The 2020 election has a lot of Democrats asking: What happened? As it turns out, it’s a question one outgoing member of Congress has been asking herself, too.
Guest: U.S. Representative Donna Shalala, Democrat from Florida.
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Some insects and reptiles have a strange self-preservation characteristic — they suddenly start bleeding from places like their eyes or knees. NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce looks at "reflex bleeding" and explores some of the creatures that bleed on purpose.
For more science reporting and stories, follow Nell on twitter @nell_sci_NPR. And, as always, email us at shortwave@npr.org.
First published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and then by Continuum in 1998, Jim Mason’s An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature has become a classic. With a new Lantern edition expected in early 2021, the book explores, from an anthropological, sociocultural, and holistic perspective, how and why we have cut ourselves off from other animals and the natural world, and the toll this has taken on our consciousness, our ability to steward nature wisely, and the will to control our own tendencies.
Jim Mason writes: “My own view is that the primal worldview, updated by a scientific understanding of the living world, offers the best hope for a human spirituality. Life on earth is the miracle, the sacred. The dynamic living world is the creator, the First Being, the sustainer, and the final resting place for all living beings—humans included. We humans evolved with other living beings; their lives informed our lives. They provided models for our existence; they shaped our minds and culture. With dominionism out of the way, we could enjoy a deep sense of kinship with the other animals, which would give us a deep sense of belonging to our living world.
“Then, once again, we could feel for this world. We could feel included in the awesome family of living beings. We could feel our continuum with the living world. We could, once again, feel a genuine sense of the sacred in the world.”
Writing to U.S. President Grover Cleveland in 1888, Oglala Lakota leaders Little Wound, Young Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud insisted upon a simple yet significant demand to allow western Indigenous nations to retain intertribal communication networks, stating that "we do not want the gates closed between us." These vast networks - and the written letters, in-person visits, and anticolonial ideologies that sustained them - are the focus of historian Justin Gage's new book, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Gage shows how sustained communication between reservations enabled a diversity of peoples to share knowledge of common experiences under U.S. settler colonialism, culminating with the rise and rapid spread of the Ghost Dance.
Focusing on extensive correspondence between Indigenous communities at over thirty western reservations, Gage elevates the voices of Indigenous leaders, diplomats, family members, and others who sought to use English literacy, one of the United States' primary tools of assimilation, to resist confinement within colonial boundaries. The result is an essential study of how the U.S. federal government struggled and ultimately failed to limit Indigenous mobility and the powerful intellectual currents that helped Indigenous nations to assert their autonomy and sovereignty at the turn of the century.
Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.
Attkisson, host of the TV show "Full Measure” and a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, joins the podcast to explain how the deterioration of fact-based journalism began. From reporting on Black Lives Matter to the 2020 election, media outlets have become consumed with promoting a specific narrative, even if it means censoring the truth.
We also cover these stories:
Former Vice President Joe Biden names former Secretary of State John Kerry as his special presidential envoy for climate.
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, mandates a three-week “statewide pause” due to an uptick in coronavirus cases.
AstraZeneca announces encouraging results in its COVID-19 vaccine trials.
Amanda Holmes reads the anonymous 9th-century poem “Pangur Bán,” translated from the Irish by Seamus Heaney. 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.
He still lost, folks! It's over. In our main segment today, we discuss the Electoral College calendar and when things are finally set in stone. But what about faithless electors??? We've got an Andrew for that too. This episode should help you feel fine about the fact that Trump still lost.
In the first segment we talk about a few things Andrew nailed his predictions on, including Chad Wolf and Kathryn Kimball Mizelle.
We’re joined by The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu for a look into Obama’s legacy, his lasting grip on Democratic politics and culture, and how Biden’s administration might feel like a speed-run of his former boss’s 8 years. Then, we vibe out to some of our future Secretary of State’s groovy tunes.
Read Osita’s piece on Obama’s new memoir in TNR here: https://newrepublic.com/article/160285/obama-promised-land-trump-biden
In part 2 of A Local Press, we expand the circle of wisdom and experience with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Bob Sanchez and local nonprofit startup Tallahassee Reports' Steve Stewart.
Plus former Tallahassee Democrat publisher Skip Foster and Miami Herald Tallahassee Bureau Chief Mary Ellen Klas stick around for Q & A. This program is facilitated by Jennifer Portman, Enterprise Editor for USA Today.
No longer represented by local shoe leather reporting done by a journalist you knew and saw at town meetings, many American communities now only think of the media as distant strangers who can't be trusted. So the scarcity of hometown newspapers doesn't just make it so some communities are dark on local news, but it's actively feeding our lack of trust and the partisan divide at a national level. Add this together with the rise of multimedia conglomerates and partisan news sources and it's obvious why our problems in journalism are Big Wicked Problems, and time might be short to stop the most profound consequences that lie ahead. And if we lose our paper, just who can we blame but ourselves?
Join us for a discussion offering insights into the current challenges facing the media industry and hear creatives ideas for keeping local journalism healthy and alive for the decades ahead.