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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The bewildering number of news organizations has inspired entrepreneurs to create ways to rank them. The most prominent of them is NewsGuard . It ranks media organizations based on their trustworthiness and then provides these rankings to large corporate advertisers. NewsGuard’s co-CEOs are Steven Brill and Gordon Crovit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Rates of mental illness across the Western world are surging, with young people being disproportionately impacted. From an exponential increase in referrals to pediatric gender clinics to substantial upticks in depression and anxiety diagnoses, the younger generation has never been more unhappy. A common explanation for...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Over the last three years, reading scores for 13-year-olds in the United States have fallen fourteen points, while math scores fell nine points. Reading scores are now the lowest they’ve been since 2004, and math scores are back where they were around 1990. But instead of finding ways to address this crisis in American e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news When Asra Nomani, an advocate for children and a self-described “Muslim feminist,” came to my house to record our podcast episode, she brought with her two piles of books. Many of those books are a part of the new literary curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland.  The stack included toddler board books like “Pride Pupp...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news by Michael Shellenberger For most of the post-war period, liberalism in the United States was defined around freedom of speech, the needs of the working class, and the fight against racism and sexism. It was liberals who defended the right to burn the American flag, and of neo-Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Hol...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Last month, Hunter Biden struck a deal with federal prosecutors. He’ll plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and avoid jail time. The crime? Writing off escorts and a sex club membership as “business expenses.“ New documents suggest Hunter — and his dad, “the big guy” — got off easy. Senator Chuck Grassley on Thursday rel...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is also one of the plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case and is suing the federal government for coordinating with social media services to censor users.  Yesterday, Public published a story containing pre...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news In 1973, Dr. Stephen Levine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, was introduced to the world of gender medicine when his supervisor sent him a patient who wished to become a woman. The patient told Dr. Levine that he had been sitting under an oak tree with a gun in his mouth, and he had...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news by Michael Shellenberger One of the most worrisome trends of our time is the devaluing of young men. We have filled their heads with dumb superhero fantasies and undermined their quest for authenticity and individuality. We have not required enough of them and thus deprived them of the adversity they need. And we have de...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news This morning, Matt Taibbi asked a question that we’ve long been struggling with ourselves here at Public: Where have all the liberals gone? The old-school leftists who protested Tipper Gore’s parental advisory warnings on records and CDs in the 1980s, the ones that were outraged by the efforts of the late Senator Jesse H...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news In March, I told members of Congress that in addition to defunding and dismantling the Censorship Industrial Complex, they should mandate that government officials and Big Tech social media platforms be transparent about all censorship (“content moderation”) requests and actions relating to social and political issues. I...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news by Michael Shellenberger Just a few weeks ago, I was lamenting the absence of any new nonfiction book that I really wanted to read. Many new books of late should have been long articles and were joyless to read. Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays,  A Heretic’s Mani...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The July 4 ruling that the federal government must not demand censorship by social media companies is a major setback in the war on disinformation, reports the New York Times yesterday. The reason, says The Times, is that the Trump-appointed judge and other Republicans have fallen prey to a conspiracy theory that a Censo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Over the last few weeks, we have documented the global crackdown on freedom around the world. Members of the UK parliament want to read your text messages without a warrant. The Irish government wants to be able to enter homes and read phones and computers without a warrant. The European Union is seeking to impose sweepi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Over the past several years, Canada’s drug crisis has spiraled out of control with no signs of slowing. From January 2020 to June 2021, nearly 10,000 Canadians died from opioid overdoses – fentanyl detected in an overwhelming majority. This is familiar to us in the U.S., but the Trudeau administration’s approach to comba...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For a moment last week, the war in Ukraine appeared to have arrived at an almost inconceivable turning point. The Wagner Group, a brutal mercenary army the Kremlin deploys to conduct off-book military operations around the world, from Mali to Syria, did an about-face from its position in Ukraine and invaded the motherlan...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Yesterday, Public reported on the new House Judiciary Commiteee report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been engaged in an effort with big tech companies to censor American citizens. The headline finding was that the people involved knew that what they were doing was wrong. “It’s onl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For decades, Union Rescue Mission President and CEO Andy Bales has lived the values he preaches, caring for the most vulnerable among us and inspiring hope in the darkest places. He has also been a relentless gadfly in L.A.’s homelessness debate, a lone voice advocating recovery and community-based services amid the din...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news If you’re a paid subscriber and are not getting our full podcast episodes on your podcast player, go to https://public.substack.com/account  and follow the instructions to set up a private feed. Despite living and practicing in the very blue state of Oregon, Stephanie Winn, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, reali...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news As more pieces of the UFO puzzle emerge, the picture doesn’t get clearer, just bigger and more complex. The idea of UFOs may make some roll their eyes, but simply put, these aerial craft are unattributed to a known source. Many cases of UFOs can certainly be connected to foreign technology or even classified research tha...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news If you’re a paid subscriber and are not getting our full podcast episodes on your podcast player, go to https://public.substack.com/account  and follow the instructions to set up a private feed. On February 17, 2020, The New York Times and the Washington Post suggested that the lab leak hypothesis was a “ fringe theory ”...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Some time in the mid-2010s, a strange idea exploded into public consciousness. It was the idea that some men are women, and some women are men. Caught off-guard, many people, failing to see the harm, went along with it, thinking it was meant in a metaphorical sense. Helen Joyce, author of Trans: Gender Identity and the N...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news In March, Public published my essay, “Why Are We Sterilizing Children?” It argued that the sudden explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender in recent years is a “social contagion,” much like anorexia before it.  Scientific support for that hypothesis comes from a 2018 study by Brown University’s Lisa Littm...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Nationalism is synonymous with fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism in many people’s minds. The ideology brought us World War II, Saddam Hussein, and Vladamir Putin. But nationalism isn’t necessarily any of those things, argues historian Michael Lind. “Almost all of the states in the United Nations General Assembly are nat...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For a year and three months, we’ve been told there’s only one correct position on the war in Ukraine. In a sense, that’s true: Russia’s invasion of the country is morally indefensible. It’s hard to imagine even the most cynical pretext for cheering Moscow on. Fortunately, nobody is doing that. Not even Oliver Stone . But...