With great swings, come great wins and great losses. Few companies know that better than SoftBank, the Japanese holding company made famous for its investments in Alibaba, Arm Holdings, WeWork, and other tech names that have dominated headlines from the past decade-plus.
Alok Sama is the former President and CFO of SoftBank and the author of the new book “The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble.” Ricky Mulvey caught up with Sama to discuss:
OpenAI’s latest fundraising round.
“Happiness for everyone” as an investment philosophy.
The death toll from Milton is lower than expected because many residents got out of harm's way. Some of the leaders behind the Stop the Steal movement are back on the National Mall today. Home mortgage rates climbed this week even despite cuts by the Federal Reserve.
Pop superstar Kylie Minogue tells us how the love and support of fans around the world helped her breast cancer recovery. Also: the penguin post office; making plastic from onion peel; and learning happiness from dogs.
Siblings Olivia Hardy and Will Gao didn’t always know making music together was in the cards. “I feel like the process was pretty organic,” Hardy said. “There was never like a, ‘Today marks the beginning of everything.’” But even so, music has always been a big part of their lives. Gao recalls there always being music playing in their childhood whether it was on the CD player or the radio.
The two have gone on to form the band Wasia Project. They’ve released a handful of singles and EPs and toured with the likes of Grammy-award winning jazz singer Laufey and artist Tom Odell. The duo dropped their latest EP ‘Isotope’ in August featuring tracks like ‘Is This What Love Is?’ and ‘Somebody Come Through.’
Hardy and Gao stopped by WBEZ’s studios ahead of their sold-out Chicago show at Lincoln Hall for an interview with Reset host Sasha-Ann Simons.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
We all know the horrid tale of what happened in Israel on October 7, 2023. Waves of gunmen attacked families in their homes and young people attending a music festival. The marauders filmed their murders on GoPro cameras. They burned families alive in their safe rooms; raped, and mutilated their victims; and took hostages back to Gaza on golf carts. Why did they do it?
For many critics of Israel, the horrific violence of October 7 was the predictable response to the “occupation”—never mind that Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. To them, October 7 was a jailbreak from what progressives often call “an open-air prison.”
But for the belligerents, in their own words, this war is for the defense of a mosque on top of a mountain. They called their massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood,” named for one of the two mosques that sit atop what is known to the Jews as the Temple Mount. This is where King Solomon’s temple once stood, and at its base is the Western Wall, where Jews have prayed since its construction in the second century BCE. It’s also known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, a noble sanctuary. It’s where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven in a dream. An October 10 Hamas communiqué justified their attack as resistance to thwart “schemes and dreams of Judaizing Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa.”
This reveals something very important about the Israel-Palestine conflict: That it is not a territorial dispute. It’s a holy war, with roots in an ancient city with significance far beyond its 2.5 miles of limestone walls. The world knows it as Jerusalem. The Palestinians call it Al-Quds.
Hamas claims there is a plot by Israel to destroy Al-Aqsa—the mosque atop the Temple Mount that sits in the center of Jerusalem—and build a third Jewish temple where it now stands. It’s a lie. A lie that goes back a century. The man who first began to spread the libel was from one of Jerusalem’s great families that traced its lineage back to the prophet Muhammad himself. He was a seminary-school dropout, a fanatic antisemite, and a Nazi collaborator. His name was Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
Today, Eli Lake tells the story of al-Husseini, the origins of the 100-year holy war, and why it persists to this day.
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.
Anthony Constantino grew up in Amsterdam, New York, at a time when the city was bustling with activity. In the years that followed, however, many of the manufacturing jobs disappeared, leaving its factories empty and its residents without work.
Rather than flee upstate New York, Constantino instead co-founded Sticker Mule in 2010. The company makes products ranging from magnets and stickers (hence the name) to buttons and T-shirts. Today, it employs about 1,000 people in the Amsterdam area.
And until recently, Sticker Mule was known for its products—not its politics.
That changed on the day former President Donald Trump survived an assassin’s bullet. Fed up with the hatred toward Trump, Constantino posted on Sticker Mule’s X account an appeal to “help end the hate.” In that post on the night of July 13, he also declared his support for Trump.
"I've been seeing the hate directed at President Trump and his supporters for the last eight years. And I don't like it,” Constantino told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. “When a bullet hit President Trump, I spoke up, and I've been doing everything I can to try to stop the hate.”
Since that fateful night in July, Constantino hasn’t slowed down. This week, he unveiled a massive 100-foot-wide sign atop his Amsterdam factory along the Mohawk River. He spoke with The Daily Signal about the sign—and the controversy that ensued—for a special episode of our podcast.
Illuminated in white and red letters, the “Vote for Trump” sign nearly landed Constantino in jail for allegedly violating zoning rules and distracting drivers.
“As soon as the local Democrat mayor heard about the excitement and the enthusiasm for the sign, he got a restraining order issued against me, blocking me from displaying the sign under threat of jail time,” Constantino explained. “My lawyer said, Anthony, if you show that sign, you're going to end up in jail. I thought they were joking; they were serious.”
A judge’s last-minute order spared him.
Monday’s celebration proceeded as planned with thousands of onlookers. Constantino’s new political action committee—Sticker PAC—produced a video casting the controversy as a “fight for free speech.”
Even if Constantino’s advocacy for Trump displeases some of Sticker Mule’s customers, the CEO isn’t planning to stay silent when it comes to politics.
“I'm very proud of my organization for the way they've handled all this and they've endured all this. They stayed focused on doing exciting things for our customers, exciting things for the business,” he said. “Everyone stuck by my side. We haven't lost a single employee."
Constantino told The Daily Signal that he remains motivated to stop the political division in America and bring the country together. He believes Trump is the leader who can do it.
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens ofreproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to access abortion, or to parent their children safely.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption increasingly functions as an institution that perpetuates reproductive injustice by separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family building for middle-upper-class white people. Based on hundreds of in-depth interviews, Relinquished centers and amplifies the voices of relinquishing mothers, and fills an important gap in the national conversation about reproductive politics and justice.
In late 1944, the Allies were on a roll, and Germany was on the ropes. Some Allies, considering how fast they were advancing, thought the war might be over by Christmas.
However, Hitler had a plan. He would engage in one last desperate battle, which he thought would turn the tide of the war in the West and possibly wipe out the Allies completely.
The result was one of the largest battles of the Second World War and the German military's ultimate failure.
Learn more about the Battle of the Bulge and how it shaped the course of WWII on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Jill Stein may not be polling high, but in several states she’s poised to bring in more votes than the margin of error between Harris and Trump. Her campaign events tout that they could cost Harris key states like Michigan, and thus the election. Is this what she wants? A closer look at Stein’s 20 years in politics reveals the Green Party candidate has had little success in elevating left-wing positions, and many of her stances—including a ceasefire in Gaza—aren’t nearly as clear cut as they seem. What’s more, Stein’s presidential runs have been aided and funded by a slew of Trump lawyers and Republican consultants. What’s her game plan here? Is she going to spoil this election? How many metaphors will Max and Erin deploy to describe her hypocrisy? Listen to this week’s “How We Got Here” to find out.
We live in a society that’s more connected than ever because of technology, and yet, the U.S. Surgeon General recently called loneliness an epidemic.
So, what’s going on?
Psychologist, professor and NYT best-selling author Dr. Marisa G. Franco explains why there’s a loneliness epidemic and its impact. She also offers practical advice for anyone looking for new friends or deeper connections in a changing, sometimes chaotic world.
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