Podcasts
- Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale (October 7, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Opposing Data Centers (October 14, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Sacrificing for AI (October 21, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Fighting for Control (October 28, 2024)
🎙️ On one of my long drives last week, I heard Timothy Snyder talk about freedom in a helpful way in the “Explaining Ukraine” podcast. Far from being an absence of various restrictions, it is a thing we actively cultivate in our own everyday life practices. “Why is freedom not a given but a task?"
🎙️ “Netanyahu and Trump’s ‘Creeping Authoritarianism’: ‘It Always Begins and Ends with Women’" – Allison Kaplan Sommer with Dahlia Lithwick and Yofi Tirosh (Haaretz) 43 min.
🎙️ “Timothy Snyder in Kharkiv: A Conversation about Freedom – with Volodymyr Yermolenko” (Explaining Ukraine / UkraineWorld) 54 min.
'Digital Vampires': Four-Part Podcast Series
I highly recommend the following series from Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us. It underlines the stakes of the podcast’s overarching theme and even sheds light on the extreme right-wing turn among some of Silicon Valley’s ultra wealthy.
Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that tech is inherently political and ignoring that has serious consequences.
I can’t listen to my usual podcasts about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East because the man in Palm Beach is not the president, nor does he have a coherent plan or a team picked out to propose and execute one. His track record doesn’t inspire confidence in a smooth transition either, even if there will surely be announcements for the media to go on about.
“Autocracy in America” – a podcast by Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
There are authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States. To root them out, you have to know where to look.
This is a fascinating and deeply unsettling listen by the authors of books indispensable for understanding the current moment: Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024); and Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). 📚
Recommended Insights into the Kursk Incursion
Michael Bohnert, an engineer at Rand Corporation, shares some useful insights about electronic warfare in the August 16, 2024 episode of the podcast Ukraine the Latest. He discusses this topic in connection with Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and describes the difficult choices that Russia’s political and military leadership face in the coming months from the standpoint of electronic warfare.
Also, Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst in Denmark, released a helpful 15-minute video on YouTube today about where he thinks Russia’s leadership is in responding to Ukraine’s incursion. Acknowledging complexity, he nonetheless keeps his viewers' eyes on two fundamental issues for Russia, namely, space and manpower, and he underlines the critical domestic political entanglements that the manpower question has.
Both of these contributions offer useful perspectives on Ukraine’s shakeup of a common impression that the conflict was supposedly frozen. Of course, there are many more aspects of this story, but I highlight these contributions because I haven’t seen them in other news stories so far.
Map of the incursion in early August, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on August 8, 2024 by Ecrusized in varying sizes and languages. License: CC0 (no rights reserved).
