Middle East Mayhem, Building Super Batteries, Native Beats

Coming up on today’s show:

• This weekend, The New York Times Magazine will publish something akin to a short book. The issue will feature a single, very long nonfiction narrative about what has gone wrong in the Middle East over the last 13 years. Scott Anderson, author of the piece and of the book “Lawrence of Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the making of the Modern Middle East,” discusses this project. 

• Robert Amsterdam is a founding partner of Amsterdam & Partners, and is currently working with the Turkish government on its extradition case against Fethullah Gulen, a former ally to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that is living in exile in Pennsylvania. Turkish officials argue that Gluen inspired this summer’s failed coup, and Amsterdam says that Gulen’s entrenchment in the American political and education system is reason enough to prosecute.

• The Arab Spring promised hope, but years later, places like Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Kurdistan still haven’t seen the dream of progress materialize. Asha Castleberry, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq from 2012 to 2015, reflects the continued breakdown of the Middle East. 

• This week, Olympian Michael Phelps showed off his love of cupping, an alternative medicine practice that is used to allegedly treat everything from anemia to anxiety and depression. What other performance enhancing methods do professional athletes use to get a competitive edge? Dennis Cardone, an associate professor of orthopedic surgery and chief of primary care sports medicine at at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, weighs in. 

• In the desert outside Reno, Nevada, Tesla is building the world’s largest battery factory known as the Gigafactory, and Panasonic is investing heavily in it. Joseph M. Taylor, chairman and CEO of Panasonic North America, discusses the company’s $1.6 billion commitment to produce the lithium-ion batteries necessary for electric cars.

• We continue our summer protest music series with Tim Hill from A Tribe Called Red, a Canadian DJ collective that mixes Native American activism with electronic beats.