On this episode of The Open Door, panelists Jim Hanink, Mario Ramos-Reyes, and Christopher Zehnder discuss the surprise popular series The Queen’s Gambit and what it tells us about the corrosive Netflix effect. Our special guest is Josh Herring. His work has appeared on Public Discourse, the Imaginative Conservative, and The Federalist. He is Dean of Students at Thales Academy. Josh has a Master of Divinity degree and is a doctoral candidate at Faulkner University. We ask him the following questions.

Could you tell us a bit about your background?

Thales Academy, your academic home, offers a classical curriculum. What does this mean?

What led you to write about The Queen’s Gambit?

Can you point out the differences between Frank Tevis’s The Queen’s Gambit : A Novel (1983) and Frank Scott’s adaptation?

Does The Queen’s Gambit, if nothing else, succeed as tragedy?

Resolved: Netflix is really just one player in a larger feedback loop designed to perpetuate a damaging message, much like a virus that replicates itself to infect others. What’s your analysis?

Decades ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about “defining deviancy down.” What factors contribute to this broad phenomenon?

Is programmed deviancy likely to be creative?

Personal responsibility presupposes moral agency. What sort of beings could have moral agency?

What’s your next writing project?