Mansplaining

Send us Fan Mail It’s getting more and more difficult to live one’s life without owning a smartphone.  After holding out for years, Joe finally broke down and got one after both his employer and his favorite baseball team made it a requirement to have a mobile device to do business with them.  Joe asked Mark whether it will someday be impossible to be a citizen and functioning member of society wi...

Send us Fan Mail It appears we’ve been sold a bill of goods.  For the longest time, workers have been told that innovative new technology is going to improve productivity and lead to shorter work weeks and more free time.  This story has been told since the advent of the assembly line more than a century ago, through the rise of computers and the internet, and now in connection with AI.  And yet,...

Send us Fan Mail Though not strictly a partisan phenomenon, the knee-jerk NIMBY ("not in my backyard") reaction is an impulse that wealthy liberals and progressives employ in many different contexts, whether to protect their coastline views from offshore wind farms or to shut down the siting of a homeless shelter or high-density housing in their urban neighborhoods.  But where does this...

Send us Fan Mail For the first time, Mansplaining tackles a question posed by one of its listeners!  This particular question doesn’t have a single correct answer, but it does lend itself to spirited discussion about what is and is not a pop song, and the elements that make a pop song great.  Joe and Mark delve into that and much more before each disclosing their nominees for "Best (Written)...

Send us Fan Mail The recent bankruptcy of a large regional sports network that carries the games of nearly half the teams in MLB, the NBA and NHL has some people wondering what happens when the old economic model that enriched everybody in professional sports  doesn’t work anymore.  Mark is one of those people, so he asked Joe to look into the matter and predict what’s next for pro sports. Turns o...

Send us Fan Mail Conservative politicians love their bogeymen, and you can make a good argument that the bogeyman du jour in American politics is critical race theory.  It’s a constant topic in conservative media and the target of legislative bans in red states all over the country.  But do its critics actually know what the term means?  Joe doesn’t think so, and so he asked Mark to mansplain it f...

Send us Fan Mail A growing chorus of biogerontologists thinks aging is a treatable disease rather than a natural process that leads to disease for some people.  It’s easy to be cynical about the motivation behind such thinking—that is, it simply signals  unwillingness to accept our own mortality.  But what if a focus on decelerating the aging processes would lead to the reduction or even eradicati...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been 64 years since the United States admitted any new states to the union—the longest period in our history.  Though most observers would say that the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are at the head of the line to become our 51st and 52nd states, the case for admitting either one is not a slam dunk, especially given the anti-majoritarian tilt of current U.S. politics. ...

Send us Fan Mail Given the booming numbers of people who report that they don’t belong to any religion (30% in the USA, 70% of young people in Europe), you’d think that religion is not long for this world.  But might those numbers mask the persistence of spirituality even as organized religion steadily declines?  Joe and Mark separate the wheat from the chaff and the faithful from the “nones” in s...

Send us Fan Mail It’s been said that New Year’s Day is the closest thing we have to a truly global holiday.  People of all different religions and ethnicities recognize it, but how did that come to be?  It’s a complicated story involving competing lunar and solar calendars, Julius Caesar’s scientific adviser, a 16th century pope, and a two-faced Roman god.  Mansplaining ’s New Year’s resolution th...

Send us Fan Mail The last few years have seen rapid improvement in AI’s ability to generate original text, images and music – so rapid that it got Mark thinking about what that means for the people who make their living as  writers, musicians and visual artists.  This being Mansplaining , he asked Joe about it.  Joe and Mark discuss the implications of computer-generated art, how it’s already affe...

Send us Fan Mail Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company from Facebook to Meta to signal that he’s all in on building the metaverse—the next-stage internet, betting billions that it will be the next big thing.  Will it meet his expectations, or is it the technological white whale that takes down Meta and all others who pursue it?  Joe and Mark discuss what the metaverse might look like, whether it wil...

Send us Fan Mail There’s another epidemic in America right now: an epidemic of vaping.  Just as the number of cigarette smokers was in decline, we have e-cigarettes with flavors like bubblegum and mango that make them irresistible to teenagers.  As the FDA ponders whether to formally approve e-cigs as smoking cessation devices, Mark and Joe explore whether vaping has any redeeming value or whether...

