Chatter Lawfare

In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started. 
Strausbaugh’s new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth’s orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren’t quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space. 
The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival. 
Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include: 
The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs 
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff  
Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X  
Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline 
Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html 
Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/ 
More about John Strausbaugh:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve 
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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Raised in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), Dr. Anaïs Maurer is assistant professor of literature at Rutgers University and author of The Ocean on Fire. Her research and writing, including this book, have explored the intersection of the legacy of colonial powers' massive nuclear detonations in Oceania, critical threats from climate change, and the stories the people of Oceania tell about it all.
David Priess chatted with Maurer about her experience growing up in Oceania, the scope of the nuclear detonations in the region, how the people of Oceania have addressed radiation effects through stories, why cultural resilience has remained a greater theme than individualism or victimhood, how these narratives inform our current era of climate change, and more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book The Ocean on Fire by Anaïs Maurer
The book Quand le cannibale ricane by Paul Tavo
The short story "Eden" in the collection Vai: La Rivière au ciel sans nuages by Ra'i Chaze
The book The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
The visual art French Apocalypse Now by Cronos
The Coconut poetry series by Teresa Teaiwa
The book Pensées insolentes et inutiles by Chantal Spitz
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.


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Tim Alberta is an American journalist and author, and son of an evangelical pastor. Following his father’s death in 2019, Alberta began a four year journey, talking to American evangelicals ranging from megachurch pastors who preach to thousands to pastors at churches with a few dozen congregants to understand the schism occurring in the American evangelical community. His book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” puts American evangelicalism under a microscope as Alberta grapples with how the community he grew up in has changed.
Lawfare Associate Editor Anna Hickey spoke to Alberta about what led him to write this book, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the evangelical community, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, what Croatian theologist Miroslav Volf warns about creeping totalitarianism that results from religion, how evangelicals talk about Christian nationalism, and more.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:

The book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” by Tim AlbertaReporting in The Atlantic by Jennifer Senior
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was recorded by Noam Osband and produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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Migration has always been a part of humanity's story. It will continue to be so long after any of us now living are gone. Population shifts in the coming century, spurred by climate change, are on track to become more extreme than at any point in our history--with hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people on the move. 
For this episode, David Priess spoke with Gaia Vince, self-described former scientists and author of the book Nomad Century (among other works), about various aspects of climate change-driven mass migration, including perceptions of borders across history, attitudes toward climate change mitigation vs. adaptation, why the "Dubai model" isn't a global solution, demographic shifts in the global north, migration as a cause of evolutionary and cultural development, myths about migrants and jobs and wages, nurses from the Philippines as a case study, how enlightened leadership can guide the most productive migration outcomes, and much more.
Works mentioned in this episode:
The book Transcendence by Gaia Vince
The book Nomad Century by Gaia Vince
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

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David Ignatius has worked at the Washington Post for more than 35 years in various roles and won many awards. He has written a column on foreign affairs for 25 years and reported some of the most significant national security stories over the last couple of decades. And he has done it while pumping out best-selling spy thrillers.
Lawfare Research fellow Matt Gluck spoke with Ignatius about his newest spy thriller, Phantom Orbit, which is a story of intelligence and the advance of space technology in the age of intensified geopolitical competition between the U.S., China, and Russia. They spoke about Ignatius’s character development in the book, what the book reveals about the new strategic space race, gender in the Central Intelligence Agency, and scientific discovery, among other things.
For more about David:
His book “Phantom Orbit”David’s Twitter Page
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.


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For a period of time in the 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, employer in the city of Miami. The CIA had set up a base of operations there, aimed primarily at undermining the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. From those early days, writes historian Vince Houghton, the Cold War battle against communism shaped the city, which he says should rank among the world’s great capitals of espionage. 
Houghton and co-author Eric Driggs, both Miami natives, chronicle the city’s spooky history in their rolicking new book Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami. Houghton spoke to Shane Harris about some of the colorful characters that span this decades-long story, why Miami has played such a pivotal role in the history of U.S. spying, and how the the Cuban intelligence service became one of the best in the world. 
The books, people, events, films, TV shows, video games, and actors discussed in this book include: 
Covert City https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/vince-houghton/covert-city/9781541774575/?lens=publicaffairs The Mariel Boatlift https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/cuba/mariel_port.htm Operation Mongoose https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose “Griselda” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15837600/ “Contra,” the video game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_(video_game) Queen of Cuba: An FBI Agent's Insider Account of the Spy Who Evaded Detection for 17 Years https://44thand3rdbookseller.com/book/9781637589595 Chatter episode about Montes with author Jim Popkin https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter-podcast-ana-montes-american-who-spied-cuba-jim-popkin 537 Votes https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13128292/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 
More about Vince Houghton 
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/News-Highlights/Article/Article/2423003/from-soldier-to-scholar-vince-houghton-named-director-of-national-cryptologic-m/ https://twitter.com/intelhistorian?lang=en 
Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.