Mike tells Sarah what makes older Americans more vulnerable to misinformation — and who is delivering it to them. Digressions include "Supernatural," the Rachel and a fake university in Pennsylvania. We recorded this episode before the election but tried not to make it too obvious.
Here's the article Mike wrote with all the research he did for this episode:
Hey Chewy, turns out Petco is going public and it’s got its own profit puppy. Nestle just whipped up a 2050 plan to make zero greenhouse emissions… without affecting a drop of their earnings. And the November Jobs Report reveals how moms are hurt the most.
$WOOF $NSRGY $CHWY
Got a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @TBOYJack @NickOfNewYork
Want a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:
https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the NFL has asserted that they would continue with their regular season this fall. They’ve kept their word. They’ve also had significant outbreaks -- and the virus keeps interrupting the season. What explains the NFL’s determination to white-knuckle it through the year?
It’s the episode you’ve been waiting for – our breakdown of Justice Alito’s keynote speech at the Federalist Society convention. And as our guest, we have the Senator living rent free in Justice Alito’s head – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who gets his own Strict Scrutiny nickname in this episode!
Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025!
Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.
The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK.
John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Photograph by Matt Crockett
Why do we laugh? This is the question the evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sets out to answer in his latest book, The Comedy of Error. He looks back at laughter’s evolutionary origins, and to the similarities and differences in humour across cultures.
The sell-out comic Sindhu Vee swapped a career in investment banking for one in comedy. She is an expert at exploiting cultural differences in her jokes, having been born in India, lived and studied in the Philippines and the US, before settling in the UK.
John Mullan holds up Charles Dickens as a master novelist who could switch with ease from tragedy to comedy in a sentence. In The Artful Dickens he explores the tricks and ploys the writer used and how his humour has stood the test of time.
Producer: Katy Hickman
Photograph by Matt Crockett
Consumers may love their products and services but, among politicians and activists, the big-technology companies are fast developing a reputation as the Robber Barons of the 21st century.
Google recently joined Apple, Amazon and Microsoft as a so-called “tera-cap” – companies valued at more than a trillion dollars. Add Facebook and the five tech giants alone account for a quarter of the S&P500. How have they managed this in such a short timeframe? Their critics claim that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella and Tim Cook are just digital versions of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – monopolists who control entry nto their markets.
Not so simple, claims Nicolas Petit in Big Tech and the Digital Economy: The Moligopoly Scenario (Oxford University Press, 2020). Concerns about privacy or the dissemination of “fake news” are valid but “looking at these predicaments through monopoly lenses is like using Facebook to get your news. It seems to do the job. But it might well be fake”.
“The picture of big tech firms as monopolists is intuitively attractive but analytically wrong,” he writes. “A better picture is one of big tech firms as moligopolists, that is firms that coexist as monopolists and oligopolists”.
Nicolas Petit is the Joint Chair in Competition Law at the European University Institute and the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies in Florence.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors.
The FDA has issued emergency use authorizations for two monoclonal antibody treatments for COVID-19 – one produced by Eli Lilly and another by Regeneron. As science correspondent Richard Harris explains, emergency use authorization doesn't assure that these new drugs are effective, but that their potential benefits are likely to outweigh the risks. So today, we get to the bottom of how this type of treatment works and if they'll really make a difference.
Email the show your questions, coronavirus or otherwise, at shortwave@npr.org.
Biden has reportedly selected California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led the defense of the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court last month, to lead the department of Health and Human Services. We discuss the pick.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new lockdown order takes effect today in large parts of the state, and will be in effect for at least the next three weeks but possibly longer.
The UK will begin its initial batch of COVID-19 vaccinations this week, using the drug from Pfizer. Russia began vaccinating thousands in Moscow with their Sputnik V vaccine this past weekend, and there’s reporting that China is gearing up for a rollout of vaccines, too.
And in headlines: judge orders DACA restored, hundreds of thousands of farmers strike in India, and Trump doesn’t nail the messaging in Georgia.
