On this episode: Elizabeth talks with Chris Balme, author of Finding the Magic In Middle School. He explains what drives tweens, why this period is fundamentally different than high school, and how to guide them through this transition. Jamilah, Zak, and Elizabeth also open up the mailbag and give some recommendations.
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Podcast produced by Rosemary Belson and Maura Currie.
Felix Salmon, Emily Peck and Elizabeth Spiers are joined by Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith to discuss his new book. They also break down Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News and the end of Buzzfeed News.
In the Plus: A throwback to the olden days of blogging.
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On this month’s episode of Future Tense Fiction, host Maddie Stone talks to David Iserson about “This, but Again.” The story follows Marcus, who is forced to relive his life over and over again in a never-ending computer simulation. Thanks to a glitch, Marcus already knows everything that will happen—but he can change almost nothing. That is until he meets Sara, who helps him break from the simulation’s script. But that, as you might expect, is not without consequences.After the story, Iserson and host Maddie Stone discuss what it would really be like to live in a computer simulation (and why it may actually be more hopeful than dystopian).
What if Hawai'i wasn't the 50th state? In Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i(U California Press, 2022), UCSD assistant professor Christen Sasaki argues that the years 1893-1898 marked a pivotal and understudied moment in Hawai'ian history. After the coup led by white oligarchs which overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and the Hawai'ian monarchy, the island chain became the center of international focus and competition, particularly between the empires of Japan and the United States, both of which vied for hegemony and control over Hawai'i's bountiful plantations. Questions about whiteness and race, labor, and immigration are at the center of this history, which recasts the story of Hawai'ian annexation as not an inevitable march of American expansion, but instead as a moment of contingency, which shows just how many possible branches any given historical moment can have.
Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in North American history—the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE)—which resulted in the warmest temperatures in the northern hemisphere since the "Roman Warm Period," a half millennium earlier. Reconstructing these climatic events and the cultural transformations they wrought, Pauketat guides readers down ancient American paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book follows the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands.
Along the way, readers discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change—or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs.
Spanning from North to Central America, Gods ofThunder focuses on remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, leading us down an evidentiary trail toward the book's conclusion that a great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago. The author also includes a guide to visiting the archaeological sites discussed in each chapter of the book.
Sarah Newman (@newmantropologa) is an archaeologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research explores long-term human-environmental interactions, including questions of waste and reuse, processes of landscape transformation, and relationships between humans and other animals.
On this week’s episode of The Waves, finding friends as an adult. Slate executive editor Susan Matthews is joined by author, comedian, and musician Lane Moore to talk about Moore’s new book You Will Find Your People. They dig into the necessity of healthy boundaries, letting go of old friendships that no longer serve you, and the importance of deep friendships that require work.
In Slate Plus, unpacking celebrity friendships.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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In Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion(U Nebraska Press, 2023) renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations.
Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West’s extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life.
As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.
Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013).
David Plotz talks with author Alexandra Petri about her new book, Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents. They discuss how to transform staid history documents into rollicking parodies, how Petri found her “voice” multiple times, and her grander ambitions for the book. Plus, Petri reads some choice selections.
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Dr. Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblowers and entrepreneurs who operated across Australia, Canada and southern Africa; and the Buxtons, a family of British abolitionists who publicized information about what might now be termed genocide towards Indigenous peoples while also pioneering humanitarian colonialism. By recounting the conflicts that these interlinked families were involved in she tells a larger story about the development of British and American settler colonialism and the betrayal of Indigenous peoples.
Through an analysis of the changing politics of kinship and violence, Dr. Elbourne sheds new light on transnational debates about issues such as Indigenous sovereignty claims, British subjecthood, violence, land rights and cultural assimilation.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco(U California Press, 2023) shows that environmental racism cannot be reduced to effects of neoliberalism but stems from long-standing social-spatial relations of power rooted in settler colonialism. Historically dispossessed of land and exploited for their labor, Enxet and Sanapaná Indigenous peoples nevertheless refuse to abide settler land control. Based on long-term collaborative research and storytelling, Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná dialectics of disruption enact environmental justice by transcending the constraints of settler law through the ability to maintain and imagine collective lifeways amidst radical social-ecological change.
