Mansplaining

Send us Fan Mail A common argument among sports fans is whether coming through “in the clutch” — where an athlete is said to raise his or her level of performance in the most important moments of the game — truly exists.  Some cite chapter and verse of their favorite players doing spectacular things under intense pressure to bolster their argument for its existence, while others insist with equal...

Send us Fan Mail "Inflation will be with us for years to come." "You can’t lower inflation without raising unemployment." "Supply chain disruptions will cause a recession." These are some of the fables told in recent years by economic forecasters.  Their job is to use empirical methods to explain why certain things happen in the economy but they’re notoriously bad at...

Send us Fan Mail Electric vehicle charging stations were recently installed in the parking lot of Joe’s apartment complex, and that got him thinking about how our country’s transition to EVs is going.  Have Americans been sufficiently incentivized to go electric?  Are there enough public charging stations to accommodate growing demand?  And what are the implications for America’s rickety power gri...

Send us Fan Mail In recent decades, the Democratic Party has hemorrhaged support from the working-class white voters who once formed the backbone of its New Deal coalition.  While Dems have maintained a slight electoral majority over the last three decades, they’ve struggled to enact their agenda in a minoritarian political system.  What might it take to turn a slight edge into a durable governing...

Send us Fan Mail This podcast has spent a lot of time on AI, whether in connection with its effect on the workplace, its application in products like drones and cars, its ability to create art, or how it’s changing robotics.  But it hasn’t addressed the inevitable idea raised by all those breakthroughs, which is how humanity will reckon with machines when they’re smarter than we are.  Until now, t...

Send us Fan Mail January always seems to bring a spate of articles about how the new year will be “The Year of This” or “The Year of That.” 2024 has already been christened by some as “The Year of Robots.” It sure seems like we’ve heard that refrain before, and yet robots are still not part of our daily lives. Why not? Joe and Mark discuss the history of robots, two reasons why their development l...

Send us Fan Mail Mansplaining continues a tradition with its 4th annual holiday-themed episode, though this time it's with a more personal question than we usually tackle on this podcast.  What are you thankful for?  Mark shares a story about an event from his childhood that changed the trajectory of his life, while Joe offers a short list consisting both of things that give his life meaning...

Send us Fan Mail The proponents of effective altruism believe that, when it comes to charitable giving, we should use reason and evidence to make the greatest positive impact.  The recently convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried proclaimed himself an adherent of EA.  Should his exposure as a crook make us think twice about it?  Joe and Mark appraise whether EA is a valuable moral compass, a conveni...

Send us Fan Mail One of the most intractable issues in contemporary U.S. politics is immigration.  Politicians in both parties have talked about comprehensive immigration reform for decades, yet no legislation is forthcoming.  Is that because there’s no good compromise to be had, or is it because one party (guess which one) has turned its back on all immigrants, even legal ones?  Mark and Joe comp...

Send us Fan Mail What if our entire reality—everyone and everything we see and experience—is an elaborate simulation, a virtual reality app designed by a technologically advanced civilization?  (Yes, just like in The Matrix .)  That’s what simulation theory posits, and Mark asked Joe whether there’s any “truth” to it (a fool’s errand, if indeed we’re living in said simulation).  Joe and Mark consi...

Send us Fan Mail The annual commemoration of the “heroes of 9/11” got Joe thinking about the concept of heroism.  What does it take to be a hero?  Why do we anoint certain qualities as heroic?  And what better person to answer these questions than Mark, with his PhD in mythology?  Mark and Joe trace the origin of the idea of the hero in ancient literature, its modification by Christianity, the dev...

Send us Fan Mail All the fuss about the new generation of AI products based on large language models, with their ability both to ghost-write term papers and spew out occasional misinformation in so doing, makes you wonder whether artificial intelligence will ever live up to the second part of its name.  Joe and Mark discuss what it means to be intelligent, how close (or not) AI comes to that stand...

Send us Fan Mail Mark and Joe briefly played organized football as kids; for both, it didn’t end well.  Today, Joe is a parent of a son who didn’t play football and wouldn’t have been allowed to, even if he had wanted to play.  Given the enduring uber-popularity of football, Joe asked Mark, who doesn’t have children, whether he would let his hypothetical son play football.  Mark’s answer marches d...

Send us Fan Mail In recent years, the media has been rife with stories about prominent scientists and labs manipulating research data.  Such behavior recently cost the president of Stanford University his job, and headline-grabbing findings in several disciplines have been discredited.  Is this the canary in the coal mine signaling a much larger problem?  Joe and Mark test the hypothesis that scie...

Send us Fan Mail In a summer plagued by heatwaves, wildfire smoke, and biblical rainfall, it’s natural to wonder whether this is the new normal for our weather.  Scientists warned about many of these particulars, but even they’ve been stunned at how quickly they’re coming to pass.  Mark and Joe contemplate whether climate calamity will render vast swaths of the United States uninhabitable over the...

Send us Fan Mail The core idea of universal basic income (UBI) is to reduce poverty by providing people with periodic cash payments sufficient to get by.  Guaranteed minimum income programs for the needy have been around forever, but unconditional cash payments to every citizen have been tested only on a limited basis thus far.  Joe and Mark examine the best arguments for and against UBI before co...

Send us Fan Mail Politicians love to pay lip service to taming the deficit, but when they’re in power, they invariably do the opposite, cutting taxes and/or increasing spending.  And yet, despite all that seeming fiscal recklessness, the U.S. economy remains strong.  It makes you wonder: maybe deficits aren’t such a big deal after all.  In the second of a two-part episode about our burgeoning nati...

Send us Fan Mail Every couple of years, our elected representatives play a game of chicken that’s the subject of breathless headlines predicting dire consequences.  Will we or won’t we avert financial disaster?  We’re talking about the debt ceiling, of course.  All that hysteria makes you wonder what would happen to ordinary Americans if the United States actually defaulted on its debt.  In the fi...

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...