On the Gist, don’t trust the polls. And, today’s installment of Remembrances of Things Trump: Trump loves the Great Lake.
In the interview, Mike helps Slate celebrate a milestone. Fifteen years ago this week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz recorded their first podcast together, and the Political Gabfest was born. Since 2005, the trio has roundtabled weekly about politicians, scandals, and countless court cases with millions of listeners joining them along the way. It’s a podcast series that Stephen Colbert says “everybody should listen to.” One of the first-published podcasts to date, Slate’s Political Gabfest set the stage for news, culture, and politics shows everywhere to come over the years.
How does the city and state plan to roll out the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine when they arrive? What’s going on with the plan to possibly re-name Lake Shore Drive? Those are just some of the state and local stories we’ll tackle with WBEZ’s Dave McKinney and WTTW’s Heather Cherone on WBEZ’s Weekly News Roundup
Will a Biden Administration bring us nothing more than an undoing of the executive actions of the Trump team? That's an unlikely outcome, according to Gene Healy.
President Trump once told veteran CBS journalist Lesley Stahl why he attacks the press.
"I do it to discredit you all and demean you all," he admitted to her in 2017, "so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you."
Trump made attacks on the press a central fixture of his campaign for president, and of his four years in the White House. As his term comes to a close, three members of the White House Press Corps reflect on what it's been like to cover the 45th president since the beginning.
The space between stars is usually measured in light years, but this makes it less easy to acknowledge the true scale of the distance. Even the closest star system to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years or 40.13 trillion kilometres from Earth. If we are ever going to bridge the gap between the stars, we will have to have some very fast spaceships, with extremely reliable, long-lasting technology on board.
So does science allow for these spacecraft to exist? That’s what listener Allan wants to know, and to find out, Presenter Anand Jagatia speaks with Tracy Drain, a systems engineer at NASA JPL responsible for overseeing the development and missions of multiple unmanned interplanetary probes including some around Jupiter and Mars. She tells us the challenges involved with simply keeping our spacecraft working for the long-haul.
Even if we can overcome issues of wear and tear over time, powering a ship to other star systems will not be easy. Today’s chemical rockets are too inefficient for the job, so we speak with Rachel Moloney, a researcher in electric propulsion to ask if this relatively new technology could power ships through interstellar space.
Faster than light travel is the solution most often found in Science Fiction, but it goes against Einstein’s laws of relativity. Is there a way around it? Theoretical physicist Professor Miguel Alcubierre thinks there may be, and he describes the way a spaceship may be able to create a bubble of spacetime around itself to move faster than light without breaking these fixed laws. But there’s a catch...
Contributors:
Tracy Drain – Systems Engineer - NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, California, USA
Rachel Moloney – Researcher in Electrical Propulsion - Surrey Space Centre, UK
Professor Samuel Tisherman – Surgeon – University of Maryland school of Medicine, USA
Dr John Bradford – President & CTO of SpaceWorks, USA
Professor Miguel Alcubierre – Theoretical physicist known for the ‘Alcubierre Warp Drive’ – National University of Mexico
Presented by Anand Jagatia
Produced by Rory Galloway
MassMutual becomes the latest announced institutional buyer of bitcoin, and this one could be even more significant in terms of precedent.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and this week’s special product launch LVL.co.
Today on the Brief:
FDA panel recommends Pfizer vaccine approval as initial jobless claims soar
Antitrust lawsuit calls for Facebook breakup
Crypto-friendly CFTC chairman to resign at the beginning of the year
Our main discussion: Why MassMutual bought $100 million in bitcoin and why it matters.
In this episode, NLW looks at recent news that MassMutual had purchased $100 million in bitcoin for its general account, as well as made a $5 million minority investment in $2.3 billion asset manager NYDIG, which helped facilitate the bitcoin purchase. He discusses why insurance company purchases are different than other institutional buyers like MicroStrategy, and why this might be the beginning of a more significant industry trend.
Disney shares surge on big news from Disney Plus. DoorDash delivers a big IPO. Airbnb delivers an even bigger IPO. Starbucks hits an all-time high. And Chipotle serves up clothing! Motley Fool analysts Emily Flippen and Jason Moser discuss those stories and talk about the latest from Chewy, Costco, Lululemon, and Stitch Fix. Plus, Jason and Emily share a couple of stocks on their radar: Axon Enterprises and Qualcomm. And Motley Fool retirement expert Robert Brokamp shares some year-end financial tips.
Have you ever heard a science story on the news where they mention how old something is then ask yourself “how do they know that?”
How is it possible to tell the age of something with any degree of certainty when there was no one around millions or billions of years ago?
Well, there are answers to those questions.
Learn more about radiometric dating, and how we can measure the age of objects and the Earth, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
... and other monologues and listener questions! I have not eaten meat for 2 months, and I want to explain why and why I think you should do your best to reduce meat eating as well. Don't worry, no excessive shaming. I just want to share my reasoning and hope it influences people. Also, more listener questions!
