Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Eric Klinenberg, professor in social science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, to discuss his recent book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed.  First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Israel’s staunch refusal to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, a tentative hold on US ammo to Israel, famine in Gaza, Missouri abortion rights, starvation in Sudan, US labor law, the downfall of Henry Cuellar, and Utah’s new tip line for anonymous genital reports. Professor Eric Klinenberg then joins, as he, Sam, and Emma preface the conversation with the idea of “natural disasters” largely being a function of society’s capacity to deal with natural phenomena, with “2020” looking at what the crises under COVID revealed about the incredibly precarious, fractured, and individualist society of the United States. Expanding on this, Professor Klinenberg tackles the ethnographic nature of this work, and the overwhelming nature of the trauma suffered by the public during the pandemic, something also seen during the Spanish Flu epidemic in the early 20th Century. After further contextualizing the United State’s role as an outlier in many regards when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, including its supposedly elite levels of preparedness and its disproportionate failure in preventing deaths, Eric walks Sam and Emma through the unique failure that faced the US in the form of a complete abdication of leadership from the federal government – led (at the time) by the Trump Administration – in favor of extreme politicization, nihilism, and polarization at a time where social solidarity was of the utmost importance. Klinenberg looks at the glimmers of hope found throughout these crises, and how the government quickly stamped them out, before exploring the Biden Administration’s particular role in refusing to acknowledge or address the continuing effects of these crises, and the US’ ever-precarious footing heading into the 2024 election.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma watch as Mitt Romney lets the connection between Israel and the TikTok ban slip, and Alan Dershowitz offers to go to legal defense for the ultimate victims of anti-semitism: Christian Zionists. Ole Miss frat boys show up for apartheid, Kristi Noem objects to another fake-news narrative picked up from her autobiography, and Marjorie Taylor Greene just wants to be clear about who’s responsible for Jesus’ death. Jerry Seinfeld finally breaks through the shackles of Big Woke in his newest release "Unfrosted: the Pop-Tart Story", plus, your calls and IMs!

Check out Eric's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671362/2020-by-eric-klinenberg/

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