The Returns: Project X

The Last Archive

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2024

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Each week on ‘The Returns,’ we pull a different episode from our archive to put our present politics into historical context.

The election of 1952 brought all kinds of new technology into the political sphere. The Eisenhower campaign experimented with the first television ads to feature an American presidential candidate. And on election night, CBS News premiered the first computer to predict an American election — the UNIVAC. Safe to say, that part didn’t go according to plan. But election night 1952 is ground zero for our current, political post-truth moment. If a computer and a targeted advertisement can both use heaps of data to predict every citizen’s every decision, can voters really know things for themselves after all?

This episode first ran in the summer of 2020.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	1stin
0:10.0	One of the best shows of the year according to Apple, Amazon and Time is back for another round.
0:16.8	This season we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs.
0:22.1	Yesterday, Band on the Run, Heed, and McCartney's favorite song in his entire catalogue,
0:29.4	Here, there, and everywhere.
0:31.7	Listen to McCartney, A Life and lyrics wherever you get podcasts.
0:36.9	And if you want to binge the entire first and second seasons, ad free, write now.
0:45.0	Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lirics show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.
0:54.3	F.M. slash Plus. Your membership also unlocks access to ad-free
1:00.3	binges from Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Lori Santos, and tons of other top hosts.
1:07.8	One Saturday in November 2020, I was buying shoes in Brooklyn.
1:14.0	Crazy, I know, but this is a true story.
1:16.7	They were running shoes.
1:17.8	Did I run with them?
1:18.8	Hardly ever.
1:19.6	But that's not important.
1:21.3	What's important is, I was at the store, trying on some hocas I later came to regret and then a crazy thing happened.
1:27.2	A good friend of mine pulled up in a car out front. He had just that very day moved back to New York,
1:32.8	and then as he got out of the car, people all over the street suddenly raised their windows,
1:37.0	leaned out of them, and began to scream and hang on pots and pans.
1:41.6	I was like, whoa, you should try moving away more often but then I checked my phone
1:46.1	and remember I was in Brooklyn I realized that the election had just been called
	...

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