A chat with the deputy boss of Ukraine’s military intelligence reveals concerns about a dearth of weapons—but the struggle to get new recruits is also proving problematic. The Chinese Communist Party is still hounding experts whose work might expose its pandemic missteps, including the scientist who first sequenced the covid-19 virus (11:24). And why the Japanese still buy so many CDs (17:14).
Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.
We're very pleased to welcome Steve Vladeck on the show to talk about what's going on with the Supreme Court these days, and how shadowy their docket has been recently. We then dig into (and debate a touch) a recent piece he wrote regarding a different way to conceptualize about court reform, and what he personally sees as viable and appropriate among the various proposals for change.
Be sure to read The Shadow Docket, which will be released on paperback soon, and subscribe to One First to get more of Steve's great coverage!
Then we reveal the answer to last episode's T3BE; did Thomas successfully determine the fate of Rebecca the violinist? And who from the audience will be the lucky winner?!
Remember to head over to www.patreon.com/gavelpod to follow our Trump Trial coverage ahead of the public release of the show!
If you’d like to support the show (and lose the ads!), please pledge at patreon.com/law!
As a new exhibition opens in Liverpool exploring the survival of bees Start the Week takes stock of the life and times of this extraordinary insect. The artist Wolfgang Buttress uses a fusion of art, science and technology to create a sensory experience of the sights and sounds of bees. Bees: A Story of Survival is on at the World Museum, Liverpool until May 2025.
They’ve been around for over 120 million years and Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London, says the thousands of different bee species have evolved a huge diversity of lifestyles and are some of the most intelligent animals on Earth. They not only use a symbolic language, can count, use tools and learn by observation, but are now believed to have an emotional hinterland.
For millennia, bees have held a special significance in human culture. Claire Preston, Professor of Renaissance Literature at QMUL, traces the symbolism of bees through historical and literary records, from ancient political analogies to today’s discussions about hive minds.
While there are increasing fears about the future of bees as they battle exposure to pesticides, diseases and habitat destruction, Alison Benjamin is one of a growing number of people trying to raise awareness. She is the co-founder of Urban Bees and wants to shift the focus away from farmed hives of honey bees which are growing in popularity in cities, to the protection and survival of wild and solitary bees.
Amy Schiller's The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It (Melville House, 2023) makes an attempt to rescue philanthropy from its progressive decline into vanity projects that drive wealth inequality, so that it may support human flourishing as originally intended. The word “philanthropy” today makes people think big money—Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Andrew Carnegie come to mind. The scope of suffering in the world seems to demand an industry of giving, and yet for all the billions that are dispensed, the wealthy never seem to lose any of their money and nothing seems to change.
Journalist, academic and consultant Schiller shows how we get out of this stalemate by evaluating the history of philanthropy from the ideas of St. Augustine to the work of Lebron James. She argues philanthropy’s contemporary tendency to maintain obscene inequality and reduce every cause to dehumanizing technocratic terms is unacceptable, while maintaining an optimism about the soul and potential of philanthropy in principle. For philanthropy to get back to its literal roots—the love of humanity—Schiller argues that philanthropy can no longer be premised around basic survival. Public institutions must assume that burden so that philanthropy can shift its focus to initiatives that allow us to flourish into happier, more fulfilled human beings. Philanthropy has to get out of the business of saving lives if we are to save humanity.
Amy Schiller is a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College in the Society of Fellows. Twitter. Website.
Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.Anna Dyjach is a senior at Deerfield.
In 1788, the son of the leader of the Confederation of Futa Jallon in West Africa was commanding his 2,000 troops against a neighboring military force and was captured.
He was sold into slavery and spent the next 40 years of his life living as a slave in Mississippi. That was until a chance meeting revealed his true identity, which eventually led to his freedom and the involvement of the President of the United States.
Learn more about Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, the prince who became a slave and whose emancipation became an international issue, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
We'll tell you what a new report from the U.S. State Department found about Israel's actions in Gaza.
And the next key witness is ready to take the stand in former President Trump's criminal trial.
Also, the northern lights were visible to millions of Americans over the weekend.
Plus, there is chaos at a famous auction house; multiple alleged trespassers have been caught at Drake's house, and familiar baby names are once again the most popular.
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
"Decision Day" for high school students looking to go to college was pushed back this year to May 15th, rather than the traditional May 1st deadline. The shift was made to accommodate for a host of problems students have had using the new federal financial aid application or FAFSA. We spoke with Ellie Bruecker, the director of research at the Institute for College Access and Success, to get a better sense of where the FAFSA fiasco left college applicants.
And in headlines: Israeli forces continued to advance in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, students walk out of commencement speeches at VCU and Duke, and the start of the corruption trial of Senator Bob Menendez.
As artificial intelligence seeps into some realms of society, it rushes into others. One area it's making a big difference is protein science — as in the "building blocks of life,"proteins! Producer Berly McCoy talks to host Emily Kwong about the newest advance in protein science: AlphaFold3, an AI program from Google DeepMind. Plus, they talk about the wider field of AI protein science and why researchers hope it will solve a range of problems, from disease to the climate.
Have other aspects of AI you want us to cover? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
The protests in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s death in police custody and today's antisemitic, pro-Palestine protests on college campuses are rooted in the same ideology of Marxism, Katharine Gorka says.
Marxism preaches that the world "is divided between oppressor and oppressed,” says Gorka, co-author with Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez of the new book “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.” (Heritage launched The Daily Signal in 20014.)
German-born philosopher Karl Marx believed that the oppressors were the business owners and the oppressed were the workers. But Gorka says that Marxism today, or “NextGen Marxism,” holds that the “oppressors are white, Americans, Israelis, [but] some Asians … kind of the successful."
"And the oppressed is everybody else, right?" she asks rhetorically. "Anybody who's a minority of any sort, whether it's based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, [or] having once been colonized.”
This movement of Marxism today has its roots in the 1960s, Gorka explains, as the student activists of those says became the community organizers who influence young people today, often via social media.
Gorka joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to outline the progression of Marxism and to discuss philanthropy's significant role in furthering Marxist ideology in America.
