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Things Fell Apart (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds Doomsday Watch With Arthur Snell (Podmasters) | apple.comBreakfast (BBC 5 live) | BBC Sounds

A couple of new series to make you feel clever. First up, the inimitable author and broadcaster Jon Ronson is back on Radio 4 (and BBC Sounds) with Things Fell Apart, in which he considers todays culture wars. As hinted at by the title, which refers to WB Yeatss poem The Second Coming (things fall apart; the centre cannot hold), Ronson is looking at extremes of argument. Actually, hes searching for the source of those arguments: the event or idea that eventually resulted in the horribly polarised disputes that now rage across social media. QAnon, trans rights, cancel culture you get the idea. Political dog whistles. Dinner party bombs. Family-splitters.

Ronsons approach is non-confrontational hes a non-confrontational man and very similar to the one he used in his excellent The Butterfly Effect podcast. Essentially he looks at how a small act can have unforeseen ripple effects. In The Butterfly Effect, it was when a chap called Fabian decided to offer free online porn. Ronson traced that effect across the world, meeting people whose lives were utterly wrecked by the unexpected consequences.

In Things Fell Apart, his vision is more focused, covering a different topic in each of its eight episodes. The first concentrates on the argument between US pro-life anti-abortionists and those who favour women having easily accessible, legal abortion services. Ah, Roe v Wade, I hear you say. But the story is more unexpected than that. Ronson manages to pinpoint the start of the anti-abortion movement among American evangelicals to, of all places, 1960s Switzerland and a vaguely hippy young man, Frank Schaeffer, who wanted to become a film director. Without giving too much away, the programme traces a direct line from Schaeffers youthful filmic hopes right through to an abortion doctor in the US being shot and killed in his home. Ronson interviews Schaeffer, who thoroughly regrets everything that has happened since. Its quite astonishing.

In the next episode, Ronson talks to Alice Moore, a US pastors wife who manoeuvred herself on to a local schools board in the 1970s because she wasnt happy about the text books on the curriculum. Somehow this leads to a Roger McGough poem, which Moore misinterpreted as being more permissive than it is (Ronson talks to McGough). Her campaign also led to important black writers being excluded from the school libraries. All in the name of protecting children.

So, great research. But Ronson is also a brilliant interviewer, asking the toughest of questions in an amiable, amused way, disarming his interviewees and allowing them to put their own point of view. Because Things Fell Apart is a radio show, there are time restrictions, and each episode is cut and polished to perfection; carved and crafted, like a teeny Japanese netsuke sculpture. Every element matters, and this is a thoroughly satisfying listen.

Doomsday Watch enlightens as it scares the living doo-dah out of you. From indie company Podmasters, this has former diplomat and counter-terrorism operative Arthur Snell talking to experts about which of todays rocky world situations might trigger the apocalypse. Yay!

First up: civil war in America. Or: Trump supporters go fully tonto. No time restrictions on this show, so each expert is allowed to speak freely, which is great. But theyre so erudite that I found I needed an occasional breather from their relentless brilliance and logic. Also, casually delivered sentences such as there are more guns than people in America and Trumps Republican party has decided to ignore any election result that doesnt suit them do have an effect. Excuse me while I breathe into a paper bag.

The next two episodes consider China and Putin and are equally fascinating. Interestingly, each involves a powerful man wanting to return his country to what seems like better times: Make America/China/Russia Great Again. All that potential devastation because middle-aged men tend to believe that life was better when they were young and virile.

On 5 live, Rick Edwards has started his new breakfast gig, presenting alongside veteran Rachel Burden. Hes doing very well, actually: holding his own, whether chatting to listeners or grilling sporting greats. Weirdly, ex-host Nicky Campbell has been popping up on Breakfast every day, in order to promote his new phone-in show, which now runs from 9-11am. Campbell can never resist a little alpha-male-ing, saying on Monday that he was answering Burden as though he was still hosting alongside her.

Edwards is up to the challenge though. On Tuesday, he made a quip about fake bonhomie, and Campbell was reduced to God, hes good, isnt he? Campbell shouldnt worry about leaving Breakfast: his phone-in show is as excellent as youd imagine, and 5 live seems to have managed this important transition very smoothly indeed.

Original post:
The week in audio: Things Fell Apart; Doomsday Watch; 5 live Breakfast - The Guardian

A Black principal who resigned after critics accused him of teaching critical race theory to students said educators are "dealing with people that are delusional" as school district culture wars rage on.

"They're not grounded in any sort of reality," the principal, James Whitfield, told Insider."It is important that we meet that delusion with what's real and we speak truth, and we're unapologetic in our stance to stand firmly in what is true and right."

Whitfield announced his resignation as principal of Colleyville Heritage High School near Fort Worth, Texas, last week after a saga that dates back to summer 2020, which was sparked after sent a letter to the school community saying that systemic racism is "alive and well" as racial justice protests swept the nation.

In the letter, which was reviewed by Insider, Whitfield urged the community to "commit to being an anti-racist."

Whitfield, 43, told Insider that he initially received positive responses to the letter, but that changed in July 2021.