Send us Fan Mail It’s fair to say that Russia is having a tougher time in Ukraine than anyone (outside of Volodymyr Zelenskyy) expected.  The vaunted Russian military is performing very poorly, at least compared to our image of it from the Soviet era.  But why?  And might a diminished Russia pose an even greater threat to world peace?  Joe and Mark discuss Putin’s folly, the nuclear threat, and wh...

Send us Fan Mail It used to be that the movies were where you found profound meditations on subjects that mattered, while TV was the place for frivolous, escapist fare, but it sure seems like those roles have flipped in recent years. Joe asked Mark whether TV and streaming platforms are now ground zero for capturing the cultural zeitgeist.  Join Mark and Joe as they consider the state of screens l...

Send us Fan Mail When it comes to charter schools, people working on education policy tend to sort themselves into two camps: the lovers and the haters.  Charters are either dramatically improving the way we teach and learn, or they’re a right-wing plot to siphon money from public education and undermine teachers’ unions.  So, which is it?  Class is in session as Joe and Mark look at the history o...

Send us Fan Mail It’s a simple question, really:  Why can’t we control guns in America?  The answer is also deceptively simple: It's because we’re afraid.  Mark and Joe explore the deep divisions around gun control, the even deeper-seated fear of victimization informing the uniquely American behavior of stockpiling firearms, and how dry recitations of facts and statistics about gun violence a...

Send us Fan Mail In college, one of Mark’s professors warned him not to interpret a memorable line about love in Homer’s Iliad to mean romantic love, which was, she said, a notion that first arose in Europe during the Middle Ages.  Ever since, Mark’s been wondering whether that's true, so he asked Joe about it.  Join Joe and Mark as they ponder a question immortalized by Cole Porter: What is...

Send us Fan Mail A controversial 2001 academic paper suggested that there’s a connection between Roe v. Wade’s legalization of  abortion in 1973 and the reduction in crime that followed a generation later in the 1990s. With crime again rising  in a post-Roe America, Mark and Joe discuss the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis, the many alternative explanations  offered since its publication, and whether it’...

Send us Fan Mail It’s strange to think that laughter –  involving the involuntary and sometimes loud expulsion of air, and which sometimes renders us helpless, struggling to breathe and with tears streaming down our faces – is a helpful evolutionary adaptation, but it is.  Joe humors Mark with an explanation of how this came to be. (Recorded July 8, 2022.)

Send us Fan Mail The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions of people around the globe and devastated cities that experienced the seismic shock of a severe economic downturn that emptied downtowns and shuttered many businesses. Many cities have still not returned to the pre-pandemic normal.  Mark and Joe contemplate what our biggest cities may look like in a work-from-home world. (Recorded June 17, 202...

Send us Fan Mail Mark can’t fathom how it’s legal to take out a big loan to buy a company, then transfer all that debt to the newly-acquired company and force it, in effect, to pay off its own purchase price via draconian cost-cutting measures that can destroy it in the process.  He challenged Joe to make the case for such transactions.  Together, Joe and Mark try to make sense of leveraged buyout...

Send us Fan Mail On a recent tour of college campuses with his daughter, Joe noticed how many more women were on campus than men, so he asked Mark whether this was true, and if so, why.  Join Mark and Joe as they discuss the very real phenomenon of declining college enrollment, why it disproportionately affects men, and what that portends for college education, for gender roles, and for the econom...

Send us Fan Mail Sports are not only big business, they’re emotionally meaningful to millions of people throughout the world. But why? Aren’t there so many better and more important things to do with our lives? Mark asked baseball-loving Joe what it is we get from watching sports, individually and collectively. Joe and Mark cover all the bases before sliding home with the news that, done in modera...

Send us Fan Mail The U.S. Senate’s recent unanimous passage of a resolution to make Daylight Saving Time permanent would save us the annoying chore of adjusting our clocks twice a year.  But is it the right thing to do?  Mark and Joe review the history of timekeeping in the United States and the relative merits of Daylight Saving Time and Standard Time, before deciding which they prefer.  Do not s...