Political Gabfest - The World Is Burning
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2023
⏱️ 56 minutes
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Summary
This week, John Dickerson and David Plotz are joined by Vox’s Marin Cogan @marincogan to discuss the extreme weather, heat, and floods that are wreaking havoc across the United States and around the world; the social media phenomenon of Threads; and the American love-hate relationship with cars.
Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
Cara Buckley for The New York Times: “To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats”
Jonathan Erdman for The Weather Channel: “America’s Top Weather Killer Is Not Tornadoes, Flooding, Lightning Or Hurricanes – It’s Heat”
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar
Antonio Pequeño IV for Forbes: “Zuckerberg Vs. Musk: Everything We Know About The Possible Cage Fight”
These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
Insider Intelligence: “US Social Network Ad Revenue Growth, 2021-2023”
Marin Cogan for Vox: “The impossible paradox of car ownership”; “The deadliest road in America”; and “Cars transformed America. They also made people more vulnerable to the police.”
Tracy Chapman: “Fast Car”; Luke Combs: “Fast Car”; and Emily Yahr for The Washington Post: “Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’”
Henry Grabar for Slate: “Why More Americans Are Using Fake License Plates and Getting Away With It”
Gersh Kuntzman for Streetsblog NYC: “Paris Mayor Enters Fray Between E-Bikes and Pedestrians – By Fighting Drivers”
Here are this week’s chatters:
John: Hannah Hartig, Andrew Daniller, Scott Keeter, and Ted Van Green for Pew Research Center: “Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage”
Marin and David: Tour de France on NBC Sports; Tour de France: Unchained on Netflix
Listener chatter from Dan Kirkwood: Claire Stremple for The Alaska Beacon: “Angoon students name, launch first dugout canoe since 1882 Bombardment”
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, David, John, and Marin discuss traffic enforcement, the need for it, and the harms it causes.
In the latest edition of Gabfest Reads, Emily talks with Monica Potts @MonicaBPotts about her book, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America.
Email your chatters, questions, and comments to gabfest@slate.com or Tweet us @SlateGabfest. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth
Research by Julie Huygen
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest. |
| 0:16.8 | July 13, 2023, the world is burning addition, I am David Plotts of CityCast, in a toasty but |
| 0:24.8 | not intolerable Washington D.C. I'm joined, of course, by John Dickerson of CBS Primetime |
| 0:31.0 | from New York City. Hello, John. We're both back. Were you on vacation? I was on vacation. |
| 0:34.6 | I don't know if you were on vacation last time. No, I wasn't on vacation, but since you and Emily |
| 0:37.7 | were on vacation, I was free-floating Amoeba in the world. That was a long horn. That was a long |
| 0:45.9 | horn. You hear that's New York City outside. That's how we resolve our differences when it's high. |
| 0:50.8 | It's just lean on the horn. Exactly. It's a nice teaser for later on. That other voice you heard |
| 0:55.9 | is first time host. Marin Cogan, Marin is senior correspondent at Vox, where she covers a lot of things, |
| 1:03.8 | but especially transportation. Marin, you may remember, was part of our favorite segment of 2022, |
| 1:11.3 | when we talked about her piece about Strades, and so we thought, given that Emily is still out, |
| 1:17.1 | we would have her back for the whole show and hit some of her favorite topics today. |
| 1:21.3 | Hello, Marin. Welcome. Thank you for having me. I was just going to say I hope it's not going to |
| 1:25.2 | be the last time. We shall see. I don't know. I hate to make predictions. See how bad I messed this up. |
| 1:32.6 | This week on the Gap Fest, the heat wave across the South, the brutal rainstorms in New England |
| 1:37.6 | smoke everywhere. How can we live with this more extreme, more dangerous, more erratic climate |
| 1:44.8 | that we have inflicted on ourselves? Then Twitter has been the central platform for American |
| 1:51.4 | political conversation for almost a generation. Is Threads going to unseat it? Would that be a good |
| 1:58.1 | thing? Is Twitter going to survive the assault from Threads? Then Marin has an important and |
| 2:06.5 | kind of worrying new article in Vox about car ownership, which has become a key tool for getting |
| 2:12.1 | into the middle class, but has become more and more expensive and precarious. We will talk about |
| 2:16.3 | whether it should be a right. Should Americans have the right to own a car? Plus, of course, |
... |
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