Slate Plus Podcasts

Former U.S. Senator Harry Reid thinks the expected impeachment trial in the Senate will fail to convict. And Reid should know -- he was in the Senate during the last impeachment trial.

Nick Spark fell down a rabbit hole tracking down the origins of Murphy’s Law, the ubiquitous phrase that says “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”. On this episode of Decoder Ring, we follow Nick on his journey while taking a few detours of our own to find out how Murphy’s Law was [maybe] born out of the rocket sled experiments of the dawning jet age. We talk to Nick, hear some of the recordings he collected during his own research, plus talk to researchers who are skeptical of Nick’s hypothesis, all to try and find out how an obscure engineering aphorism spread to world-conquering philosophical observation. 

This week, Jordan talks to Tamara Ortiz who has been working at Women in Need (WIN) for 23 years. WIN is the largest network of family supportive housing in New York City. Tamara’s job is all about making sure families who are homeless find a safe, helpful environment within WIN’s shelters. And that can mean a lot of things -- from providing daycare to helping students apply to college to giving job training to mothers.  

This week Felix, Emily, and Anna discuss Larry and Sergey, aka The Boys, stepping away from Alphabet, Uber’s big safety report and Silver Lake’s investment in Manchester City soccer. And in the Slate Plus segment: Argentina.

Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Kate Shaw, a professor of law at Cardozo Law School and the co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy. They talk about presidential speech, impeachment, and why figuring out what happens next involves taking a close look at what happened in 1868.