During a July 31 Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board meeting, a former school board candidate alleged that Whitfield was teaching and promoting "critical race theory," a learning approach that examines racial bias in US laws and institutions.

The academic theory, which is mostly taught at the university level and doesn't feature in Colleyville Heritage High School's curriculum, has become a target in the last year for conservative leaders and parents concerned by baseless claims of students being indoctrinated.

The man said Whitfield has "extreme views" and called for his contract to be terminated as other attendees at the meeting applauded and cheered in the background.

Whitfield denied promoting critical race theory and told Insider that it has been eye-opening to see non-partisan school boards turn into "political battlegrounds."

Whitfield was placed on leave paid leave on August 30, though the district told CNN at the time that it was not related to the critical race theory accusations.

According to a settlement document reviewed by Insider, Whitfield agreed to resign last week and will remain on paid leave until August 15, 2023.

In a joint statement, the school district and Whitfield said they "have mutually agreed to resolve their disputes."

Whitfield told Insider he's "devastated" and that he misses his students and staff.

He said he's gotten mostly positive support and encouragement since the backlash, but has also been called harsh names and received racist messages in the mail.

Whitfield isn't quite sure what his next chapter will look like, but he said he wants to continue having an impact in young people's lives.

"I just want to be part of something that helps bring people together helps just make the world a better place," he said.

Read more from the original source:
Black principal who faced CRT accusations: 'We're dealing with people that are delusional' - Insider

Delegates attend the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Delegates attend the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland

Sean Buchan has started every day of the past two weeks at his computer, tracking narratives about the COP26 U.N. climate summit.

He looks for claims like one about the electric cars ferrying dignitaries around Glasgow being powered by diesel generators. That isn't true: the cars were recharged by generators burning lower-emission vegetable oil.

"But that was subtly left out of the information when it was tweeted or posted, and it makes it seem like the whole of COP26 is running on diesel," Buchan said. "It's not false. But it is highly misleading."

Buchan, an analyst at the British climate-advocacy group Stop Funding Heat, is part of a global team of activists and online researchers that has been tracking false and misleading claims about climate change while world leaders have met in Glasgow.

The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has long studied online extremism and terrorism, led the effort.

"Climate is being co-opted into this universe of antigovernment sentiment. It's being weaponized by groups that have extremist or conspiracist affiliations," said Jennie King, a senior policy manager at ISD who coordinated the team.

Her team's chief concern was that climate deniers and conspiracists alike would spread messages on social media that risked undermining the summit negotiations and, more broadly, global action to tackle climate change.

Buchan and King say they've witnessed how online influence campaigns can thwart public policy.

In 2009, climate scientists' emails were hacked ahead of another U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. Climate deniers used the hack to manufacture a scandal known as "Climategate," fueling doubt in climate change and dealing a blow to the summit. In 2019, right-wing activists used social media to pressure European governments to drop their support for a U.N. global migration agreement by making it seem like opposition was widespread.

In both cases, "we were able to look back and go, 'wow, all of this coordinated activity put some countries into doubt,'" Buchan said. "What we're trying to do is catch things like that before or while they happen, so we can maybe find a solution before it derails an entire agreement."

Over the last year, ISD and its partners built what King calls an "early warning system: a set of dashboards to monitor climate discussions on Facebook, Twitter and other websites. Every day of the summit, analysts have been poring over the dashboards' constantly updating feeds of climate denialism, misleading memes and viral news articles.

King has sent out daily email bulletins to hundreds of subscribers, including climate organizations, media outlets, scientists, and policy makers about the narratives gaining the most traction.

King says before the summit started, she wondered whether she'd mainly see attacks on specific topics under negotiation, like carbon markets or curbing methane emissions.

Instead, "climate has absolutely become part of the culture wars," she said.

Many of the influencers the group has tracked are long-time climate deniers. Some are linked to the fossil fuel industry.

But increasingly, they include figures who post online all kinds of hoaxes and conspiracies. And those who've long claimed that climate change is a pretext for government overreach are pointing to similar false claims about lockdowns to stop the spread of COVID-19 both framed as authorities' excuses to strip people of their freedom.

"Language around things like climate lockdown is bleeding into spaces that were formed around anti-vax sentiment or around QAnon-affiliated arguments," King said.

"These are not communities that were particularly interested or dedicated to climate to begin with, but they have found a way to connect those other world views or ideologies with fear about the future of climate change response."

She says when misleading or outright false climate claims become embedded in this web of conspiracies, it makes them harder to fight. And that could hamper even more the world's ability to take big, bold action on a global crisis.

More:
These researchers are trying to stop misinformation from derailing climate progress - NPR

The memories of wedging into an outfield reserve seat of the electrifying, drafty and almost surreal coliseum of the Twin Cities, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, will always be some of my most deeply cherished as a Twins fan. During the eras of success under the dome, reporters would compare the decibel level of the crowd to that of a large jet at the nearby Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Throughout the dynastic years of Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, Torii Hunter, Johan Santana and Joe Nathan, comparisons tended to fall flat for Minnesota natives.

