Wells Fargo is one of the most popular retail banks in the United States, and its gigantic customer base uses it for everything from savings accounts to loans and more. However, a few years bank the bank came under fire for perpetuating a conspiracy all its own -- more and more customers found they had multiple accounts and lines of credit opened without their consent, and further investigation found that was just the beginning of the problem. Tune in to learn more about this real-life banking conspiracy, how it was discovered and the consequences (or lack thereof).
When Adam McKay decided to make a movie based on The Big Short, he was mainly known for his comedies. But he managed to get a bevy of star actors — among them Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Margot Robbie — to sign on and bring the intensity and arcane financial jargon of Wall Street to life. Michael Lewis sits down with McKay a decade after he made the Oscar-winning movie version of The Big Short to learn about the challenges of getting the film made — and why he’s still making movies about societal collapse.
Contemporary women are primal-screaming and hitting rage rooms, but are these really the solutions to our personal and political anger? On this episode of How To!, Courtney Martin talks with Soraya Chemaly, journalist and author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, about her own recent upsurge of anger. Soraya explains how to identify, understand, and harness what’s bottled up inside you—and use it for change.
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The show is produced by Rosemary Belson, with Sophie Summergrad. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob and our supervising producer is Joel Meyer.
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The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (U Minnesota Press, 2025) delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. It follows the social lives of projects throughout their production cycles, from planning and editing to screening, broadcasting, and after-images. Across its narrative sweep, this ethnography engages the film career of Kukatja elder Mark Moora to demonstrate the impact of filmmaking on how Aboriginal futures are collectively imagined and called forth.
William Lempert highlights a series of awakenings through which Moora ultimately came to view cinema as a process for catalyzing his family’s return to their home country of Mangkayi. This biographical media journey paints an intimate portrait of the inspiring possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states. Lempert traces how Moora’s life and films convey a multiplicity of Aboriginal experiences across time and space, from colonial contact to contemporary life in communities like Balgo, including the continued governmental attempts to undermine them.
Amid ongoing negotiations to establish the first treaties between Indigenous nations and Australian states, Dreaming Down the Track illustrates what is at stake in how Aboriginal–State relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Lempert stays true to Moora’s insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.
William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. His writing has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Reighan Gillamis Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (U Minnesota Press, 2025) delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. It follows the social lives of projects throughout their production cycles, from planning and editing to screening, broadcasting, and after-images. Across its narrative sweep, this ethnography engages the film career of Kukatja elder Mark Moora to demonstrate the impact of filmmaking on how Aboriginal futures are collectively imagined and called forth.
William Lempert highlights a series of awakenings through which Moora ultimately came to view cinema as a process for catalyzing his family’s return to their home country of Mangkayi. This biographical media journey paints an intimate portrait of the inspiring possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states. Lempert traces how Moora’s life and films convey a multiplicity of Aboriginal experiences across time and space, from colonial contact to contemporary life in communities like Balgo, including the continued governmental attempts to undermine them.
Amid ongoing negotiations to establish the first treaties between Indigenous nations and Australian states, Dreaming Down the Track illustrates what is at stake in how Aboriginal–State relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Lempert stays true to Moora’s insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.
William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. His writing has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Reighan Gillamis Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
In the new movie Sovereign, actor Nick Offerman plays an extremist who doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of the Federal government. In real life, Nick comes from a small-town political family. His father is the mayor of Minooka, Illinois, and his uncle is on the village board. In this episode Nick talks about choosing roles, how he’s different from his family, his love of teaching woodworking and the profound influence of poet Wendell Berry.
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And if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com. Our new email address, where you can reach us with voice memos, pep talks, questions, critiques, is deathsexmoney@slate.com.
We’ll tell you what President Trump is calling a “historic dawn” in the Middle East—and what issues still need to be worked out before the war in Gaza can come to a permanent end.
Also, ripple effects from the government shutdown, as there doesn’t seem to be much interest from either party in crossing the aisle to make a deal.
Plus: there was a—let’s just say—“unique” protest in Portland, what to know about the woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize, and where in the world it’s still the year 2018.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!
Week two of the government shutdown isn't proving to be any more successful than week one. In fact, on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said this shutdown could end up being the country's longest. Why? Probably because Johnson won't negotiate with Democrats on extending Affordable Care Act tax credits that will expire at the end of the year. And without help from Democrats, the government is staying closed. So what does this mean not just for the millions of people who benefit from government services, but for future elections? In 13 months, will voters remember that Republicans are being blamed for the shutdown? To find out more, we spoke with Lakshya Jain, head of political data for the online magazine, The Argument.
And in headlines, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans on coming to the US to make a case for his country once again, the Supreme Court is getting ready to hear arguments in a case that could roll back a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, and a slew of media companies are refusing to sign a statement acknowledging new restrictions on journalists at the Pentagon.
President Trump travels to Israel and Egypt to celebrate the return of the hostages and the end of military operations in Gaza. Tommy and Lovett react to the ceasefire, discuss what's next for Gaza, Israel, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and debate how much credit Trump deserves for brokering this peace deal. Then they turn to ICE's latest violence against immigrants and protesters, a new attack on constitutionally protected free speech at The Pentagon, and the latest from the ongoing government shutdown. Then, Leah Greenberg, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible, discusses this weekend's upcoming No Kings protests and Republicans' attempt to paint them as a "hate America" rally.
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.
It’s an AI showdown. Elon Musk has been building out two massive data centers in Memphis as he plays catch-up in the AI race. But will it be enough? Meanwhile, AI chips underdog Advanced Micro Devices rocked the market last week when it landed a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, directly challenging industry leader Nvidia. We’ll tell you about the old-school CEO leading AMD. Julie Chang hosts.
