Ep. 51 – Why Baseball Matters
March 29, 2018
Baseball is America’s Pastime but can it survive in the technological era when games are longer than most attention spans? Susan Jacoby, author and longtime baseball fan, discusses the history… READ MORE
Category: Social Science
The History of the Nerd
March 28, 2018
Joe Moran— Unlike Scandinavians or Southeast Asians, Americans have no carefully calibrated language for describing different kinds of embarrassment. They have a reputation for seeing shyness as unAmerican. Their cultural… READ MORE
(Self-)Righteous Anger
March 4, 2018
Judson Brewer— In 2010, I went on a monthlong silent retreat with the aim of working on and possibly stabilizing a special c concentration type of meditation practice (jhana) that… READ MORE
Workers of the World
February 13, 2018
Niall Kishtainy— A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’ This is the first line of The Communist Manifesto, which was written in the middle of the nineteenth century and… READ MORE
The Other Middle East
February 10, 2018
Franck Salameh— Middle East specialists of a hundred years ago have traditionally been philologists trained in a dozen or more Middle Eastern languages, including Latin and Greek, but also the… READ MORE
YouTube = MeTube
February 9, 2018
Judson Brewer— “Status Update,” an episode of the podcast This American Life, featured three ninth graders talking about their use of Instagram. Instagram is a simple program that lets people post, comment… READ MORE
Hunting Mobile Shoppers
February 7, 2018
Joseph Turow— “Bricks and mortar is dead; long live bricks and mortar!” This was the surprising theme that emerged from the sprawling 2014 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, reported Laura… READ MORE
The Four Horsemen of Capitalist Decline
November 15, 2017
Fredrik Erixon and Björn Weigel— Now, however, capitalism seems to have lost its founding spirit of enterprise. Four forces that guided the economy from the 1970s assisted in reducing the… READ MORE
The future of Islamism
October 27, 2017
Tarek Osman— Arab Islamism has always tried to design the future in the image of the past. The Islamists have repeatedly tried to impose their own interpretations of certain episodes… READ MORE
Sense of righteousness
October 21, 2017
Robert A. Burt— The judicial task is not mechanistic but properly and necessarily involves judgment. In particular, judges must understand themselves as ultimately promoting equal deliberation among conflicting parties rather… READ MORE
A Conversation with Trudier Harris on Bigger: A Literary Life