A very good recovery plan and one year since lockdown

Happy belated Pi Day (3.14)!*

*Also Stephen Curry’s birthday and the anniversary of Marx’s death! (Guess who’s drafting today’s notes?)

0:00 – Seth Berkman’s NYT article on Subway product placements in K-dramas (don’t forget: Subway is evil!), Fatima Bhutto’s book on non-Western entertainment gone global, and whether Taylor Swift listens to BTS.

16:00 – The $1.9 trillion “American Recovery Plan,” or ARP, was signed last week. Is it a new era of Keynesian governance (Zach Carter in NYT) and/or a reversal of a half-century of austerity (Eric Levitz in NY Mag)? We talk: $1,400 checks, childcare credits, and, boo, the failure of the $15 federal minimum wage, and what all this could mean in the long run. (Also, is the new paradigm shift partly a nationalist response to the threat of China?)

44:00 – Covid reflections. What were we doing one year ago when Rudy Gobert’s positive Covid test shut down the NBA (and Tammy’s neighborhood library closed)? Plus: Covid Asian nationalism, loopholes in the vaccine rollout, and retrospectives on last summer’s protests. 

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P.S. – If you’re free Thursday night U.S. time, come to Tammy’s presentation on Camp Humphreys, the U.S.’s largest foreign military base, with poet and translator Eunsong Kim, sponsored by the Heung Coalition, UC Berkeley, and U Mich.

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