The Intelligence from The Economist - Peace from pieces: Syria after Assad

President Bashar al-Assad has been run out, his regime in tatters. As Syrians awaken to a new era, how can they put their broken country back together peacefully? Australia has passed a law that will ban under-16s from social media: a bold move, but a tricky one to implement (10:21). And how “Dungeons & Dragons” jumped from nerd culture to popular culture (19:38).


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The Indicator from Planet Money - How influence actually works

Influence. The ability to persuade, motivate, or connect with other people. It's one of these skills that's hard to measure, but incredibly important in the office. However, some would argue that we often misunderstand how influence works.

Today on the show, we talk to Steve Martin, Faculty Director of Behavioral Science at Columbia Business School, about the unspoken rules of influence in the workplace.

Steve is author of a recently published book titled, "Influence at Work".

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Start the Week - Security threats and future prospects for Britain and the EU

Sir Alex Younger is the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. He assesses the evolving security risks facing Britain in the 21st century, and how the country continues to build strategic partnerships and intelligence agreements in a fracturing world. Younger ran MI6 during President Trump’s first administration and reflects on prospects for ‘the special relationship’ in the second.

With tensions between the US and China, increased economic protectionism and the war in Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas, the Head of the Europe Programme at Chatham House, Armida van Rij, believes European security and economic prospects appear fragile. And this comes at a time of political polarisation throughout the continent.

After Britain finally left the EU in 2020 following the Brexit vote it was feared that it would be Britain that was isolated and vulnerable. Not so, claims the journalist Ross Clark, in his forthcoming polemic, Far From Eutopia: Why Europe is failing - and how Britain could do better (published 23rd January 2025). Clark pinpoints the absence of economic growth and huge disillusionment about high migration throughout Europe, and how Britain is surpassing many of its former continental partners. But questions still remain about how Britain will fare – on its own – on the global stage.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 12.9.24

Alabama

  • The Prattville parade occurred including PRIDE Float, but also low attendance
  • AG Steve Marshall applauds judges upholding law that bans Tik Tok app
  • State lawmaker pre-files bill to include death penalty for child rape
  • Sen. Tuberville weighs in on food toxins at senate hearing with FDA officials
  • Sen. Britt wants DOGE to have work requirements placed for gov. benefits
  • Shooting in Theodore at large party injures seven, kills one man

National

  • Syrian rebels takeover Damascus, Syrian president flees to Russia
  • US military launches missile strikes within Syria, claims to be for ISIS
  • Trump says US should not be involved any further in Syria's problems
  • Hung jury in NYC has judge downgrade the charges against Daniel Penny
  • Judge dismisses defamation lawsuit by Ray Epps against Tucker Carlson
  • Baton Rouge elects first Republican mayor in over 20 years
  • Jay-Z named in civil case against Sean Combs for rape of a minor

NBN Book of the Day - Jacob Flaws, “Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp” (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (U Nebraska Press, 2024) utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Jacob Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world.


Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Susan Gaunt Stearns. “Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade” (U Virginia Press, 2024)

Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, imperial control of the North American continent remained an open question. Spain controlled the Mississippi River, closing it to American trade in 1784, and western men on the make like Jackson had to navigate the overlapping economic and political forces at work with ruthless pragmatism.

In Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024), Dr. Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States’ untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Dr. Stearns’s perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments—the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase—and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real.


This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Everything Everywhere Daily - CDs, DVDs, and Blu Ray

In 1982, the Phillips and Sony Corporations jointly released the compact audio disc to the world. 

The technology involved was originally just used to play digital audio, but it actually had much more potential. 

Over the last 40 years, basic optical disc technology used in CDs has expanded to store digital video and every type of digital data. 

Yet, despite the ubiquity of the internet and the ability to access digital files all over the world, there is still a demand for this technology.

Learn more about optical discs, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.


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Strict Scrutiny - Leave Trans Kids Alone You Absolute Freaks (with Chase Strangio)

Kate, Melissa, and Leah break down United States v. Skrmetti, the Court’s big case on gender-affirming care for minors, with the ACLU’s Chase Strangio. Chase is one of the lawyers who argued the case–as well as the first known transgender lawyer to argue at the Supreme Court. The hosts then make a pit stop at the always-out-there Fifth Circuit before recapping the other cases the Court heard this week.

Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 

  • 6/12 – NYC
  • 10/4 – Chicago

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