Leah and Melissa introduce a new series on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s deranged instruction manual for taking away all of our rights and making everyone’s lives worse. Then, the whole crew is together for a conversation with Dylan C. Penningroth about his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights.
Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025!
Almost as soon as Vice President Kamala Harris jumped into the 2024 presidential race, she found a message to set her apart from former President Donald Trump: her record as a prosecutor. It’s a compelling narrative, especially given Trump’s status as a convicted felon. But when she ran for president in 2020, then-candidate Harris aligned herself with the recent wave of “progressive prosecutors” moving away from the tough-on-crime policies that helped create mass incarceration. And it’s a label Republicans are trying to use against her and other Democrats in this election. Jamiles Lartey, staff writer for the Marshall Project, talks about the backlash to the progressive prosecutor movement and how it’s shaping the 2024 election.
And in headlines: Former President Donald Trump told a group of supporters that if they elect him in November they “won’t have to vote anymore,” Israel launched counterstrikes deep into Lebanon, and millions of West Coast residents are under air quality warnings as firefighters battle California’s biggest wildfire of the year.
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About Us: From the creators of Robinhood Snacks Daily, The Best One Yet (TBOY) is the daily pop-biz news show making today’s top stories your business. 20 minutes on the 3 business, economics, and finance stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual. Hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell.
Generally, we at Short Wave are open-minded to the creepies and the crawlies, but even we must admit that leeches are already the stuff of nightmares. They lurk in water. They drink blood. There are over 800 different species of them. And now, as scientists have confirmed ... at least some of them can jump!
Interested in more critter science? Email us at shortwave@npr.org— we'd love to consider your animal of choice for a future episode!
Jamie Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and "hilarious" that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an "anti-LGBTQ hate group."
"It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people," Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.
Calling Kamala Harris a “DEI hire” is both sexist and racist, and despite the GOP leadership’s pleading, it has quickly emerged as a favored line of attack from the right.
Guest: Dr. Brittney Cooper, professor of gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University
Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
Calling Kamala Harris a “DEI hire” is both sexist and racist, and despite the GOP leadership’s pleading, it has quickly emerged as a favored line of attack from the right.
Guest: Dr. Brittney Cooper, professor of gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University
Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
A small Texas town in the late 1980s, two teenagers on the outside of the social scene, and a curse for revenge. That's the setup for Stephen Graham Jones' new novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher. But as he tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, the classic slasher tale at the heart of Jones' book comes with a twist for both the reader and Jones himself as the writer.
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
Charis Kubrin is a professor of criminology at University of California Irvine whose extensive analysis of rap lyrics has provided the basis for her expert testimony in cases around the U.S. in which an artist’s work has been used against them as criminal evidence. Professor Kubrin joins us to explain what brought her to this subject, the history of “rap on trial,” and her ongoing work with the defense bar to push back against this problematic and almost inevitably racist practice.
