Brown Pundits

Akshar talks to Guarav, our resident "Brown Pundit" in India, about what it's like to go through the "second wave" of the pandemic in India.

Omar and Akshar talk about Indian politics with Frank Bullit

Shahada and Mukunda have an adult conversation with Dr.Seema Anand, author of “The Arts of Seduction”. Let's call this "Brown Pundits After Hours"...

Omar and Mukunda talk to Chris Iwanek, a Polish Indologist who has now become a commentator on Indian politics, with a focus on the BJP.

https://thediplomat.com/authors/krzysztof-iwanek/

Akshar and Mukunda talk to Hindu students at Rutgers about the future of Indology at their institution and cultural controversies around it.

Michelle Kerr is a teacher in the California, and a regular contributor on various educational podcasts.   Brown Pundits Shahada,  a teacher herself, discusses  the challenges of Covid in education, the   mental health implications and it’s long term impact. 

The Brown Pundits talk to Koenraad Elst.

Omar Ali talks to Keerthik Sasidharan about his book Dharma Forest, and its historical and philosophical background. https://twitter.com/KS1729

Omar, Srikanth,  and Mukunda talk to Akshay Alladi about his vision of Indian conservatism. 

For this episode of Unsupervised Learning, I talked to Richard Hanania of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

Richard is a smart and heterodox thinker whose ideas and opinions are informed by his background as a scholar of political science. He’s not “winging it.” Last fall The Washington Post published his op-ed, Americans hate each other. But we aren’t headed for civil war. My big question for him was if he had updated his assessment in light of recent events.

In addition to talking about whether the US will erupt in civil war or suffer a coup in the next decade, we also discuss a new reporthe co-authored, The National Populist Illusion: Why Culture, Not Economics, Drives American Politics. The conclusion is that a populist economic realignment isn’t happening, and in much of the podcast we discuss  Richard’s belief that Republicans and Democrats will “regress to the mean.” He believes Donald J. Trump is a sui generis figure, and with his exit, Republicans will probably want to revert to their old playbook.

We also mull over the possibility that the “Great Awokening,” a phenomenon first identified by one of the fellows at Richard’s think-tank, Zach Goldberg, still has steam left in it, and what that means for the Biden administration.

Finally, while recording the podcast we uncover intriguing evidence that Jon Ossoff, Senator-Elect from Georgia, is “I.D.W.-adjacent.”