Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S12 E12: Robert Brennan, OpenHands

Robert Brennan grew up in Boston and loved it so much that he ended up calling it home again. He spent time in New York between his bookend times, but he enjoys the chill pace and great music of Boston over the fast pace of the big apple. Outside of technology, he likes to read nonfiction and fiction, specifically science fiction. He loves music, and. Has been playing guitar for 25 years now. He frequents the live music scene around Boston, and even lives near a jazz club.

Robert observed the release of the first version of Devin a few years ago, which was very exciting to see agent driven development. But he and his co-founders were concerned with who was going to govern how this software was going to get written - and they hypothesized that it should be open source and community driven.

This is the creation story of OpenHands.

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Native America Calling - Tuesday, March 31, 2026 — The Menu: “A Feather and a Fork” cookbook and preserving ooligan (smelt fish)

Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah documents the intertribal flavors and characteristics of contemporary Native American cuisine and her upbringing in Oakland, Calif. in her debut cookbook, “A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior.” Woven through the recipes and gorgeous food photos, Wahpepah gives readers and cooks a tour of her restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, and present Oakland Native food sovereignty initiatives — and poignant personal and cultural stories that ingredients and flavors hold.

Near the end of winter, ooligan (eulachon or smelt), a small oily fish, would come rushing up rivers by the millions in the Pacific Northwest, according to historical accounts and elders’ stories. Today, ooligan are listed as a threatened species with sporadic springtime runs that more often do not support subsistence fishing. We’ll hear from the Nuxalk Nation in British Columbia about their ooligan studies and restoration, and from fishermen in Metlakatla, Alaska about this spring’s ooligan haul.

GUESTS

Crystal Wahpepah (Kickapoo), chef and owner of Wahpepah’s Kitchen and author of “A Feather and a Fork: 125 Intertribal Dishes from an Indigenous Food Warrior”

Cindy Wagner (Tsimshian and Haida), fisherman

Louie Wagner (Tsimshian and Tlingit), fisherman

Jason Moody (Nuxalk), Nuxalk fisheries and wildlife planning coordinator and owner of Nan Adventure Tours

 

Break 1 Music: Boujee Natives (song) Snotty Nose Rez Kids (artist) Trapline (album)

Break 2 Music: Save the World (song) Tribz (artist) Trimmed (album)

 

Editor’s Note: The publisher of “A Feather and a Fork” is a sponsor of Koahnic Broadcast Corporation. That plays no role in Native America Calling’s editorial coverage decisions.

Marketplace All-in-One - Too much AI in the office is causing “brain fry”

The promise of artificial intelligence is that it will take on all the boring tasks we don’t want to do and free us up to do the fun, high-level work.


But managing the AI tools can be its own kind of work. A new study from the Boston Consulting Group found that when workers have to closely monitor and manage their AI tools can cause cognitive exhaustion, which they dubbed “AI brain fry.”


Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Matt Kropp, managing director and senior partner at BCG and one of the co-authors of this new study.

WSJ What’s News - U.S. Gas Prices Top $4 a Gallon

A.M. Edition for Mar. 31. Regular unleaded gasoline crosses the $4 a gallon threshold for the first time since August 2022, and is now up more than a dollar since the start of the war with Iran. Plus, with higher energy costs and the worst quarter for stocks in four years, WSJ markets reporter Sam Goldfarb discusses why bonds aren’t proving to be the safe havens many investors hoped for. And Washington moves to tax millionaires, as the tax divide between blue states and red states widens. Luke Vargas hosts.


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The Daily - How Cesar Chavez Abused His Power

The civil rights icon had a history of sexually abusing women and girls, which the Times reporters Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes spent five years investigating. They spoke to “The Daily” about how they uncovered the story. 

Guest:

Background reading: 

Photo: Barton Silverman/The New York Times

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


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The Ezra Klein Show - Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’s made of or how it works or why it exists.

But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the vanguard of this research. And his new book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” shows that the closer you look at consciousness, the weirder it gets.

I asked Pollan to walk through some of the places his mind wandered on this journey — including the role of the body and feelings in consciousness, fascinating studies that provide evidence for plant sentience, the researchers who have abandoned their old theories after trying psychedelic drugs, and the possibility that consciousness may not emerge from inside us at all. “I’ve entered this ‘never say never’ realm with this research,” Pollan told me.

Mentioned:

The Descriptive Experience Sampling method” by Russell T. Hurlburt and Sarah A. Akhter

What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel

The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms

Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio

The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought” by Kalina Christoff and Kieran C. R. Fox

Book Recommendations:

The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Being You by Anil Seth

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Kim Freda. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


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The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 3.31.26

Alabama

  • Sister of fallen police officer defends AG Marshall from attack ads coming from Club for Growth
  • AMCC overpaid a law firm by $200K according to recent state audit
  • Judge issues restraining order against CAW over flouride in water issue
  • Man who is convicted for murder of 5 year old girl is asking for his execution to be expadited

National

  • WH Press secretary says Trump wants Congress to end break and fund DHS
  • Trump releases video of more US airstrikes in Iran, Iran issues tolls on Strait of Hormuz and fires missiles back at Middle Eastern countries
  • SC Senator Lindsey Graham seen at DisneyLand as US troops deploy to Iran
  • Bank of America agrees to $72M settlement with Epstein survivors
  • Court filing in Tyler Robinson murder trial shows that bullet does not match with rifle supposedly used to shoot and kill Charlie Kirk

New Books in Indigenous Studies - Allan Greer, “Canada in the Age of Rum” (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2026)

Awash in a sea of rum describes the years between the 1670s and the 1830s in the colonies that would later become Canada. Millions of litres of the sugar-based liquor were imported every year to supply a comparatively small population of colonists and Indigenous people. Why rum, and why so much?
Rum was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum (McGill-Queen's UP, 2026) by Professor Allan Greer shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption.
This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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What A Day - Conservatism’s Biggest Conference Was Missing Its Star

Over the past decade or so, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, has become a massive gathering of right-wing power brokers — but this year, President Trump didn’t go. Neither did Vice President JD Vance nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The lackluster convention seemed to mirror a MAGA movement that’s looking increasingly unmoored. Ben Jacobs is a Washington-based political reporter who has been going to CPAC for years. We talked about his trip to the 2026 convention and what made this year so different from the others.

And in headlines, Trump makes yet another threat against Iran, Transportation Security Administration workers start receiving some backpay, and TMZ is giving members of Congress the tabloid treatment.

Show Notes: