California has over 33 million acres of forest land, about a third of the state's total area, as well as other wild land areas. For decades we've done everything possible to suppress fires, but they just keep getting bigger and more destructive. And that's partly because of all our suppression efforts. KQED Science reporter Danielle Venton explains how different ecosystems are evolved to burn sometimes, much more often than they have of late.
This story was reported by Danielle Venton. This episode of Bay Curious was made by Olivia Allen-Price, Annie Fruit, Amanda Font, Christopher Beale, and Ana De Almeida Amaral. Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Holly Kernan, and the whole KQED family.
Four years ago, news organizations and social media platforms deliberately suppressed or outright ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story—one of the biggest scandals of the 2020 election.
This time around, those same media outlets are engaged in a different kind of censorship: hiding the radical policy ideas once advocated by Vice President Kamala Harris.
A new poll from Media Research Center confirms even Harris’ most ardent supporters don’t know her extreme positions on everything from defunding police and co-sponsoring the Green New Deal to legalizing drugs and supporting open borders.
Brent Bozell, MRC's founder and president, spoke with The Daily Signal about the shocking findings. He also recounted the impact of burying the Biden laptop story. A postelection poll in 2020 found that if voters knew about the controversy, they would've backed then-President Donald Trump.
"Trump would have won 317 electoral votes with ease. It would have been a massive landslide, but that's just the states we polled," Bozell said. "He would have won a landslide on the order of Ronald Reagan had they only known about the laptop."
Bozell warned the media could have a similar impact on the 2024 presidential election by ignoring the most controversial aspects of Harris' policy positions.
"The media delivered the victory to Joe Biden in 2020," Bozell said. "If she wins, it will be because they delivered the victory to her."
Listen to the full interview with Bozell to learn more about the poll, his take on the presidential debates, and why Democrats are more likely to undermine the First Amendment.
Gad Saad was born in Beirut in 1964 into one of the last Jewish families to remain in Lebanon. But the country that was once called “the Paris of the Middle East” began to turn.
Saad remembers one day at school when a fellow student told his class that he wanted to be a “Jew-killer” when he grew up. The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon descended into a brutal civil war and Saad said death awaited him at every millisecond of the day.
Even through the danger and turmoil, his family thought, This will pass over.We will be fine. Until someone showed up to their home in Lebanon to kill them, at which point his family fled the country and rebuilt their life in Canada.
In 2024, many of us in Western democracies find ourselves saying the exact same things: This will pass over.We will be fine. Even as Hamas flags and “I love Hezbollah” posters wave in cosmopolitan capitals across the West. How worried should we be? And, is there a way to roll back admiration for anti-civilizational groups? Those are just some of the questions we were eager to put to Saad in today’s conversation.
Saad said that witnessing the Lebanese Civil War gave him a crash course in the extremes of identity politics, tribalism, and illiberalism. He argues that immigrants like himself, who have lived without the virtues of the West—freedom of speech and thought, reason, and true liberalism—uniquely understand what’s at stake right now in Western cultural and political life. It’s no coincidence, Saad said, that the most prominent defenders of Western ideals are immigrants, people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Masih Alinejad.
Saad is a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences, and if you’re on X, we suspect you know his name. Unlike most professors, he has a million followers, and a knack for satire—so much so that Elon Musk seems to be one of his biggest fans.
Outside of his X personality, he’s been teaching at Concordia University in Montreal for the past 30 years. But he’s now having second thoughts. Concordia is today widely regarded as the most antisemitic university in North America. Saad is now a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University in Michigan. He said he can’t bear the possibility of returning to Concordia given the antisemitism on campus.
All of this, he argued, constitutes another war: a campaign against logic, science, common sense, and reality here in the West, which he explains in his book: The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
Today, Bari Weiss asks one of the most insightful and provocative thinkers about the risks of mob rule and extremism on the left, where these “parasitic ideas” came from and why they’re encouraged in the West, if progressive illiberalism is waxing or waning, and if these trends are reversible.
And if you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.
It sounds like something out of the Old West, but this year, Constitutional Sheriffs — law enforcement officers who believe they’re above state and federal oversight — have rounded up posses and set their sights on election security. WIRED’s Tim Marchman talks with reporter David Gilbert about how the Constitutional Sheriffs hitched their wagons to the big guns in the election denial movement, and how just one rogue county sheriff could call the entire presidential race into question.
Tim Marchman is @timmarchman. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics
With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production.
Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity.
By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History(Yale UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.
Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
We'll tell you how both presidential candidates have now responded to comments from Trump’s former chief of staff.
All while a new survey proves most Americans, regardless of party, are stressed about the election.
Also, U.S. officials are calling it a ‘serious escalation.’ What to know about North Korea sending troops to Russia.
Plus, we'll tell you what Boeing’s largest union decided about whether or not to end its strike, why American Airlines is facing a record fine for violations, and how this year’s World Series is selling high-priced tickets fast.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
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From the end of the Second World War through 1991, the city of Berlin, the former capital of Germany and its largest city, was split in two.
The two Berlins, East and West, were in a geopolitical situation unlike any that the world had seen before or since.
This one city split into two, was ground zero for the Cold War. Here, the conflict between East and West was a daily reality for the people who lived on both sides.
Learn more about East and West Berlin, how they came to be, and how they came back together on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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