Elizabeth Holmes founded a big blood-testing startup; her claims were founded on very little. As her trial begins we ask how the company got so far before it all crumbled. Research on primates is increasingly frowned upon in the West, leaving a strategic opportunity in places such as China. And lessons in a lost novel by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
Between the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, an endless pandemic, a broken education system, and competent leaders nowhere in sight, it can feel like America is in a constant state of meltdown.
On today's episode, renowned historian Niall Ferguson answers the big questions: how did we get here? Is American decline inevitable? And if not, what can be done to renew the culture and the country?
Even though California’s population has grown since 2017, we’re using 16% less water. Good job everyone! We’ve already made some big strides in water conservation that are paying off. Today, we’re going to look at more ways individuals can conserve water at home.
Reported by Nina Sparling. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Katrina Schwartz, Kevin Stark, Katie McMurran and Brendan Willard. Additional support from Erika Aguilar, Jessica Placzek, Kyana Moghadam, Isabeth Mendoza, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Carly Severn, Ethan Lindsey, Vinnee Tong and Jenny Pritchett.
The United States is the only rich industrialized nation without a universal paid family leave policy. But as child and home care costs balloon, and the pandemic continues to leave families in precarious work situations, many caretakers have hit a wall. Congress might finally be ready to do something about it.
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Beginning in 1801, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, the Earl of Elgin, began a project to document the sculptures located at the Parthenon in Athens.
He then took it one step further and took half of the sculptures at the Parthenon and shipped them back to England.
It has been a source of controversy and diplomatic conflict ever since.
Learn more about the Elgin Marbles on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
English Covid restrictions were lifted in July. Back then, some predicted that there could be as many as 6,000 hospital admissions a day by the following month. So, what happened?
The Metropolitan Police says it?s spent ?50 million on policing Extinction Rebellion since 2019. They?re on the streets again ? can it really be that costly?
The economics correspondent at The Economist Duncan Weldon puts government borrowing during the pandemic into context and talk about his new book, 200 Years of Muddling Through.
Are we running out of lorry drivers? And to what extent is Brexit to blame? We look at the numbers behind a claim that there is a shortfall of 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK.
Plus, disturbing evidence that Star Trek?s Mr Spock may actually be terrible at logic.
From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives.
Nadieszda Kizenko's bookGood for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire(Oxford UP, 2021) brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.
Paul Werth is a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) made headlines around the world in 2016. Supporters called the pipeline key to safely transporting American oil from the Bakken oil fields of the northern plains to markets nationwide, essential to both national security and prosperity. Native activists named it the "black snake," referring to an ancient prophecy about a terrible snake that would one day devour the earth. Activists rallied near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota for months in opposition to DAPL, winning an unprecedented but temporary victory before the federal government ultimately permitted the pipeline. Oil began flowing on June 1, 2017.
The water protector camps drew global support and united more than three hundred tribes in perhaps the largest Native alliance in U.S. history. While it faced violent opposition, the peaceful movement against DAPL has become one of the most crucial human rights movements of our time.
Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys' bookBlack Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice(U Nebraska Press, 2021) is the story of four leaders--LaDonna Allard, Jasilyn Charger, Lisa DeVille, and Kandi White--and their fight against the pipeline. It is the story of Native nations combating environmental injustice and longtime discrimination and rebuilding their communities. It is the story of a new generation of environmental activists, galvanized at Standing Rock, becoming the protectors of America's natural resources.
Ryan Driskell Tate writes on fossil fuels, climate change, and the American West. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and is completing a book on fossil fuel development in the Powder River Basin.
Andy goes to Florida — ground zero in the battle over how to respond to COVID — to hear directly from kids and what they have to say about the pandemic. Two young people have been working to make adults hear their voices: 21-year-old David Hogg and 14-year-old Alana Nesser, both of Parkland, Florida. In 2018, adults failed to keep David and his classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School safe when one of the worst school shootings in history occurred. A few short years later, Alana and her friends have again been left vulnerable by adults in the debate over masks. Hear what kids are saying to one another about trauma, and about what we as adults can do to understand and help.
Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt.
Follow David @davidhogg111 and Alana @AMNesser on Twitter.
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