worth a listen

"Make sense of the day’s news and ideas," urges The Morning, a daily New York Times newsletter. "Get smarter, faster on news and information that matters to you," Axios assures its readership. "This is how the news should sound," The New York Times again declares, via its podcast The Daily.

Over the last ten years, roughly speaking, we’ve seen the proliferation of the daily digest-style newsletter and podcast at legacy and new media organizations. Inspired, at least loosely, by the so-called explanatory journalism of Vox and similar outlets that arose in the mid-2010s, publications now commonly offer bite-sized breakdowns of the news that allegedly matters most, delivered to the inboxes of upwardly mobile, dinner-party-hosting, perennially on-the-go professionals - or at least those who want to think of themselves as such.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with accessibility in news media—quite the opposite, in fact. But, for corporate “explanatory” news models, it’s worth asking who makes the decisions about which news is the “most important,” and about how that news is framed. How do seemingly benign, even folksy promises to “make sense of the news” mask the ideology of corporate media institutions? And what are the dangers of herding audiences into a center-right political consensus that issues complaints like “campus speech is vexing” and “the left is less welcoming than the right”?

On this episode, we examine the rise and hegemony of centrist micro-news platforms–from Axios’s trademarked "Smart Brevity" to The New York Times’ David Leonhardt’s newsletter The Morning and The Daily podcast–looking at how they package left-punching, pathologically incurious, glib news nuggets served up to busy, upwardly mobile, well-meaning liberals.

Our guest is writer Jacob Bacharach.

Episode 195: David Leonhardt and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine

Writer Roy Scranton explains why he sees death when he looks to civilization's future - from national political systems unable to address the looming, global threat of climate change, to our failure on an individual level to move behind ethnic and national arrangements as a globalized earth grows more chaotic - and how we have a choice between the death of our current way of life, or the death of our species itself.

Roy is author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization from City Lights.

Extinction level eventuality: Why civilization must die before it's too late

Historian Anna-Lisa cox traces the westward journey of America's Black pioneers - as a first Great Migration of African American farming settlements spread across the Midwest, free Black families experienced new levels of self-determination and prosperity in frontier communities, as well as a White backlash against their advancements.

Anna-Lisa is author of "The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America's Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality" from PublicAffairs: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/anna-lisa-cox/the-bone-and-sinew-of-the-land/9781610398107/

When Black farms blossomed on the American frontier.

Conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas finds new forms of life born into this warming world - as (some) species adapt to the new conditions created by climate change, humans must adapt the way we view and interact with nature to reflect a new understanding of time, change and stewardship of the natural world.

Chris is the author of "Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction" from PublicAffairs: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/chris-d-thomas/inheritors-of-the-earth/9781610397285/

On death, change and new forms of life at the end of wilderness.

Historian Walter Scheidel traces the long twin histories of economic inequality and violence throughout human history - as a cycle of rising wealth disparity and brutal, leveling shocks have followed us since the dawn of agrarian civilization - and explains why peaceful solutions to today's inequality won't be found in the past, but must be built in the future.

Walter is the author of "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" from Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10921.html

A very long, mostly uninterrupted, human history of inequality.

Journalist Daniel Trilling explains why Europe's refugee crisis is really a global border crisis - exposing the failures of the state to aid the stateless in a warming, violent world, shifting political power from the failing liberal center to the surging far right, and devaluing freedom and human lives to prop up a crumbling order.

Daniel is author of "Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe" from Verso.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2862-the-lights-in-the-distance

On human movement in an age of shrinking states and expanding borders.

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

Episode 195: David Leonhardt and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine

Citations Needed Podcast