Author: Slate Podcasts

In mid-October, Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that New York City municipal workers would have just nine days to get the COVID vaccine or risk being put on unpaid leave. Thousands of workers showed up the next week to protest the mandate. A week after the hammer came down, did Mayor DeBlasio correctly call their bluff? 

Guest: Eric Lach, staff writer for The New Yorker.

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In schools across the country, tighter digital controls were put in place to keep kids on task during the pandemic. Are they here to stay?

Guests: Priya Anand, reporter at Bloomberg

Host: Lizzie O’Leary

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Democrats suffered major losses in local and state elections this week. Are the results a harbinger for the party’s fate heading into the 2022 midterms? 

Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer.

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It’s been over four years since white supremacists gathered in a violent and deadly demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, nine people are suing the organizers and groups involved with the Unite the Right rally as they try to prove the protest was a conspiracy to commit racially-motivated violence. This isn’t the first time white supremacists have been taken to court -- but could this trial spell real consequences?

Guest: Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and A Field Guide to White Supremacy.

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India Walton won the Democratic primary for Mayor of Buffalo, New York, in June. Her victory put her on track to become the first socialist mayor in the city’s history, and the first nationwide in more than half a century. The only problem is, her opponent - current mayor Byron Brown - refuses to bow out, and is waging a well-funded write-in campaign in the hopes of keeping his post.

How has a self-styled socialist gotten so close to running Buffalo? And why are some Democrats standing in her way?

Guest: Ross Barkan, a contributing writer to The Nation and the author of The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York.

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The public scrutiny applied to Facebook has been building for years, as the company grows its user base faster than its ability to regulate its content. But distrust among Facebook employees is also building, as evidenced by the remarkable disclosure of internal Facebook documents by whistleblower Frances Haugen. A crisis of trust could be what undoes Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to dominate the internet of the future.

Guest: Steven Levy is editor-at-large at WIRED and author of numerous books, including, most recently, Facebook: The Inside Story. 

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The bots aren’t just buying cool sneakers. They’re buying concert tickets. Tickets to basketball games and Broadway shows. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were buying hand sanitizer and face masks. And later, they were booking vaccine reservation spots.

Why are bots taking over certain markets? And is there anything we can do to slow them down?

Guests: 

Derreck Johnson, designer at Slate

Eric Budish, economics professor at the University of Chicago

Host: Seth Stevenson

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Last week, five members of Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s Veterans Advisory Council publicly stepped down. In their resignation letter, they claimed that they were just “window dressing for her image” and called her “one of the principal obstacles to progress.” One of those veterans explains why she finally said enough. 

 

Guest: Sylvia González Andersh, former member of Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s Veterans Advisory Council.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds many, if not most, of the world’s global health initiatives, so much so that the Foundation has become one of the most influential deciders of global health policy. With the distribution of vaccines to developing countries all but completely failing, how do we assess the Gates’ culpability? And is it time to imagine another model for global health cooperation?  

Guest: Tim Schwab, investigative reporter. 

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