For centuries, scholars only had one version of the life of Margery Kempe, an English mystic who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries — until a ping pong match revealed her story in her own words.
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For centuries, scholars only had one version of the life of Margery Kempe, an English mystic who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries — until a ping pong match revealed her story in her own words.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org
After years of military service, and long before running for Congress, Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., and his wife started a family and focused on growing their business in North Carolina. The couple had “nothing to do with politics until Afghanistan came crashing down” in 2021.
Watching Afghanistan fall so quickly back into the hands of the terrorists that Harrigan had fought to defeat during his military service was one of the reasons Harrigan says he decided to run for Congress.
“Our politicians failed us,” he said. “Our military leaders failed us. And at some point, you just step back and you realize, if we're structurally so weak that we would lose Afghanistan the way that we lost it, we're just asking our adversaries to attack us.”
“I really do believe that the way that we left Afghanistan condemned the next generation of Americans to conflict,” Harrigan added. “And I want to do everything that I can possibly do here in Washington to deter that next conflict that I think is very likely to happen. And in the event we are not able to deter it, I want to set the conditions to win it because there's no substitute for winning.”
Harrigan’s passion for strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base began to take form during his years of military service, going back to when he was 23 and found himself in Afghanistan overseeing about 350 Americans, Afghans, and expatriates at a small combat outpost.
The position was “very difficult,” Harrigan says, but also a “very rewarding leadership experience that really shaped a lot of who I am today.” Harrigan, a graduate of West Point, returned to Afghanistan in 2015 after becoming a Green Beret.
The congressman joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” just one month into his term to discuss how the Trump administration can restore U.S. military readiness, and decrease wasteful use of military resources that is adding to the U.S. national debt.
Please enjoy my conversation with Rep. Pat Harrigan!
Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept of atrocity even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country?
In Atrocity: A Literary History(Stanford UP, 2025), Bruce Robbins details how, when and where the conceptual space opened to make the recognition of atrocity possible. Robbins reads Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and many other writers to examine how writers not only develop but question what representations of atrocity achieve. Critically examining the emergence of a cosmopolitan ethic, and questioning the practical wisdom offered by the indignation or its refusal in the face of atrocity, Robbins argues for the invention of atrocity as a moral achievement, however tainted its development may have been.
Ben Smith, former media columnist at the New York Times and now the editor-in-chief of Semafor, joins Dan to talk about today's ultra-challenging news media landscape. The industry is significantly weaker than it was in 2016, and Trump's aggressive lawsuits have the executives in charge of CBS and ABC scrambling to appease him. Will the death blow for America's free press come from within? Smith runs through what we should have learned from the first Trump presidency, how cults of personality rule in journalism just like they rule in politics, and why the dominance of the Times is terrible for fascism-proofing the country.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Increasingly, tech companies like Meta and Character.AI are giving human qualities to chatbots. Many have faces, names and distinct personalities. Some industry watchers say these bots are a way for big tech companies to boost engagement and extract increasing amounts of information from users. But what's good for a tech company's bottom line might not be good for you. Today on The Sunday Story from Up First, we consider the potential risks to real humans of forming "relationships" and sharing data with tech creations that are not human.
Using Github, you can watch as government websites are brought into compliance with Donald Trump’s executive orders. Out goes the word “equity;” in comes “fair.” And health and science data, once publicly available, disappears.
Jeremy Prokop, data science advisor in the Midwest
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