🎥 Hasan Piker vs. The Establishment
Hasan Piker, the leftist political commentator who’s been referred to as the “Joe Rogan of the left,” is a classic example of how much influence traditional gatekeepers of the Democratic Party still have. Piker appeals to younger voters, building a huge audience around them, and the establishment’s attempts to write him off may actually strengthen his appeal. In this episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon explores the divide between Democratic centrists and the online left — and Piker joins in the studio for the conversation. Watch the episode on YouTube or listen in your audio feeds.
🎧 What we lose when we stop writing by hand
I love sending handwritten notes and cards. But I know I’m in the minority because handwriting itself has become a lost art. Schools shifted long ago from teaching students how to write by hand to getting them to quickly adopt typing; some no longer teach cursive at all (although there seems to be a push to bring it back). This episode of Explain It to Me digs into how the evolution of teaching handwriting in schools has affected education and asks a simple question: What do we lose when we don't write by hand?
🎧 Should we really kill all the lanternflies?
To stomp or not to stomp? In New York City and Pennsylvania over the past few years, the spotted lanternfly — with both red wings and gray wings and a black head — has been everywhere, and scientists were worried the invasive fly would cause ecological and agricultural damage. In NYC, officials urged us to kill them if we saw them. But everyone’s worst fears haven’t exactly materialized. So, should we keep killing them? Join the Unexplainable team for a discussion on how we make ethical choices when every option leads to some type of harm.
Pet snakes have a hidden body count
Here’s another moral dilemma that the Vox team tackled over the last week: Pet snakes are not for me, but they seem to be for a growing number of people — more than 1 million US households, actually. What I didn’t realize is that feeding these pet snakes requires breeding tens of millions of mice and rats in factory farms each year. And as senior reporter Kenny Torrella reports, the snakes are also “confined in small tanks and unable to express their most basic, natural behaviors, like hunting, climbing, and roaming.” Kenny’s reporting takes you inside the world of mice factory farms, raising difficult questions about this outsized animal welfare issue.
