Pope Leo XIV makes history as the first American pontiff. The White House and the U.K. announce an outline for a deal on trade. And a Soviet-era spacecraft is expected to crash back to Earth this weekend.
This week, a court in Kenya sentenced four men to either a year in prison or a fine of £5,800 for trying to smuggle 5,000 ants out of the country. The contraband included highly-valued ants like the giant African harvester ant, and it’s believed these ants were intended for exotic pet markets abroad.
But all this talk of ant smuggling got the Unexpected Elements team feeling antsy to talk ants!
We learn about the earliest ants who lived among dinosaurs, ants that can sniff cancer, and ants who were sent into space!
Then we take a turn from ants to anteaters and talk to Mariella Superina from the International Union for Conservation of Nature about the different adaptations and skills needed for anteaters to successfully eat ants.
Plus, we discuss plant smuggling and ant wrangling, both unexpectedly dangerous ventures.
All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Leonie Joubert and Godfred Boafo
Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Imaan Moin, Robbie Wojciechowski and Minnie Harrop
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The Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution holds some of the most treasured rights held by Americans.
This includes the rights of free speech, religion, assembly, due process, and protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, and self incrimination.
However, there are other parts to the bill of rights. Parts that don’t get quite as much as attention.
Learn more about the Third Amendment and why it was put into the Constitution on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Germany’s new chancellor gets off to a bumpy start. Is Google helping Turkey to strangle independent media?
And Malta is forced to abandon a lucrative business model. Then a VE Day Special: Nathalie Tocci on Europe, a look at Britain and France’s “coalition of the willing”, and a very personal tour of synagogues in the Netherlands.
On this episode: Trump’s judicial picks and his meeting with Mark Carney, the U.S. / UK trade deal. Plus: tensions between India and Pakistan, Biden's on tour, more protests at Columbia, and what’s happening at the Conclave? Watch this one 'til the end!
In My Tax Dollars:The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitimacy of the tax system, antiwar activists who resist the use of their taxes to fund war, antiabortion activists against “taxpayer funded abortions,” and a diverse group of people who promote taxpaying as a moral good.
Though taxpaying is often portrayed as dull and technical, exposure to collective rituals, civic education, propaganda, and protest transforms the practice for many Americans into either a sacred rite of citizenship or a profane threat to what they hold dear. These sacred and profane meanings can apply to the act of taxpaying itself or to the specific uses of tax dollars. Despite intense disagreement about these meanings, politically diverse Americans engaged in both taxpaying and tax resistance valorize the individual taxpayer and “my tax dollars.” Braunstein explores the profound implications of this meaning making for tax consent, the legitimacy of the tax system, and citizens’ broader understandings of their political relationships. Going beyond the usual focus on tax policy, Braunstein’s innovative view of taxation through the lens of cultural sociology shows how citizens in value-diverse societies coalesce around shared visions of the sacred and fears of the profane.
Interviewee: Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut.
Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.
We have a new pope, and he’s from Chicago! On the second day of the papal conclave Thursday, Cardinal Robert Prevost was elected the 267th pope of the Roman Catholic Church, taking the name Pope Leo XIV. He’s the first American citizen to hold the position, but he also spent two decades serving in Peru, before the late Pope Francis chose him for an influential post at the Vatican. Pope Leo XIV now has a very, very big job leading the world’s 1.36 billion Catholics amid major tensions within the church, between those aligned with Francis’ efforts to make the church more inclusive and those who think those efforts have undermined Catholic tradition. Christopher White, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and author of the forthcoming book ’Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy,’ tells us more about the new pope’s selection and what we can expect from his papacy.
And in headlines: President Donald Trump unveiled his first big new trade deal with… the United Kingdom, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced plans for a much-needed update to the nation’s air traffic control system, and former President Joe Biden defended his time in office during an interview with The View.