Thorns Have Roses

We speak to Dr. Nidhi Gonnakuti and Rohith Vedira, a civil contractor building COVID-19 facilities, about their experiences as frontline workers during the deadly second wave in India. We also talk about the vaccine shortage, super-spreader events, and how government negligence led to where we are now.

In this episode, Christina and Anurag discuss the inadequacies of new terms in American English to describe life during the pandemic. If you’re also sick of ‘pandemic wall,’ Christina gives examples of words in other languages that better capture complex, emotional responses to world events.

Anurag takes you on a 15 minute world tour of dumplings. We discuss the origin of dumplings and talk about some lesser known dumplings from around the world.

Lastly, Christina talks about the most recent slate of food travel shows by American hosts trying to understand a “nation of immigrants” through its food. What are they trying to tell us, and what gets left unsaid?

Links to words:
Neijuan (内卷)
Weltschmerz

Links to dumplings:
Ethiopian dumplings: Tihlo
Georgian dumplings: Khinkali

Links to recommendations:
Salt Fat Acid Heat: Episode 2 on salt (on Netflix)
Georgian folk singers: Trio Mandili
Chinese vlogger: Liziqi

This week, we're in conversation with Dr. Michael Svoboda, a professor of writing at George Washington University, to discuss how the climate crisis is depicted in movies and books. 

We talk about why movies aren’t exactly inspiring us to change the world through climate change stories, and how we can improve that. 

Dr. Svoboda regularly reviews most forms of climate related media, and he shares with us some of his favorite cli-fi films.

In this week's episode, we revisit surveillance systems with Karen Li Xan Wong and look at how governments and corporations use our data to track us. She explains how these systems are all around us and all around the world.

There have been reports this week that the EU is planning to regulate the use of AI for mass surveillance and social credit systems.

This episode is a good introduction to this topic, which we investigated thoroughly in our previous episode "One of many: China's social credit system."
  

In this episode, we chat with psychiatrist Sharat Vallurupalli about his time treating patients during COVID-19 and how we should be rethinking what 'health' means. Is the rise of people seeking therapy because there is more awareness about mental health, or is there something about modern society that is making us ill?

Warning: there is some discussion of physician suicide.

The ‘social credit system’ in China has people worried about the dystopian future that is unfolding. But what actually is the system in China, and what does Western media get wrong about it? Are there similar types of systems all around us that we don’t even notice? We talk about all of this and more with Xin Dai, a law professor at Peking University who has studied the ‘social credit system’ extensively.

Link to Xin Dai's paper about the reputation systems and China's system from 2018: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3193577

This episode, Christina talks about anti-Asian violence as a Chinese American, the lack of cohesion in the Asian American community, and why she doesn’t think anti-Asian hate will end anytime soon. 

Anurag talks about how he thinks his years growing up in India were very different to kids who grow up in the US in one big way.

Finally Anurag also talks about ghost forests, a climate change phenomenon leading to stretches of dead coastal forests.

We introduce ourselves, talk about why we're making this podcast, and go over some of the topics we'll be covering.