Friend of the show & tech journalist Ed Zitron stops by to check in on the state of the internet. Have they cracked AI video yet? Does the VisionPro herald an en-goggled future? Just how stupid is Elon Musk, actually? We explore the end of the era of techno optimism and as our most advanced internet tech seems to aid less and abuse more.
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Amanda Holmes reads Dennis O’Driscoll’s “Someone.” 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.
Author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut Benjamin Studebaker joins Bad Faith to explain why he thinks the solutions offered by the U.S. pundit class are selling little more than false hope and podcast subscriptions (with exceptions). What about our system makes the Democracy crisis "chronic," why should we not be concerned about threats to democracy from Donald Trump, and what's the solution not being offered by the fallen elites that comprise the media class?
If you ever stay up at night scanning through frequencies on shortwave radio, there is a good chance you might come across something very odd and kind of creepy.
You will find a station that is nothing but a disembodied voice reading off a seemingly random string of numbers. There is often an identifying sound or song which is played on a regular basis before another recital of numbers.
These stations have no call signs or other identifying information, and no one has ever publicly claimed responsibility for them.
Learn more about numbers stations, what they are, and how they work on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Yangsze Choo says she doesn't thoroughly plan out her novels – her newest, The Fox Wife, blossomed from that core idea behind the title, of a woman who also happens to be a fox. But beyond that, it's a story about a mother avenging her child, about a murder investigation in early 20th century China, and about family curses. As the author tells NPR's Scott Simon, foxes hold a wide range of intrigue and mystery in Chinese, Korean and Japanese legends — and it's these traits that broke open a whole world of secrets for her characters.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
When you hear complaints from the White House about "junk fees," it's worth digging into what that refers to and notably what it does not refer to. Ryan Bourne parses the rhetoric.
In a special Presidents Day episode, Jon, Jon, and Tommy react to the $355 million verdict in Donald Trump's civil fraud case, speculation that Trump will back a national abortion ban, and Joe Manchin's big news. Then, Elizabeth Warren stops by the studio to talk about selling Joe Biden's accomplishments, and the urgency of pushing back on the Netanyahu government and ending the violence in Gaza.
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.
In the Pacific Theater in World War II, the leader of the combined Japanese fleet was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Yamamoto was villanized as the arch-enemy of the American forces in the Pacific, and to be fair, he was their enemy.
But there is actually much more to the story. Yamamoto was the loudest voice against war with the United States and was one of the only officials in the Japanese leadership who spent time in the United States and understood it.
Learn more about Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, his rise and tragic end on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Big medical datasets pose a serious problem. Thousands of patients? health records are an enormous risk to personal privacy. But they also contain an enormous opportunity ? they could show us how to provide better treatments or more effective health policies.
A system called OpenSAFELY has been designed to solve this problem, with the help of a computer code ?robot?.
Professor Ben Goldacre, director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford, explains how it works.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Janet Staples
Sound mix: Hal Haines
Editor: Charlotte McDonald
