Ninety Seconds to Midnight
A new philosophy steeped in the ideas of Artificial Intelligence, space colonization, and the long-term survival of the human species is gaining ground among the wealthy. However, there are reasons to question its goals and its ethics. Longtermists believe that not only could we colonize space and create simulated humans in giant servers around stars, but that we must. Anything short of a trillion-year multi-planetary...
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (ENCORE)
The cost of living in a city has skyrocketed. While wages have flatlined for most working-class people, rents have reached new highs, leaving most people struggling. And this, despite the economic costs of the pandemic. A one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is over $3,200 a month. But it’s not just in the US. The rising cost of living is affected the entire world. But why does the cost of housing continue to spiral upward?...
Blindspot: Tulsa Burning and Focus: Black Oklahoma
On this episode, we turn our focus to how journalists and historians today are covering the Tulsa Race Massacre. We hear from KalaLea, host of the critically acclaimed podcast series Blindspot: Tulsa Burning. The series tells the story of the rise of Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street. The podcast recounts the brutal 1921 massacre and attack led by a group of white...
Pandemic and Profit
To mark the three year anniversary of the official start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ll be looking at two alternative supply chains for masks that emerged in the fallout of the Trump administration’s failure to prepare. We’ll be speaking with ProPublica reporter David McSwane about his book Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick. The book details the shadowy supply chain...
70 Million: Why Policing Our Schools Backfires
School resource officers are often called upon in middle and high schools to help with routine discipline. But for many children, especially those with disabilities, a law enforcement response to their behavior can lead to the school-to-prison pipeline. This week on Making Contact, we hear a story from our podcast partner 70 Million about the relationship between students with special needs and school resource officers and the changes...
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (ENCORE)
Inflammatory diseases are on the rise around the world, and doctors are finally starting to pay more attention to them. But why does a beneficial part of our immune system turn unhealthy? Raj Patel and Rupa Marya think it has a lot to do with the world we’re forced to live in. They talk about the collapse of our planet and what it has to do with inflammation, and how our bodies are a mirror of a much deeper disease in...
