Podcasts

“Chapter 33: Everybody Down” is now live! Listen here!

What is Midnight Burger? When Gloria took a waitressing job in a diner outside of Phoenix, she didn't realize she was now an employee of Midnight Burger, a time-traveling, dimension-spanning diner. Every day Midnight Burger appears somewhere new in the cosmos along with its staff: a galactic drifter, a rogue theoretical physicist, a sentient old-timey radio, and some guy named Caspar. No one knows who built Midnight Burger or how it works, but when it appears there's always someone around who could really use a cup of coffee.

The long-awaited beaver episode! In this episode, we learn about how beavers are not only champions of wildfire resilience but are also sleeper endurance athletes (climbing mountains to find new watersheds), dedicated anti-capitalists (not giving a **** about the regulatory or material concerns of humans), expert engineers (casually restoring entire watersheds) and pretty handy companions to have in our pursuit of restoring habitat and landscape resilience across the West (and beyond).

An irrigation system, once created at Stalin’s order as a project of grand Soviet social engineering, is now running dry.

As Endless Thread begins to divest itself from being an all-Reddit, all the time podcast, I started a home here on Lemmy for it.

As soon as the death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony was announced in February, conspiracy theories about who was behind it began circulating in Russia.

“That he was killed by his puppet masters from the west, not the Kremlin. That he was killed by them because his murder would actually make Putin look awful in the eyes of global community,” explains Ilya Yablokov, a lecturer in digital journalism and disinformation at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Yablokov studies the spread of conspiracy theories in post-Soviet Russia, and says the stories about Navalny are the most prominent of many circulating ahead of a presidential election that looks certain to keep Putin in the Kremlin until at least 2030.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12901877

Audrey Tang has served as Taiwan's first Digital Minister since 2016, by which time she already was known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, she served on the Taiwan National Development Council’s open data committee and basic education curriculum committee and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. In the private sector, she worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the social sector, she actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

When China’s Belt and Road Initiative was formally launched in 2013, it was touted as a world-spanning push to replicate the economic and political impact of the Silk Road. As it made investments across the world – including in the port of Piraeus during the depths of the financial crisis – Western capitals sought to counter Beijing’s growing influence. While it appears that the BRI is in retreat today, there are still risks.

Josh Birenbaum, the deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joins Thanos Davelis to look at the BRI today, why Europe and Washington should still be concerned about China, and what tools are available to counter Beijing – from the DFC to the proposed IMEC corridor.

[Warning: The podcast contains potentially distressing content.]

The day President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, Feb. 24, 2022, Russia unleashed a brutal assault on the strategic port city of Mariupol. That same day, a team of AP reporters arrived in the city. Vasilisa Stepanenko, Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov kept their cameras and tape recorders rolling throughout the onslaught. Together, they captured some of the defining images of the war in Ukraine. Stepanenko and Maloletka talk with guest host Michael Montgomery about risking their lives to document blasted buildings, burned-out cars, enormous bomb craters and the daily life of traumatized civilians. As Russian troops advanced on Mariupol, the journalists managed to escape with hours of their own material and recordings from the body camera of a noted Ukrainian medic, Yuliia Paievska. The powerful footage went viral and showed the world the shocking brutalities of the war, as well as remarkable acts of courage by journalists, doctors and ordinary citizens.

Next, we listen to audio that’s never been publicly shared before: phone calls Russian soldiers made during the first weeks of the invasion, secretly recorded by the Ukrainian government. AP reporter Erika Kinetz obtained more than 2,000 of these calls. Using social media and other tools, she explores the lives of two soldiers whose calls home capture intimate moments with friends and family. The intercepted calls reveal the fear-mongering and patriotism that led some of the men to go from living regular lives as husbands, sons and fathers to talking about killing civilians.

In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers left streets strewn with the bodies of civilians killed during their brief occupation. Kinetz shares her experiences visiting Bucha and speaking with survivors soon after Russian troops retreated. In the secret intercepts, Russian soldiers tell their families about being ordered to take no prisoners and speak of “cleansing operations.” One soldier tells his mother: “We don’t imprison them. We kill them all.”

Will Russian soldiers and political leaders be prosecuted for war crimes? Montgomery talks with Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyer who received a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. She runs the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which has been gathering evidence of human rights abuses and war crimes in Ukraine since Russia’s first invasion in 2014. Matviichuk says it’s important for war crimes to be handled by Ukrainian courts, but the country’s legal system is overwhelmed and notoriously corrupt. She says there is an important role for the international community in creating a system that can bring justice for all Ukrainians.

One of the most hopeful and practical podcasts I’ve listened to in a long time. I know this show has been linked here before but I think this specific episode is worthy of a listen to those who are interested in working directly at making the world a better place.

Robert sits down with Ify Nwadiwe to talk about the weird cult that's formed around AI, and some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley. (Adapted from his article in Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/)

Part Two

Taking action on their solarpunk dreams, Nick Schwanz and Spencer Scott bought a degraded agricultural plot and have been turning it into a food forest, an explosion of flowers, and a demonstration of regenerative farming that brings the local community together and creates a network of prosperity and opportunities for other farmers, creatives, and makers. Join us as we talk soils, how their project is going, and what they mean by their intention to queer the agricultural endeavor.