On The Time of Monsters: Alexander Sammon on toiling in the grift machine.
The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Almost everyone who is on line or even has a cell phone has encountered a familiar and
perplexing nuisance: an email or text with a job offer to make lots of money while working from
home. These messages seem like obvious scams but how do they work? Alexander Sammon, a
feature writer for Slate, conducted a personal experiment to find out by taking one of the jobs
he was offered. The result is a hilarious article detailing not just what it’s like to be ripped off
but also illuminating the new grift economy that flourishes in the internet age as Donald Trump
pursues his agenda of deregulation and the promotion of crypto currency. I had enormous fun
both reading Alex’s article (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and talking to him about
his strange experiences.
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Almost everyone who is online or even has a cell phone has encountered a familiar and perplexing nuisance: an e-mail or text with a job offer to make lots of money while working from home. These messages seem like obvious scams, but how do they work? Alexander Sammon, a feature writer for Slate, conducted a personal experiment to find out by taking one of the jobs he was offered. The result is a hilarious article detailing not just what it’s like to be ripped off but also illuminating the new grift economy that flourishes in the Internet age as Donald Trump pursues his agenda of deregulation and the promotion of cryptocurrency. I had enormous fun both reading Alex’s article (which I can’t recommend highly enough) and talking to him about his strange experiences.
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The Time of Monsters podcast features Nation national-affairs correspondent Jeet Heer’s signature blend of political culture and cultural politics. Each week, he’ll host in-depth conversations with urgent voices on the most pressing issues of our time.
Iran is facing upheavals at home and abroad. For more than two decades, the Islamic republic
has faced waves of protests from citizens demanding a more democratic society. Over the past
two weeks, these protests have erupted with a new ferocity and are being met with violent
repression. Meanwhile, the Israeli government is pushing the United States to renew bombing
Iran, a military objective now being given the guise of a humanitarian mission. To discuss the
turmoil in Iran and place it in the larger context of regional instability and competing visions of
the future of the Middle East, I spoke with Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at The Quincy
Institute who studies the region.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.