We are in what Leonard Cohen once sang of as “the Blizzard” – information, misinformation, disinformation coming at us at impossible velocity and size.
To have any hope of making sense of any bit of it, we need speicalists who can communicate – “public intellectuals.”
This being a public intellectual is harder than it looks, and many pundits etc do it badly or not at all (but survive because they are telling their tribe what the tribe wants to hear). Some are broken clocks – right twice a decade or so.
Others push out insane volumes of very high quality stuff, and I am in awe of them and full of gratitude. The one I am thinking of as I bash the keyboard while the cat on my lap purrs and wonders what a feline has to do to get an ear tickle around this place is …. American historian Heather Cox Richardson, who does a daily podcast called “Letter from an American.”
If you want to keep up with the day-to-day crimes and horrors of the Trump gang, and the dismantling of health, education, science etc, I can think of no better place.
I tend to batch them (you do you) and today listened to April 22- 24 while feeding moorhens. The April 22 episode is an example of what HCR does so well. She takes “Earth Day” and shows its roots in Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, quotes Carson to great effect, throws in some more context (the Earthrise photo, the Santa Barbara oil spill, that river catching fire), then pivots to Nixon, Gaylord Nelson and THEN telescopes forward 55 years to the Trump2 administration.
The other podcast episodes are just as good, but not about things that get me viscerally.
This is 15 minutes or so a day of brilliant sense-making/situational awareness. Richardson is scrupulous about citing her sources. What’s not to love?
marchudson.net 
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