As world leaders set their countries' foreign policies, history might seem an obvious basis upon which to base sound policy. Other potential bases that might seem obvious include game theory and perhaps even evolutionary theory. But is feminism an underappreciated basis? I discuss this topic with Jamille Bigio, Alexandra Bro, and Rachel Vogelstein, all at the Council on Foreign Relations. At a time when Sweden explicitly labels its foreign policy as "feminist," we explore what that means and whether there's evidence that feminist foreign policy is smart foreign policy.

--Jamille Bigio's CFR profile

--Alexandra Bro's CFR profile

--Rachel Vogelstein's CFR profile

--"Sweden's Feminist Foreign Policy: Long May It Reign" (by Rachel Vogelstein and Alexandra Bro, in Foreign Policy)

--"Growing Economies Through Gender Parity" (interactive CFR report)

--"Countering Sexual Violence in Conflict" (by Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein)

--Nadia Murad Wikipedia entry

--Denis Mukwege Wikipedia entry

--"A Place of Her Own: Women's Right to Land" (Alexandra Bro, coauthored with Meighan Stone)

--"Let Women Work" (by Rachel Vogelstein, in Foreign Affairs)

Special Guests: Alexandra Bro, Jamille Bigio, and Rachel Vogelstein.

Given the ultimate purposes of colleges, universities, and academic disciplines, is viewpoint diversity (such as recruiting more conservatives into the social sciences) essential to achieving those purposes? What about free speech? Are trigger warnings an impediment to achieving those purposes? In this episode, I discuss these issues with two publicly engaged scholars: Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and a faculty member at the New York University Stern School of Business, as well as Aaron Hanlon, an assistant professor of English at Colby College who also teaches in and serves on the Advisory Committee for the college's program in Science, Technology, and Society.

--Jonathan Haidt's NYU webpage

--Aaron Hanlon's Colby College webpage

--The Heterodox Academy

--"The Coddling of the American Mind," (by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in The Atlantic)

--"The Trigger Warning Myth," (by Aaron Hanlon, in The New Republic)

--"On Balance," (by Stanley Fish, in The Chronicle of Higher Education)

--"Free Speech is not an Academic Value" (by Stanley Fish, in The Chronicle of Higher Education)

--The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (by Jonathan Haidt)

--"Don't Sweat the Technique," (by Eric B. & Rakim)

Special Guests: Aaron Hanlon and Jonathan Haidt.

Ashley Jardina, a faculty member in political science at Duke University, is the author of White Identity Politics, which is scheduled to go on sale on Thursday, February 28. She and I recently talked about her book, which examines White identity and its political impact. As much as Whiteness has often been treated as a kind of cultural default, and even though it's often assumed that their own race isn't salient to White Americans and that they don't feel solidarity with other Whites, many actually do think about their race and do feel such solidarity. And it's not just the types who gained infamy in Charlottesville. Jardina's book explores what White identity is and what White consciousness is. She also documents some of the political correlates of those variables. We discuss that research, as well as her own background. And we even highlight one thing that Donald Trump has done "expertly."

--Ashley Jardina's webpage at Duke

--White Identity Politics, at Cambridge University Press

--White Identity Politics, at Amazon

--"White Identity Politics Aren't Going Anywhere" (by Thomas Edsall, in the New York Times, and including discussion of Jardina's book)

--Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenue

Special Guest: Ashley Jardina.

My former student Vanessa Ford, and her husband JR, join me to talk about their family's story, and about the experiences of trans youth and their families. Vanessa is a board member for the National Center for Transgender Equality, and JR works for the federal government. They're parents to Ronnie and his younger sister Ellie (who is transgender), and they're also advocates for trans youth. They've written pieces for Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Katie Couric interviewed them. And now I'm lucky that they spoke with me on Tatter.

--JR and Vanessa Ford, on Facebook

--"A Massachusetts law protecting transgender people is in danger of being repealed" (a CNN story that includes coverage of the Ford family)

--National Center for Transgender Equality

--"Gender revolution: A journey with Katie Couric" (a National Geographic video program including conversation with the Ford family)

--"Betsy DeVos is a danger to transgender children" (by Vanessa Ford, in Newsweek)

--GLSEN (works to end discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression)

--"When children say they're trans" (by Jesse Singal, in The Atlantic)

--"The loaded language shaping the trans conversation" (by Tey Meadow, in The Atlantic, and one of several responses to Singal's piece)

--The full set of responses

Special Guests: JR Ford and Vanessa Ford.

Marine biologist and storyteller Skylar Bayer, psychologists Paul Bloom, Dan Molden, and David Pizarro, Moth storytellers and hosts Shannon Cason and Dame Wilburn, soccer coach Stewart Flaherty, and rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano describe their favorite Christmas movies, discuss their criteria for qualifying a movie as a Christmas movie, and offer their opinions on whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not.

