Mansplaining

Send us Fan Mail Who knew the Democratic Party was run by "childless cat ladies"?  JD Vance's rant has already garnered more than its share of well-deserved opprobrium.  But in Mansplaining's first-ever White-Hot Take, Joe takes aim at the right's weird obsession with fertility, what it means for American women, and why, like so many of the right's other weird obsessi...

Send us Fan Mail The Supreme Court’s recent controversial ruling about presidential immunity appears to rely on a shadowy notion of executive branch power called the unitary executive theory.  After gaining currency in conservative circles for decades, the unitary executive may now be poised to go from theory to reality, thanks to the right-wing SCOTUS supermajority.  Mark and Joe trace the theory...

Send us Fan Mail It wasn’t so long ago that human fertility was likened to a ticking time bomb, with overpopulation leading to famine and ecological collapse.  More recently, we’ve heard that declining fertility rates are the real problem, bringing forth a shrinking workforce and economic ruin.  Is negative population growth something to worry about? Joe and Mark examine demographic history and tr...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, Americans have moved south chasing cheaper homes and better weather.  But after years of unremitting heat and more frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods that have disproportionately devastated those destinations, you might wonder whether people start moving back whence they came.  In a follow-up to Episode 74 (The Weather Forecast is Calamitous), Mark and Joe ass...

Send us Fan Mail Just as colleges are finally being forced to pay their long-exploited student-athletes commensurate with the revenue they generate for their schools, we’re beginning to hear about private equity firms investing in college sports programs.  Joe and Mark give it the old college try in analyzing the implications of this development on college athletics specifically and higher educati...

Send us Fan Mail Over the past several years, bail reform laws—changes to the criminal legal system to reduce unnecessary pretrial detention, especially for non-violent offenses—were implemented in jurisdictions throughout the country, and many advocates for criminal justice reform welcomed these changes as long overdue.  There ensued a backlash, howerver, in which conservatives blamed recent incr...

Send us Fan Mail Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology startup, recently live-streamed footage of a paralyzed man with a brain implant playing video chess using only his mind.  According to Musk, that’s just one of many medical applications for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).  But it is BCI’s non-medical applications that are generating controversy among ethicists, in the way they aspire to cre...

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...