Saturday Morning for Saturday 17 October 2020

8:10 The week in US politics: Nicholas Fandos

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's likely replacement on the Supreme Court, has been grilled about her stance on abortion rights during her confirmation hearing this week.

Facebook and Twitter have restricted access to a controversial New York Post story critical of Joe Biden, raising questions about how social media platforms should tackle misinformation.

And President Trump is back up and dancing, but how are the final weeks of the campaign going for him?

Nicholas Fandos, a reporter based in the Washington bureau for The New York Times, joins us to discuss.

8:35 Esther Woolfson: loving our pets to death

Is the way we breed and keep pet animals essentially cruel and unethical?

Esther Woolfson is an Scottish author and animal lover. Her latest book Between Light and Storm: How We Live With Other Species examines the fraught relationship we have with the animals we rely on for companionship, food, clothing, and sometimes decoration.

A recent extract from the book about pets and how they are bred reportedly became the most popular and widely shared Guardian Long Read ever.

Her previous books are Corvus: A Life with Birds and Field Notes From a Hidden City.

9:05 Nobel Prize winning auction expert Paul Milgrom

Stanford University Professor and Auctionomics co-founder Paul Milgrom has just been awarded a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences alongside his former academic supervisor Professor Robert Wilson.

You might have seen the popular video doing the rounds this week of Wilson ringing Milgrom's doorbell in the middle of the night to let him know he'd won the award!

The two men have been recognised for their work on "...improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats".

Milgrom's acknowledged as the world's foremost authority on auctions and how they work, and designed the US's first radio spectrum auction for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

His know-how about the inner workings of this common market mechanism is claimed to have saved some clients hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile with Google search results also being ranked via a background auction process, there are auctions going on for your attention too.

9:35 Binnie O'Dwyer: lawyer fighting for Aboriginal rights

Lawyer Belinda (Binnie) O’Dwyer was born in Hastings, and now lives in New South Wales where she works for the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS).

A former environmental activist, she’s trying to combat the disproportionately high incarceration rates of Australia’s Aboriginal population.

In some areas Indigenous people are twice as likely to be sentenced to jail as non-Indigenous offenders.

10:05 Feminist philosopher Judith Butler: why gender still causes trouble

Professor Judith Butler is an activist, philosopher, and critical theorist who has spent decades writing about gender.

She's authored several books, but is best known for her widely influential 1990 work Gender Trouble, in which she argues that gender is a kind of performance.

Recently she's spoken up against a vocal minority of feminists who reject the assertion that trans women are women.

Her latest book is The Force of Nonviolence.

10:35 Sarah Kessans: proteins in space

Sarah Kessans started her academic career studying plants; now the self-confessed 'space geek' is a synthetic biologist trying to build New Zealand's role in the global space economy.

Her research takes place on board 10cm3 nano-satellites and aims to understand how protein crystals grow in microgravity.

This knowledge can then be used here on Earth to hopefully design more effective drug treatments, and better foods.

Originally working towards a 2022/23 launch, last month Kessans got the news she can launch her experiments on a UK satellite in April next year.

11:05 Poet Mohamed Hassan: Islamophobia, Aotearoa and me

Mohamed Hassan is an award-winning journalist and poet based in Auckland.

Public Enemy, his 2016 podcast series about the rise of Islamophobia post 9/11, won Gold at the 2017 New York Festival Radio Awards.

Last year he reported extensively on the Christchurch mosque attacks, all while in deep shock as a member of New Zealand's small and connected Muslim community.

He'll share a couple of poems from his soon-to-be-released poetry collection National Anthem.

He's appearing at several events from Nov 6-8 during Wellington's VERB festival and at WORD in Christchurch at the end of October.

11:35 Mary Kisler: The Art of Artemisia Gentileschi

Art historian and curator Mary Kisler is back to discuss the Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition currently on at the National Gallery in London.

Gentileschi (1593 - c.1656) was an Italian Baroque artist, and one of the first women to forge a successful career as a painter.

She painted subjects that were traditionally the preserve of male artists.

 

Books mentioned in this show:

Between Light and Storm: How We Live With Other Species
By Esther Woolfson
ISBN: 9781783782796
Published by Granta

National Anthem
By Mohamed Hassan
Published by Dead Bird Books

Music played in this show

Song: Strange Overtones
Artist: Whitney
Played at: 0830

Song: Slow ride
Artist: Foghat
Played at 09.30

Song: Like a Girl
Artist: Lizzo
Played at 10:35