The Free Press.
Arguing no, that Israel’s war on Hamas is not a just war, are Briahna Joy Gray and Jake Klein. Briahna was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and is host of the Bad Faith podcast. Arguing alongside Briahna is Jake Klein. Jake is a content creator for the Foundation for Economic Education, and he is a co-founder and editor at The Black Sheep.
Arguing yes, that Israel’s war on Hamas is a just war, are two of our very own Free Pressers, Eli Lake and Michael Moynihan. Eli is a columnist at The Free Press and a longtime journalist covering foreign affairs and national security. And Michael Moynihan, who you’ve heard guest-host Honestly, is a veteran journalist, having spent years at Vice, The Daily Beast, and Reason magazine. He is also a host of The Fifth Column podcast.
The debate is moderated by the one and only Russian British satirist, co-host of the Triggernometry podcast, and Free Press contributor, Konstantin Kisin.
‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’
In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War(U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015) and Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism (2016), McCarthy argues that black writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Gwendolyn Brooks variously dissented from these delimitations in the name of alternate, unappeasable, quiet and disquieting bids for freedom. Across detailed chapters spanning from 1945 to 1965, the year in which Malcom X was assassinated and Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School by Amiri Baraka, McCarthy unfurls these writers’ efforts to work through negative experiences—alienation, dehiscence, dissolution, disaffiliation, disidentification—in order to, in Baldwin’s words, find ‘the power that will free us from ourselves.’
Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, novelist, editor at Point Magazine, and an assistant professor in English and African-American Studies at Harvard University.
Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.
