Bukele: el señor de Los sueños I’m rather proud of myself for reaching the end of this series, spoken completely in Spanish (although I admit to having to read the Spanish transcript alongside it). I’ve been listening to it for literally months, with a long gap in between. I finally listened to Episode 6 today, where Bukele has stacked the court and congress sufficiently to obtain a consecutive period as president, even though this is explicitly outlawed in the constitution. There is a final Extra episode, where they discuss the way that Bukele has become a role model for other Latin American countries that want to ‘solve’ their problem with gangs. If you can speak Spanish, it’s really worth listening to. You can find all the Spanish episodes here.
The Daily El Nino is Back. And Worse Than Ever There’s a lot of talk about the upcoming El Nino event. This is a very clear episode featuring Chico Harlan, the global climate correspondent for The New York Times. He points out that the El Nino event takes place in a rectangle in the Pacific Ocean that stretches from the South American continent at Peru and across to Hawaii. Temperatures have already gone up .5 degree, and are expected to reach 2degrees- and maybe even 3 degrees- which makes it a mega El Nino. The effect is often seen in the years following the El Nino event (which is called El Nino because Peruvian native people noticed dead fish washing up on their shore in November/Dec and they called it El Nino de la Navidad – the child/son of Christmas). The problem is that we are facing a mega-El Nino at a time when we also have climate change, which is likely to make it more extreme. There is no scientific consensus over separating out El Nino from climate change: they may be affecting each other, or maybe not and we don’t have the records to prove whether El Ninos are becoming stronger. But perhaps 2027 with its mega El Nino will give us a preview of what is coming.
Journey Through Time Episode 36 The Art of Manipulation: The History of Reality TV Episode 2 Here Sarah Churchwell and David Olusoga return to the American Family program from the 1970s that we left in Episode 1. The family featured, the Louds, already had a rocky marriage and the program showed a family undergoing a divorce. Many people began judging them, and as the first Reality TV victims the parents felt that they had to engage with the criticism. However, their gay son Lance was the first Reality TV star. He was already out to his family, but the show put a human face onto a social phenomenon. The BBC produced a similar show in 1974 called The Family, but unlike the American show, they chose a working class family, exposing the family to an open season of judgement. The next iteration of reality TV was a program called Living in the Past which had groups of adults and their children living in an Iron Age village c.200 BCE. They stayed there for 13 months- something that would not be allowed today, especially with children, but the camera was only there one day a week. What changed Reality TV was technological change. Film was expensive, and American Family required a 25 hrs of filming to generate 1 hour of television, and it took one year to edit. Once magnetic tape was invented, it was possible to film 1000 hours cheaply to generate that hour, and it could be computer-edited quickly . In 1992 MTV used this technology to present The Real World, where they brought in a group of young people into a plush apartment in different cities for each of their 33 (!!) seasons. The casting was manipulated to evoke conflict, and there was a ‘confession booth’ where the participants were interviewed. But it wasn’t just the cast that was manipulated: the audience was manipulated as well. It became increasingly gamified, with challenges set and the format was syndicated throughout the world.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 