But alongside peak fandom in the Metrodome came heart-wrenching defeats, most of which fans attributed to the managerial woes of former manager Ron Gardenhire. Fiery, impassioned and regimented, Gardenhire, who ranks seventh on the all-time manager ejections list, would shout and stomp his way through 85- to 90-win seasons, all the while eyeing his first playoff series win since 2002. His trademark altercations with home plate umpires gave the fanbase life during a time when the near-supersonic big-moment success of the teams two World Championships was nothing short of lackluster.

Much like his MLB counterparts, Gardenhire offered a method behind the madness in Minnesota. Real-time decisions to keep the bullpen cold and let Francisco Liriano paint a complete-game masterpiece became the life force of his managerial role. Gameplay strategy on the basis of trusting his guys placed an undeniable weight on his shoulders, still in the shadow of Moneyballs introduction into the game.

Years later, Ron Gardenhires leadership feels like an all too distant era. The rapid infiltration of data into almost every aspect of the game has forcibly and indefinitely shifted the role of a good manager. Dugout deliberations adhere to tried-and-true predictive algorithms at the fingertips of every coaching staff. The dynamic duo of robot umpires and robust video replay virtually reduces the classic tirades of Gardenhire to relics of the past. Analytical insights on pitching make lengthy starting pitcher performances, and all of the managerial wisdom that hangs in the balance, true anomalies.

The role of the MLB skipper is changing, perhaps more rapidly than fans might realize.

With general managers behind closed doors stripping dugouts of more decision-making responsibilities than ever before, a pretty significant dilemma is destined to present itself to MLB offices: How much baseball knowledge is necessary for a successful tenure as manager?

Undoubtedly, the human aspects of managing communication, personality management, real-time health evaluation and support for players are not going anywhere. They cant go anywhere. Algorithms cant act as charismatic spokespersons to reporters.

All things considered, interacting with elite baseball players, I would argue, requires some experience on the diamond. Building relationships and establishing common ground with an ever-evolving mix of diverse players certainly calls for some first-hand experience of the grind at a high level.

Could mere sports therapists, conflict specialists or psychologists that implement the data-driven choices of the front office without batting an eye fit the mold? Could former Ivy League student-athletes with advanced degrees in sociology have what it takes to manage in a data-driven baseball landscape? In all likelihood, no. The most successful managers at any level of the game maintain agency behind their decisions.

Studies have proven that athletes thrive in an environment of trust. Pitchers jog from the bullpen and take the mound with confidence that their manager supports them, trusts them, believes in them. Culture wars within locker rooms have utterly debilitated organizations; safeguarding against so-called culture problems starts at points of leadership, particularly those with agency in the decisions that they make. Simply relaying the calculated and quantified choices of the front office with no dugout involvement leaves very little room for trust between players and coaches.

Enjoy the Gardenhire tirades while we still have them. Take heart in knowing that decisive managers are here to stay.

Excerpt from:
The future of baseball skippers - Observer Online

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Cant Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015s So Youve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.

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His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the satanic panic who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).

We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronsons new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.

Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceauescus belongings?

Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.

JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.

AC I bought Ceauescus cap, and a pair of socks.

JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I dont even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.

AC I do, actually.

JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find Im asking you questions because Im trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: Dont think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here. There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.

AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, Im trying to remember when we actually met.

JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.

AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.

JR She probably said: I cant take it any more. He wont stop agonising.

AC But when we met you didnt agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other and its been the professional bond between us is that were both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.

JR Im really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.

AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what its like to be an obsessive individualist, but weve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which youve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. Ive always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that youve done it. You cant post anything online. When you say that to people, they cant conceive of it.

JR I really like that idea.

AC The other thing that we both do when were interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly theyll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. Its like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.

JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that theres a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.

AC Were talking about sincerity? Dont go there, Jon! Youll be writing poems next.

JR [Laughs] Well its really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that Ive worked hard to come to the thoughts Ive come to.

AC Yes, I agree with that.

JR I guess what we have in common is were not ideologues. We dont go into a situation with a set of agendas. Were more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that were forced to keep an open mind. I dont even have a list of questions in my head when Im interviewing somebody. Im literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.

AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And its absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what were calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What Im increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What youve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.

JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show thats about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didnt want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.

AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.

JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church ministers wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasnt having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at in fact, shots were fired from both sides and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].

AC By Roger McGough!

JR Yes. It was a poem [1967s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: I dont think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent. So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.

AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: Hang on, this isnt quite as bad as she thinks it is. And then, Jons brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.

JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.

AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. Its good versus evil thats where journalism has got to now. But yours doesnt do that.

JR Im interested in everybody as a human being and Im quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.

AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that its just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, its extraordinary. Its a conspiracy theory. Thats as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.

JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: Oh my God. All this time Ive just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trumps election, George Floyd. So they think its not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think its completely understandable and, in some cases, its a great thing. But then in other cases, its really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.

AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that theyve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.

JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think its going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasnt just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.

AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that theres something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. Its almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. Its become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someones got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.

Jon Ronsons Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtiss Cant Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.

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Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: 'How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?' - The Guardian