Kamala Harris pulls ahead in three key swing states as Donald Trump continues to flail and fume to donors and supporters. JD Vance tries to go on the attack in a trio of network interviews on Sunday, but things don't go quite as planned. Then, as Harris starts laying out her own policy agenda, the officially defunct Project 2025 ends up back in the news, this time with a series of leaked training videos offering a bleak, and bizarre, picture of a second Trump term.
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.
There's an app for everything. In Kat Tang's debut novel Five-Star Stranger, there's even one that allows you to hire someone you've never met to play a role in your life, like to be best man at a wedding or pretend to be the father of a child. In today's episode, Tang speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about the titular stranger at the heart of her story, who is going around New York taking on a number of roles, and how he starts to crack as he reexamines his relationship to a woman who's hired him to pretend to be her husband – and to the girl who believes she's his daughter.
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We’re joined by video doc king Jon Bois to discuss some of his recent projects with Secret Base, specifically REFORM!, a history of Ross Perot and the Reform party. Jon shares his fascination and research into this bizarre eddy of American electoral politics, the various cranks and characters that populated it, and how the Reform Party prefigured a swath of our current political landscape. We also touch on James Rebhorn’s character in Independence Day, slipping on banana peels, and the best and worst of Olympic sports.
Part 1 of the REFORM! Series is on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqqaW1LrMTY
Subscribe to Secret Base on Patreon for all of their premium content: https://www.patreon.com/SecretBase
Rick Perlstein's POW/MIA piece Amber recommended: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/enduring-cult-vietnam-missing-action/
Amanda Holmes reads Nâzim Hikmet’s poem “The Cucumber,” translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.
This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch.
What makes a monopoly depends on who you ask and what’s being monopolized. In the case of Google, it's a narrow focus on one element of its business: search. Jennifer Huddleston details how a court concluded that Google, despite its many competitors, is still a search monopolist.
It's that time of year when we want to lie on a beach and lose ourselves in a good book. Today on the show, three summer reading recs that got our hosts thinking about economics. Remember, anything read on the beach is, in fact, a "beach read."
Books recommended in this episode: • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (B&N, Bookshop) • Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World by Tom Chivers (B&N, Bookshop) • Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (B&N, Bookshop)
In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Victor Davis Hanson joins in to discuss his new book, “The Case for Trump.”
Music by Jack Bauerlein.
Historian, author, journalist, and Marxist intellectual Vijay Prashad returns to Bad Faithto talk progressives for Kamala, the Tim Walz pick, Cori Bush’s ouster, & what lessons global movements -- including recent student protests in Bangladesh -- hold for the American left.
The Vietnam War was perhaps the most significant event that took place in the last half of the 20th century.
It had profound impacts on the American military and foreign policy as well as on its culture.
However, many people have a very simplistic view of the causes of the war. They assume it was just a result of Cold War politics. While that was certainly a cause, the root causes go back much further.
Learn more about the origins of the Vietnam War and how and why it happened on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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