The news to know for Wednesday, September 4, 2024!
We're telling you about some of Russia's most destructive strikes on Ukraine since the war began, and about the new U.S. charges against top Hamas leaders.
Also, protests are starting up again on American college campuses.
Plus, millions of Americans are in the grips of another heatwave, a viral banking hack seems to have gotten Chase customers to do something illegal, and Taylor Swift has a big role in the newest NFL promo.
Those stories and even more news to know in just over 10 minutes!
Short Wave producer Hannah Chinn has adult-onset eczema. They're not the only one. Up to ten percent of people in the United States have it, according to the National Eczema Association — and its prevalence is increasing. Despite its ubiquity, a lot about this skin condition remains a mystery. So today, Hannah's getting answers. They sat down with Raj Fadadu, a dermatologist at UC San Diego, to ask: What is eczema? What triggers it in the first place? And might climate change make it worse sometimes?
If you liked this episode, check out our episode on the science of itchiness. Also, follow us! That way you never miss another Short Wave episode.
Interested in hearing more about climate change and human health? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear your feedback!
On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Nathan Goodman chats with Anthony Gregory on his latest book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. Most Americans remember the New Deal as the crucible of modern liberalism. But while it is most closely associated with Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Depression and provide social security for the elderly, we have failed to acknowledge one of its most enduring legacies: its war on crime. The book reassesses the political importance of the 1930s by highlighting the general crisis of lawlessness, arguing that the Roosevelt administration’s criminal justice policies transformed liberalism and the constitutional order. They also helped legitimate government itself, transcending the institutional, jurisdictional, partisan, racial, and social divisions that had previously frustrated national enforcement authority.
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Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to seasons one and two.
The House of Representatives returns next week to Washington, and a budget fight showdown is expected. The fiscal year ends Sept. 30, and Congress is tasked with having the fiscal 2025 budget ready to go by then, but it’s all but guaranteed it won't be.
“What usually happens at this time is, we'll get to the September 30th deadline, and we've seen this happen for years, regardless of who's running the show, but we'll kick the can down the road maybe a few weeks,” Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, explains.
The “can,” in this case, is the fiscal 2025 budget blueprint, and the “kick” is a continuing resolution that funds the government, usually for several weeks or months at a time.
It has become the habit of Congress a day or two before Christmas to “have this massive Christmas tree of an omnibus bill that gets passed that few people have read [because it’s] thousands of pages long, [includes] gobs amount of money, and doesn't really do the American people the service that they deserve from their Congress,” Cloud says.
The Texas congressman says he's doing everything he can to return the nation to fiscally responsible spending, noting that members of his own party are also partly responsible for the out-of-control spending in Washington.
“With the Left in charge, they raced toward this fiscal cliff, and Republicans, when we've been in charge, we jog toward that same cliff and call that progress,” Cloud laments. “I'm not willing to settle for something that doesn't put us on the right path going forward.”
Cloud joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss how Congress can take significant steps toward balancing the U.S. federal budget, and how the election could affect the financial fight in Congress this fall.
This week we’re sharing an episode of a podcast we think you’ll really like – BBC’s The Global Story.
Indonesia is building a brand-new capital city - twice the size of New York – in the middle of a rainforest. The current capital city, Jakarta, suffers from pollution, congestion, flooding, is prone to earthquakes and is also one of the fastest sinking cities in the world. The new high-tech metropolis called Nusantara aims to be carbon-neutral and better protected from natural disasters. But the project is facing some major hurdles and has fallen well behind schedule.
On this episode Caitríona Perry is joined by Astudestra Ajengrastri and Rebecca Henschke to find out if Nusantara can live up to its environmental promises and if Jakarta will still be saved from sinking beneath the ocean.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson remembers her first brush with the national spotlight as "white hot." When President Biden nominated her in 2022 to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, it kicked off an intense confirmation process for Jackson, the first Black woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court. In her new book, Lovely One: A Memoir, Jackson charts her path from the segregated South to the country's highest court. In today's episode, Justice Jackson sits down with NPR's Juana Summers to discuss whether the Supreme Court should adopt a more binding ethics code, the court's ability to deliver a credible opinion on this year's election and her family life, including her daughter's autism diagnosis.
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
Long time friend of the show James Adomian stops by to catch up on some news, including the conservative rumor of bikers traveling to Colorado to fight Venezuelan gangs, the North Carolina GOP gubernatorial candidate who was a five-night-a-week customer at a porn store, and the Swifties for Kamala Zoom call. We also check in with some of our old friends Elon Musk & Sebastian Gorka.
James’ new stand-up special Path of Most Resistance is available now for purchase at 800 Pound Gorilla: https://800poundgorillamedia.com/products/james-adomian-path-of-most-resistance
And will be streaming on YouTube starting September 19th!
It’s time for your questions, and having a great audience means there are so many fascinating directions to go. A Canadian listener tells of how a non-originalist purpose-oriented approach to constitutional law works for them - why not in the US? We go in a different direction when we consider the wisdom of increasing the size of the House of Representatives. Still another asks about whether the presidential immunity decision has undermined some fundamental aspects of criminal law, not to mention one of the Court’s greatest moments - the Nixon tapes case. Keep those questions coming! CLE credit is available for lawyers and judges from podcast.njsba.com.
Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor.
“[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot is gunning for their livelihood, “Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.”
This is not to depict Acemoglu as an apologist for our new silicon taskmasters. Current trends such as the consolidation of power among technology companies, a focus on shareholder returns at the expense of all else, a blind trust in companies to somehow muddle through to societal equilibrium, and a slavish drive to automate everything immediately all leave him cold: “I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.”
His conversation doesn’t end there, thankfully, and he offers some hopeful words on how we might find that modus vivendi with AI, including (but by no means only relying on) “the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another.”
Acemoglu is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the academic-cum-policymaker group of economic movers and shakers known as the Group of 30.
Besides Power and Progress, his books include the popular bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written with James Robinson. Acemoglu has received a number of prizes, including two inaugural awards in 2004, the T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago and the Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, as well as the Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006 and a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
