The last 40 years have seen an almost non-stop campaign from the right wing to make government smaller and privatize its functions. Put simply, this does not work and has created problems all over the place for basically everyone. If we want to be able to do big things, then we need a government capable of putting them together.

Over the last few decades, how students get to school has changed, and in 2024, for the first time ever, the majority of students arrived to school in a private vehicle. It's all part of a broader trend where American cities and suburbs have made it all but impossible to build schools in urban environments and extremely difficult for kids to get to school in any other way than in a car.

In recent years, a commitment to safe, secure elections has given way to conspiracy theories, understaffed polls, and fights over who should get to vote in the first place. Maddie Covino from the Campaign Legal Center joins us in this episode to talk about how we need to reject this trend, and embrace working for the common security of American elections.

It seems like just about every movie in the theaters and all the shows on TV are remakes, sequels, adaptations, or reboots, and it's sucking the life out of entertainment. Megan and Clayton talk to Cormac Schambach, a writer, director, and allrounder working in the film industry about what the problem is, and what we might be able to do about it.

The Trump administration's hardline stance on immigration mirrors a sea change in public opinion on the subject in the last four years. People are more concerned about immigrants taking jobs and bringing crime than they have been in some time. The only problem with these narratives is that they are not even a little bit true. Rather than falling for falsehoods, and calling for deportations and an end to birthright citizenship, we need to embrace the fact that immigration is what made America great in the first place.

In the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, it is easy to feel powerless in the face of climate change. But this mentality is dangerous and counterproductive. Instead, as special guest Samantha Morales Johnson Yang explains, we need to embrace active environmental stewardship and get our hands dirty.

Much of the "enshittification" of modern life can be traced to the theory of shareholder supremacy (also called shareholder primacy), which has contributed to a monomaniacal drive towards short-term profits over anything and everything else. Listen as Megan and Clayton take you through the drawbacks of shareholder primacy, and what we might be able to do about it.

The last 30 years have seen an explosion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools. Proponents of charters argue that they are a better route than traditional public education, but in reality they only serve to further weaken education and enrich their for-profit operators. Listen along as special guest Alexander Elg joins Megan and Clayton to unpack the route we ought to take instead.

Americans increasingly focus their educational attention on a small cadre of elite institutions, to the detriment of university education as a whole, and with negative consequences for students. Listen along as Megan and Clayton discuss why this focus is so damaging, and what we can do about it.

The pandemic unleashed a tidal wave of attempts to ban books in American school libraries. However, rather than reflecting too much parental involvement in education, we hope to convince you that it's not the quantity of involvement that's the problem, but the quality. The way to fix this problem is not to curtail parental involvement altogether, but to encourage productive involvement.