OA1171 - Today's episode is a nice, fun departure from the doom and gloom. Oral arguments in a recent SCOTUS case went terribly wrong. And for once, it wasn't the court itself that was looking like a clown show. The case was AJT v Osseo and it involved disability rights. So naturally, I had to invite everyone's favorite disability rights advocate and all around all-star, Dr. Jenessa Seymour!
This week Tyler and Danny discuss Willi Carlisle's incredible new album, Winged Victory, and add its opening tack to our Ultimate Country Playlist. "We Have Fed You All For 1000 Years" (sometimes written as 'A Thousand') is a powerful union song over 100 years old, attributed to "an unknown proletariat." In Carlisle's hands it is a barn burner that maintains all of the old song's importance, relevance, and bite. We love it and think you will too!
Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the crypto market, A.I. venture capital, and how people, especially Gen Z, are making career decisions. Kyla Scanlon has emerged as a leading theorist on the economics of attention and is herself a member of Gen Z. She is the author of the book “In This Economy?” and Kyla’s Newsletter on Substack. I asked her on the show to walk us through her theory of the attention economy.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. 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.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
One of the most important inventions of the 20th century was the transistor.
Prior to the transistor, electronic devices were large and bulky and dependent on vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were large, fragile, power-hungry, and prone to failure.
The transistor not only replaced the vacuum tube in many applications but also enabled the miniaturization and reliability required for modern electronics, including computers, phones, and spacecraft.
Learn more about transistors, how they work, and how they were invented on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Make no mistake -- being a farmer is hard work. Farming outfits often have to carry a huge amount of risk from one season to the next, and any number of things may ruin their prospects, from unexpected weather, market volatility and so on. To mitigate these dangers, world governments often provide funding, or subsidies, to agribusiness in order to lower risk and increase chances of farmers staying in business. In the US, these subsidies are a multi-billion dollar industry... but where does all that money actually go?
State leaders express sorrow over loss of Alabama girl in Texas flooding
Baldwin County Chaplain heads to TX to help with relief efforts there
Handful of Faculty members from UAB and AU send open letter in defense of "science" and accusing Trump Admin of Nazi programs
Huntsville plant is notified of UAW efforts to unionize workers there
State lawmaker says E-verify is not enough to stop illegal workers in state
Governor Ivey appoints Hal Nash as Chairman of Pardons and Paroles
National
84 bodies recovered from floodwaters in TX, as rescue operations continue
In South TX a gunman is neutralized after attack on border patrol station
DHS releases long list of criminality of those sent to "Alligator Alcatraz"
Federal Judge issues temporary block on portion of BBB re: abortion
President Trump issues tariffs on 14 countries, extends deadline to August 1st
DOJ memo is causing a stir after claims that Jeffrey Epstein had no high profile client list, wasn't conducting blackmail operations, a did kill himself
Love him or hate him, many consider Elon Musk to be a modern-day genius. He co-founded PayPal, which transformed how people purchase things. He became the CEO of Tesla, which revolutionized electric vehicles—and made it cool to drive them. He founded SpaceX, accomplishing what only superpower nation-states have previously. And he is working to make our species interplanetary—maybe in a few years, we’ll be doing this podcast on Mars.
To many, these acts make Elon Musk a genius, perhaps the most important genius in history.
But it’s worth asking: What exactly makes him a genius? Is it a particular set of qualities, or is Elon Musk just particularly adept at playing the role of genius? Or at least what we’ve come to expect of geniuses? Is his offensive behavior excused by his genius, or the result of it? And why do human beings value genius, even to the point of deifying it?
All of these questions are raised in Helen Lewis’s new book, The Genius Myth. And not just with regard to Musk, but to so many of the figures our culture venerates as geniuses: Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. Lewis asks: Were these people actually geniuses? Or was their genius based on a myth? And more importantly, how does our perception of “genius” confuse and distort our understanding of success—and how we value, or don’t value, other human beings?
Today on Honestly, Bari asks Helen Lewis if some people belong to a special and superior class, what it means to be a genius, and if she believes in geniuses at all.
Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories.
In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism(Duke University Press, 2025), solar power is no less likely to exploit marginalized communities than dirtier forms of energy. Drawing from ethnographic research on clean energy corporations and community solar campaigns in New York City, Lennon argues that both groups overlook solar’s extractive underside because they primarily experience energy from the sun in the virtual world of the cloud. He shows how the material properties of solar technology—its shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and modularity—work closely with images, digital platforms, and quantitative graphics to shape utopic visions in which renewable energy can eradicate the constitutive tensions of racial capitalism. As a corrective to this virtual world, Lennon calls for an equitable energy transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork: one’s haptic care for their local environment; the full-bodied feel of infrastructural labor; and the sublime affect of the sun.
Myles Lennon is Dean's Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University.
Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP).
Now that President Donald Trump has gotten exactly what he wanted, and signed his major domestic tax and policy agenda into law, what should Democrats do now? Poll after poll has shown the legislation is wildly unpopular, but also that voters don’t know a ton about it. The legislation is projected to strip millions of people of health care and food assistance over the next decade. And for Democrats, tying Republicans to the law’s most unpopular provisions will be imperative to their hopes of regaining power in Congress in next year’s midterm elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries joins us to talk about how Democrats plan to respond, both to Trump’s big beautiful disaster of a law and to the onslaught of attacks from the Trump administration more broadly.
And in headlines: Texas officials said they’ve confirmed more than 100 deaths from Friday’s devastating floods, Trump announced new 25 percent tariffs on Japan and South Korea, and immigration officers staged another massive show of force in Los Angeles.