Canada’s election campaign was dominated by Donald Trump’s threats against the nation. Now the Liberal party has won, it faces a tougher fight: confronting the US president. Japanese salarymen used to take a job for life, now they are finally switching companies – and even careers (9:32). And Volkswagen brings out the wurst (16:07).
Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty lives in Bangalore with his family. Early on, he joined startups where his friends worked, in order to get to know the landscape of how they functioned. He fell in love with the tech, team and early innings of building a business - so much so, that he eventually started his own. He has been an entrepreneur for 15 years - or in the woods, as he says. But outside of tech, he's married with 2 girls. He loves spending time with his family, playing tennis, being outdoors or skiing.
Ten years ago, Ravi was riding the wave of smartphones, tinkering with numerous technological solutions to connect users to their world via their smartphone. After moving through beacons, NFC, GPS and others - they started to think about how they could use the camera, which was on every device, to read QR codes.
Federal investigators begin a controlled burn in Pacific Palisades to determine the cause of January’s deadly fire. Tens of thousands of L.A. County workers walk off the job, disrupting major public services. Tech layoffs surge across California, shaking confidence in an industry long seen as secure. And the U.S. dollar faces its worst first 100 days under a president since 1973, raising fears of a longer-term economic shift.
One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios - especially the trillionsof dollars invested on behalf of public retirees. That’s money that could continue to fund fossil fuel development, or help pay for climate solutions instead.
New York City has implemented an ambitious Net Zero plan for its public pensions. That plan includes divesting from some fossil fuel companies and investing billions of dollars in climate solutions. One company benefiting from that investment is NineDot Energy.
Wedged between an elementary school and a big box shopping center in the Northeast Bronx, NineDot Energy is operating a battery farm that the city’s utility company, Con Ed, can call on to help relieve the grid when it gets overstressed. “The batteries hold a combined three megawatts of battery storage. That’s enough to power about 3,000 New York City households for four hours on a hot summer day. Last summer, the battery farm was called half a dozen times, which was enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a combined 24 metric tons. That’s the equivalent of nine thousand car trips on the Cross Bronx Expressway.
Currently, the city has the dirtiest energy grid in the state. More than 90% of its power comes from fossil fuels. NineDot Energy is still in growth mode, but battery farms like this could eventually help the grid transition to renewable sources, like wind and solar.
“The sun only shines when nature tells it to; the wind only blows when nature tells it to, but people use electricity when they decide to,” explained Adam Cohen, co-founder of NineDot Energy. “A battery helps mediate that process. It pulls in the extra power when it's available, and then puts it back out when people call for it.”
On a recent visit to the Bronx facility, 12-year-old Virtue Onoja showed off a mural she helped paint along with other students from the elementary school across the street, envisioning a future powered by cleaner energy.
“One thing about me, I'm definitely an artist,” she said. “I drew a clear blue sky, no pollution, no nothing [and] beautiful yellow flowers and the sun.”
There are also drawings of windmills and electric school buses. “There's still a lot of pollution, not just in the Bronx, but just in New York in general,” Onoja said. “All of this is the goal that we want to achieve.”
Ahead of his 100th day in office, President Trump signs new executive orders targeting migrants. Milwaukee shuts down two more public schools over lead contamination concerns. And West Virginia coal miners question the president’s cutbacks on health programs.
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Today marks President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office. What to make of this dizzying first hundred days?
As Bret Stephens put it: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disastrous first 100 days of any presidency in American history. . . all of the wounds are self-inflicted.”
Even some of Trump's most ardent supporters are struggling to understand and support his actions. As Rod Dreher wrote for The Free Press last week: “MAGA tempts the same sorry fate that conservatives like me suffered over Iraq. Do we hate our enemies more than we love liberty? More than we care about prudence and common sense? If the cost of victory is trashing the jobs and businesses of ordinary Americans with a reckless and unstable tariffs policy, abusing the Constitution, pointlessly sabotaging America’s allies, and replacing a domestic woke-left system with a woke-right one, MAGA risks destroying itself.”
On the other hand, there are people like Victor Davis Hanson, who see Trump as waging an existential counterrevolution, "a social, political, military, and economic shake-up to see if he can reboot the country. . . In other words, each day he is trying to stage a counterrevolution against the prior left-wing, neo-socialist, DEI, and green revolutions of the Obama-Biden years.”
Suffice it to say, the reaction to Trump’s policies has been a stark split screen.
Today, we have two Honestly favorites to discuss these first 100 days: Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Democratic strategist and Free Press contributor Brianna Wu. Bari asks them about Trump’s war on globalized trade, elite campuses, illegal immigration, plus the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Bari, Batya, and Brianna debate if Trump’s actions are what his base really wants, and most importantly, Bari asks about the reach of Trump's power, and the lengths he is willing to go.
If you ever stay up at night scanning through frequencies on shortwave radio, there is a good chance you might come across something very odd and kind of creepy.
You will find a station that is nothing but a disembodied voice reading off a seemingly random string of numbers. There is often an identifying sound or song which is played on a regular basis before another recital of numbers.
These stations have no call signs or other identifying information, and no one has ever publicly claimed responsibility for them.
Learn more about numbers stations, what they are, and how they work on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration.
The End of Empires and a World Remade: A Global History of Decolonization(Princeton UP, 2024) shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.
Martin Thomas is professor of imperial history and director of the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict at the University of Exeter. A fellow of the Leverhulme Trust and the Independent Social Research Foundation, he is the author of Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940; Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire; and other books.
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.
