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The Gist - The Sons and Daughters Lost to ISIS

We’re all familiar with news stories about radicalized Western kids who join the terrorist group ISIS. Today on The Gist, Julia Ioffe tells the story of the mothers those kids leave behind, and how many turn to activism in their grief. She wrote the article “Mothers of ISIS” for Huffington Post Highline. For the Spiel, Mike consults the book of Job. Today’s sponsor: Stamps.com, where you can buy and print official U.S. postage right from your desk using your own computer and printer. Use the promo code THEGIST to get a no-risk trial and a $110 bonus offer. Join Slate Plus! Members get bonus segments, exclusive member-only podcasts, and more. Sign up for a free trial today at slate.com/gistplus.

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Song Exploder - HEALTH – Stonefist

The band HEALTH formed in Los Angeles in 2005. Their newest record, Death Magic, came out in 2015. They spent four years trying to make it. They describe themselves as a noise band, but for this record, they reinvented their palette and their process. In this episode, John and Jake from HEALTH take apart the song Stonefist, which they made with their bandmates, Jupiter Keyes and BJ Miller.

This episode is sponsored by Hover, Lagunitas Brewing Company, and Simple.

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The Gist - Simon Rich, the Premise Keeper

An article in the Guardian once asked, “Is Simon Rich the funniest man in America.” We ask him, “Are you?” His new book Spoiled Brats explores why the so-called millennial culture is easy to mock, especially by baby boomers. Plus, we ask linguist Michael Erard about the craft of metaphor design. He’s the author of Babel No More. For the Spiel, how Donald Trump’s doing us all a service. Today’s sponsors: The Great Courses, engaging audio and video lectures taught by top professors. Courses like “Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory.” Right now, get 80 percent off the original price when you visit thegreatcourses.com/gist. And by Citrix GoToMeeting. When meetings matter, millions choose GoToMeeting. Get a free 30-day trial by visiting GoToMeeting.com and clicking the “try it free” button. Join Slate Plus! Members get bonus segments, exclusive member-only podcasts, and more. Sign up for a free trial today at slate.com/gistplus.

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More or Less: Behind the Stats - WS More or Less: Worm wars

A debate has been raging over the last month about the benefits of mass deworming projects. Hugely popular with the UN and charities, the evidence behind the practice has come under attack. Are the criticisms justified? We hear from the different sides ? both economists and epidemiologists and their approach to the numbers.

Football predictions How useful are football predictions and should we always trust the so called experts? The More or Less team look into the idea that predicting where sides will finish in the English football Premier League is best based on how they performed in previous seasons.

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New Books in Native American Studies - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” (Beacon Press, 2014)

When Howard Zinn published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was thrilled. “I used it as a text immediately,” she remembers. Comrades in the movement anti-war movement, Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz shared a belief that a radically different kind of history, freed from patriotic bluster, was desperately needed.

But Dunbar-Ortiz was also concerned by Zinn’s narrative. While the opening chapters on the genocide of Indigenous people were “like no other general U.S. history book,” Native Americans largely fell out of the story until the Red Power movements of the 1960s and 70s. “I kept saying to Howard, ‘What happened to the Indians? Why did they disappear until Alcatraz in 1969?'” Dunbar-Ortiz recounts. “He would say, ‘You have to write that book.'”

And so last year, Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2014). Covering several centuries in a brisk and moving narrative, this is a deeply unsettling tale. Dunbar-Ortiz lays bear a process of genocidal colonization and Indigenous resistance, the genesis of a American way of war born from frontier counterinsurgency and premised on annihilation, and how powerful origin myths continue to obscure the real history of this continent.

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African Tech Roundup - Scary Software Upgrades + The Week’s Biggest News

Microsoft certainly got millions of people excited a while ago when they announced that their latest version of Windows would be free. However, Windows users in most of Africa have begun to balk at the "not-so-free" implications of this recent innovation-- which by the way, is essentially a compulsory upgrade. Internet access is still relatively limited in most parts of the continent, and there's plenty of data showing that most people primarily connect to the web via mobile networks which deliver data at a premium. In this week's discussion, Tefo Mohapi and Andile Masuku talk about how it appears tech companies like Microsoft seem unmoved by how forced software upgrades will negatively impact African consumers who must pay dearly for the privilege of staying up to date. Also in this episode of the African Tech Round-up-- all the week's biggest digital, tech and innovation news: -- Find out why two of Vodafone's biggest subsidiaries in Africa are in hot water for two very different reasons, -- Discover how the Hacking Team security breach has inspired advocacy group Paradigm Initiative Nigeria to write a strong letter to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, -- Learn how South African JSE-listed giant Naspers is plotting to pre-empt Netflix's imminent entry into the South African market with a video on demand service of its own, -- Get the low-low on which South African travel crowdfunding startup is calling it a day, and -- Hear all about how the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Africa project is desperately seeking data scientists. Music Credits: Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Music licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/