The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren?t just gossip fuel. They?re a vast business, one that?s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News, where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC New?

We?re in an upside-down moment, in which there seems to be no cost for lying and no respect for honesty. How did we get here? Jennifer Freyd can explain. Since the 1990s she?s been tracking the misbehavior of public figures and the ways that institutions unwittingly betray us. And in the process she discovered and revealed the secret, specific choreogra?

The historian and author Andrew Ward, grew up on the South Side of Chicago and then in India before becoming a historian of colonialism and slavery. He?s also my Dad. I think he?s just the person to discuss the weird moment we?re in, when politicians are trying to erase slavery and racism from the national discussion just when we were starting to take s?

This is the first episode of The Rip Current podcast. Each week I?m going to be interviewing experts in everything from venture capital to the economic impact of slavery to how bullies get the best of us. My first guest is Catherine Bracy, executive director of TechEquity, a nonprofit that examines the ways technology affects equity in areas like labor and housing. She's the author of the new book World Eaters: How Venture Capital is Cannibalizing the Economy, in which Bracy argues that the trouble with tech isn't the people, or the products. It's the money.

Our conversation ranges from the ways founders are trained by VCs to lie about their companies to the "Blitz Scaling" of Washington to Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Era.

For more on these topics, including a look at the VC mindset and where it leads, subscribe at TheRipCurrent.com!

A beautifully designed bar of soap from Lisbon, Portugal had a lot to teach me about life under dictatorship.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, the fascist regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar suppressed free expression, leading artists to pour their creative energies into what they could, including the politically acceptable decorative arts. For me, this bar of soap from Claus Porto - it's gorgeous, and you should buy one - is a symbol of how beauty and artistic distraction repackage themselves to survive oppression, and of how societies before us have leaned into decorative art when nothing else was acceptable. Let?s keep leaning into beauty, but let?s also be conscious of when we begin reshaping beauty to avoid offense, because it can be a symptom of deep national trouble.

I spent the long weekend interviewing technologists at CFPB who left behind the chance to make big money in the private sector so they could work to protect you instead?and got fired for it. The written piece is here, but I wanted to share a few extra takeaways with paid subscribers, including the ridiculousness of accusing these folks of being inefficient, and the self-enrichment potential posed by Elon Musk and his people accessing their competitors? data inside this agency. Thank you for being part of The Rip Current, and let me know in the chat what you think about the role of a regulator and whether they?re worth protecting. If you were in charge of CFPB, what would you have it looking into?

As ever, if you know someone you think would benefit from a look at the big, invisible forces pulling on us right now, please share or recommend my work ? it goes an incredibly long way in helping me draw an audience. Again, I?m so grateful for your support.

This is a weekly audio digest of the latest content, exclusively for paid subscribers to The Rip Current.

This week I write about the jingoistic tech posturing we're going to suffer in the coming weeks, after new Chinese AI models tanked American companies' stocks, and about the current politics of casual destruction and the way profit incentives gobble up everything around them, including your time.

I was often first on the scene for big wildfires during my 10 years as a correspondent for Al Jazeera and NBC News. The lessons I learned, and the ways in which my mind began to shorthand otherwise unimaginable experiences, make the LA fires particularly hard to watch. Here?s some perspective from the front lines. Thinking of you, SoCal.