The Jacob Shapiro Podcast

Brazil was always the country of the future - prophesied as a new Eden since the sixteenth century, promised great things that never quite arrived. Alex Hochuli’s argument is that the future caught up to Brazil from the other direction. The wealthy world didn’t pull the laggards forward; it declined to meet them. A shrinking middle class, patrimonial politics, collapsing trus...

Eritrea and (a Tigrayan-led) Ethiopia fought one of Africa’s deadliest wars against each other. Then Eritrea helped Ethiopia crush Tigray. Now Eritrea and Tigray are fighting Ethiopia together. Confusing? Super. Nicholas Norbrook of The Africa Report maps the forces pulling at a country that was, until recently, one of the fastest-growing economies on earth - a messianic prim...

Mark Walter bought the Lakers for $10 billion and sold them fourteen months later for $12.5. That's a 20% return - which sounds enormous until you consider that nobody sells the Lakers after a year unless something has gone badly wrong. Chris Branch, author of The Athletic's The Pulse, joins to pull on the thread: life insurance money funding franchise purchases, a U...

Two hundred years ago, Simón Bolívar dreamed of a united Latin America - precisely so it could resist becoming America's backyard. South America may finally be integrating... Just not the way he had in mind. Elohim Monard joins from Pucallpa, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, to trace what Marco Rubio's recent swing through the region actually accomplished, why security is the Mac...

People are being killed over sand. Not diamonds, not lithium, not rare earths - sand, the second-most consumed resource on earth after water, and the one nobody thinks about twice. Mette Bendixen, a geoscientist at McGill, studies where it comes from and who pays the price for it. Dubai imports its sand from Australia. Greenland's melting ice sheet is quietly producing a new ...