| | | | Dear Beloved Listeners,
You might expect us to reserve this space for a screed of sorts against former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and the mountains of undeserved coverage he's received. After all, his coffee tastes like burnt concrete and he hasn't even announced his candidacy for president! No matter. Bookers can't seem to stop themselves from putting Schultz on tv. As Media Matters observed recently, "To the extent that Howard Schultz has a constituency, it exists largely in America's green rooms." Tssss, burn! And it's not just Fox (although they seem particularly into it). Did you hear that CNN is gonna televise a primetime town hall spectacle for Schultz next week? Barf.
So, sure. You'd think we'd be all anti- and whatever. But Schultz did make an important observation recently and it really got us thinking. After all, as we say around these parts, words matter. In a conversation with NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin which took place for no reason whatsoever this week, Schultz said he thinks the word "billionaire" is derogatory, and suggested it's better to say "person of means" or "people of wealth" instead. Yes, this really happened.
In all fairness to Schultz, we've had similar lexiconfusion here at OTM. Brooke and Bob have recently taken issue with the term "host." They say it's too showboaty and suggests they are riddled with parasites. Brooke is specifically concerned that people will think she's a "host" to an ancient symbiotic creature known as Dax and that they share a single consciousness and personality, and that Dax helps her in interviews by accessing the memories of seven previous "hosts" -- making her a formidable interviewer and a devil of a cook. (Some of Brooke's fears come from Deep Space 9.)
So, no. They're not "hosts".
From now on, they prefer "person of platform."
Onward. | | [ In Case You Missed It ] | |  | | Last week, national security adviser John Bolton walked into a White House press briefing conspicuously displaying a single provocative notation: "5,000 troops to Colombia." Should the US invade Venezuela, it would be the latest in a long history of meddling in Latin American countries, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Haiti, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Grenada and Uruguay. Brown University Professor of International Relations Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, and Bob discuss how the press and the US government often exploit human rights abuses to provoke warmongering among the American people, and why short-term interventions often lead to long-term despair. | |  | | Natasha Lyonne has been with us for what feels like lifetimes. We loved her brassy wit and fabulous hair when she first entered our lives with Slums of Beverly Hills and But I'm a Cheerleader in the 90s, and we loved her on Orange Is the New Black and we've never stop loving her, really, but now we just love her so much more because she spent the past decade writing and making Russian Doll, a weird and brilliant new Netflix show in which her darkness and depth and creativity and amazing hair are showcased so brilliantly. We don't want to say too much, but the gist is: it's Lyonne's character's 36th birthday. She dies. She wakes up. And it's her 36th birthday again. And then it happens again. And again. And somehow it just gets weirder and more interesting and better and better and better. More layered, more surprising, more pathos-filled. And with a Lyonne-cool aesthetic coursing through the whole thing. Watch it. | |  | | This week, an Israeli company called Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies captured the news cycle with promises of a complete cure for cancer within the year, the story caught fire. The company's technology is called "MuTaTo" — that's multi-target toxin. And, to judge from the news media this week, it seems vetted, verified and veering us all toward a cancer-free future. Reports began in the Jerusalem Post, but quickly took off, making their way into various Murdoch-owned publications like FOX and the New York Post and landing in local news outlets around the country and the globe. The too-good-to-be-true story appears to be just that, built on PR puffery. But who can resist a good cancer cure? We revisit our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Health News edition, with Gary Schwitzer, publisher & founder of HealthNewsReview.org. | |  | | In Stacey Abrams's rebuttal to President Trump's State of the Union, she emphasized one big issue: voter suppression. Voter suppression makes progressive policy ambitions extremely difficult by determining who is represented and who is tactically left out. And the forces that make "it harder to register and stay on the rolls" that "mov[e] and clos[e] polling places" and that "reject lawful ballots"? Those are extensions of a much longer, deeply insidious current of racism in the United States. Last September, Bob spoke with historian Carol Anderson about the history of disenfranchisement in this country and where things stand today. Listen here. | | | We've asked Facebook for an interview several times over the past fifteen years and they've always said no. This week they said yes! | | | Thanks for listening, and for reading. We love feedback, so please contact us with any questions or comments. We're busy, but we read them all, promise. | | | | | | |
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