Robert Wright's Nonzero

John explains how the current national crisis came to be ... Is civic discourse dead? ... Glenn: We are sliding into a state where the basic preconditions of society are at question ... Is America going backwards on race? ... Glenn: "I feel like my side is losing, and I think it's a catastrophe" ... Can faith help bind up the nation's wounds? ...

Monticello, Hamilton, and Archie Bunker ... Matt questions how the Harper's open letter could make someone feel "unsafe" ... Bill: "I don't see what the letter actually accomplishes" ... When Bill was fired for his political views ... Should being a jerk in a viral video be a fireable offense? ... Did Tammy Duckworth torpedo her VP chances? ...

Rutger's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History ... Debunking the "veneer theory" of human nature ... Are violence and war intrinsic to human nature? ... The human self-domestication thesis ... Why Bob doesn't like the idea of people "deserving punishment" ... Is it bad to emphasize the dark side of human nature? ... What the debunking of the Stanford Prison Experiment can teach us ... Giving money to rich people: Why the U in UBI? ... Would UBI turn us all into couch potatoes (or worse)? ...

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Doug's new book, Philosophy Smackdown ... Plato's Cave and the three layers of wrestling reality ... What it means when wrestlers break the fourth wall ... Real life can be "just as scripted as wrestling, if not more so" ... How and why moral virtue changed in wrestling ... The only performance where people say "you know it's fake, right?" ... What philosophers could learn from professional wrestling ...

John: White Fragility is "one of the worst books ever written" ... Debating how we should remember Woodrow Wilson ... Glenn: Our story is about more than just domination and oppression ... On being a dissident black academic ... Why John resigned from the board of the National Books Critics Circle ... Should John and Glenn fear defenestration by the mob? ...

Mickey to Trump: Drop out ... How can the number of cases be rising while deaths stay steady? ... How Biden can put his bumbling to his advantage ... Digging into the "Russian bounty on GIs in Afghanistan" story ... Ghislaine Maxwell and the many Epstein conspiracy theories ... Will we ever find out the names of the men Epstein procured girls for? ... Weighing the cancellations of Woodrow Wilson, John Wayne, and JFK ... Mickey sees a potential "Sister Stab-ya" moment ...

Mickey to Trump: Drop out ... How can the number of cases be rising while deaths stay steady? ... How Biden can put his bumbling to his advantage ... Digging into the "Russian bounty on GIs in Afghanistan" story ... Ghislaine Maxwell and the many Epstein conspiracy theories ... Will we ever find out the names of the men Epstein procured girls for? ... Weighing the cancellations of Woodrow Wilson, John Wayne, and JFK ... Mickey sees a potential "Sister Stab-ya" moment ...

Conspiracy theories about fireworks ... John has flashbacks to the late 1960s ... Movements without leaders ... Nikita thinks about buying land in Russia and settling down ... Why some Russians think that Putin doesn't exist ... Is life a game you can win? ... The revived popularity of strongmen ...

The GOP's bad bargain on Trump and judicial appointments ... Why do social conservatives keep losing at the Supreme Court? ... A brief interlude on baseball and baseball movies ... A QAnon fan beats a five-term GOP incumbent ... Bill on Woodrow Wilson's complicated legacy ... Between lionizing and demonizing ...

Leigh's new satirical novel, Self Care ... Leigh's viral essay on the fall of the girlboss ... The life-changing magic of tidying up your whiteness ... Activism as self-improvement ... Are activists inadvertently promoting racial segregation? ... Why are women's spaces prone to unraveling? ...