The US election is tomorrow. If you, like me, are tired of horse-race-style reporting, and need to zoom out, I wanna tell you a story. It’s about an ancient force influencing the election. And, as a bonus, it’ll give you an Easter egg to watch for as the returns come in. THREAD
Before I tell the story, I should say I first heard it eight years ago from @rkrulwich. And I never forgot it. Parts of this story might be obvious to some of you, but as a new US citizen, I knew very little of it …
Ok here we go.
Look at the electoral maps by county for the last few decades of US presidential elections. You’ll notice that the South goes almost uniformly Republican red every time.
Duh.
But if you look closer, there’s something else there ...
This year has been unrelentingly bleak, so I want to tell you a real-life Cinderella story that started almost exactly ten years ago today. (A THREAD)
In the summer of 2010, I was a lowly graduate student studying the history of science. I loved it, but I knew I didn't have a future as an academic. Not least because every paper I submitted to scholarly journals got rejected.
So one day, I cold-emailed my favorite podcast, @Radiolab. I had no experience in radio or podcasting or documentary or music or journalism. But I figured, what the heck, I'm gonna tell them how much I love them. And also maybe ... pitch them some history of science stories??
My Netflix show just went live! If I had to sum it up, it’s basically if Bill Nye and Anthony Bourdain had an awkward Muslim baby. But it’s also more than that ...
It’s about space lasers and dating apps and Saharan fish and extragalactic potatoes and climate change and nuclear weapons and the breath you just took. But it’s about more than all that too ...
It’s about a single simple idea that feels way more resonant now than when we conceived of the show years ago. And it’s this:
Such an honor to talk to these brilliant folks. In their honor, here's a quick thread of a few of my favorite @greatbigstory mini-docs to help pass the quaran-time:
The Mad Genius Behind Sea Monkeys - @lennypane's doc somehow finds the exactly right length and style, given its tiny odd subject
How a Man's Ashes Made it To the Moon - A love story about a man and a woman and the earth and the moon. It'll make you cry in three and a half minutes.
Hey folks. Last ep of #TheOtherLatif due out early next week. (@Radiolab team is working remotely bc of Covid19, so needed extra time.) It's a solid ep, tho. Worth the wait. (Here's a snapshot to look forward to.) And meantime, to keep you sated in quarantine, some Gitmo recs:
Have to start with @carolrosenberg, “the dean of Gitmo reporters.” She hasn’t written a book about Guantanamo (yet!) but check out the last big story she did here: nytimes.com/2020/02/26/us/…
Read Ben Taub’s @NewYorker profile of Mohamedou Salahi. Despite having interviewed Salahi myself before reading, and knowing most of the details, I wept so hard. For some reason the detail that hit me hardest was about the baby crib. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
New ep of #TheOtherLatif is now up! This time, we go to Gitmo. In lieu of a proper thread, I’m just gonna post a bunch of pics of stuff from the Gitmo gift shop, because why not. wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radio…