WMNF | The mysterious Mr. Thiel. Questions about the news. New piano music.

What do you know about billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel? He has been a behind-the-scenes operator, influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate balance of power between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. Yet despite Thiel’s power and omnipresence, no public figure is so mysterious – until now. In The Contrarian – Peter Thiel and the pursuit of power in Silicon Valley, Thiel’s first major biography, Max chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator’s singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as a child of immigrant parents and his years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader until his founding of PayPal and Palantir, his early investments in Facebook and SpaceX, and his relationships with his tech colleagues the titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian highlights the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values ​​to corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including funding the trial that destroyed the Gawker blog and vigorously supporting far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump as President in 2016. Max chafkin joins Norman B to discuss The Contrarian.

When we have questions about the news headlines, we call Dr. Binoy Campmark for his scholarly insight.

1. What do the recent German elections mean for the rest of the world?

2. Canada grants asylum to refugees who hosted Edward Snowden?

3. The gas crisis in the United Kingdom? Real or test?

4. The New James Bond with Daniel Craig – Are we desperate to relive an era that never really existed?

5. Russia threatens to ban Youtube after shutting down pro-Kremlin channels?

Like always, Binoy unfailingly tackles each question with expert knowledge and a suspicion of wit. Dr. Binoy campmark is Senior Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Still on the show, new Brighton piano music, Poppy Ackroyd. Pause is his fourth full album. A collection of ten solo piano works written during the pandemic and shortly after the birth of her first child, the title refers to the feeling of a normal life temporarily suspended. Poppy said, “For the previous albums almost as much of the creative process was spent editing and manipulating the recordings as it was composing on the piano, but after having my son I struggled to spend time sitting in front of it. a computer. The only thing I wanted to do when he was still little, if I wasn’t with him, was play the piano. In fact, much of the album was written with him asleep on top of me in a sling as I used any quiet moment to compose. It made sense that this was a solo piano album, it was important to me that every song on the album could be fully performed with just two hands on the piano.

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