--Skylar Bayer's personal homepage

--The first story I ever heard Skylar tell, from The Story Collider

--Paul Bloom's Yale homepage

--Shannon Cason's personal homepage

--Shannon Cason's Moth page

--Stewart Flaherty's Dartmouth homepage

--Stephanie Kelley-Romano's Bates homepage

--Dan Molden's Northwestern homepage

--David Pizarro's Cornell homepage

--Very Bad Wizards podcast (Pizarro is co-host)

--Dame Wilburn's Moth page

--"What makes 'Die Hard' a Christmas movie," by David Breitenbeck (The Federalist)

Special Guests: Dame Wilburn, Daniel Molden, David Pizarro, Paul Bloom, Shannon Cason, Skylar Bayer, Stephanie Kelley-Romano, and Stewart Flaherty.

There are many robust threads of progressivism in the history of Wisconsin, running all the way back to its founding by Scandinavian and German immigrants. It also had influence on progressive policies in other governments, including the federal government. But at least in recent years, conservative officials in the state have successfully enacted policies contrary to the stances of progressives, and in many cases inimical to the interests of organized labor and others. And these policies have also been influential outside of Wisconsin. In this episode, I speak about such issues with Dan Kaufman, author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. We discuss the administration of outgoing Republican Governor Scott Walker, organized labor, race, and more.

--The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, by Dan Kaufman

--Dan Kaufman's Twitter profile

--Ableman v. Booth (U.S. Supreme Court response to the Wisconsin Supreme Court's ruling on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850)

--The Turner Movement

--Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette

--The Wisconsin Idea

--Wisconsin Act 10

--Right-to-work law

--"Trump's tweets attract attention. Act 10 moves forward. Quietly. Inexorably. Changing the political landscape like a glacier." (Grover Norquist)

--The Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968

--There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, by Phillip Dray

Special Guest: Dan Kaufman.

Stephen Vladeck is the A. Dalton Cross Professor in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. He's also CNN's Supreme Court analyst. On the day of its announcement, he and I spoke about the Supreme Court's decision not to review a lower court decision that is at least partially related to abortion (Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri). He also shared his thoughts on what it means that it appears Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Kavanaugh did not join their conservative colleagues in voting to take up the case.

--Vladeck's webpage at UT-Austin

--SCOTUSblog's summary of Andersen v. Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri

Special Guest: Stephen Vladeck.

The utterance and writing of gendered and racial or ethnic slurs has often evoked controversy. My philosopher colleague Lauren Ashwell has taken up slurs as a subject of scholarly inquiry. In this episode, we sit for a 90-minute conversation about such issues as what makes a slur a slur, whether slurs can be reclaimed by members of the target group, and why the study of slurs matters.

--Lauren Ashwell's personal website

--"Gendered Slurs," by Lauren Ashwell (requies JSTOR access)

--"CNN's Brooke Baldwin Chastises Trump Critic For Using N-Word On The Air," by Oliver Gettell, Entertainment Weekly

--Myisha Cherry's interview with Luvell Anderson, about slurs, on The Unmute Podcast

--Luvell Anderson's Syracuse profile

--"Kreayshawn's White Girl Mob & The N-Word," by Brandon Soderberg, Spin

--"A History of Outrage Over the Word 'Pākehā'," by Branko Macetic, The Spinoff

--nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy

--"SlutWalks Sweep The Nation," by Laura Stampler, HuffPost

--"An Open Letter from Black Women to SlutWalk Organizers," contributed by Susan Brison, HuffPost

--"Is The Word 'Queer' Offensive? Here's A Look At Its History In The LGBTQA+ Community," by Marissa Higgins, Bustle

--Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne

Special Guest: Lauren Ashwell.

Talk of implicit bias has moved far beyond its origin in psychology. It's spread to law journals, it informs training in many workplaces (including one famous coffeeshop chain), and it's entered popular discourse. Does that ubiquity carry risks? What balls are we potentially taking our eyes off of when we focus on implicit bias? These are the kinds of issues addressed in my conversation with Jonathan Kahn, the James E. Kelley Chair in Tort Law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and author of the book Race on the Brain.

--Jonathan Kahn's Mitchell Hamline webpage

--Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Jonathan Kahn

--Project Implicit

--"How the GI Bill left out African Americans," by David Callahan (Demos)

--Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

--"The American civil rights tradition: Anticlassification or antisubordination?" by Jack Balkin and Reva Siegel

--"Chief Justice out to end affirmative action," by Jeffrey Toobin (CNN)

--"Sotomayor accuses colleagues of trying to 'wish away' racial inequality," by Robert Barnes (Washington Post)

Special Guest: Jonathan Kahn.

The recent confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court--despite vocal and forceful opposition by many people--attests to the importance of being the majority party in the U.S. Senate. Democrats are currently in a narrow minority, and their path to control runs through Senate seats currently held by Republicans, many of which are in rural, agrarian states. One such state is Mississippi, and one such race features Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy, among others. The election is likely to go to a runoff, and if control of the Senate hangs in the balance, it will be an important runoff. In this episode, I discuss that election with Geoff Pender, political editor of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, based in Jackson, MS. We also discuss the broader political context in Mississippi, including issues that might be on their way from The Magnolia State to the U.S. Supreme Court.

--FiveThirtyEight's U.S. Senate Forecast

--May 2018 article by Geoff Pender on polling in the Mississippi U.S. Senate special election

--Geoff Pender's staff page at the Clarion-Ledger

--"Mike Espy sees runoff as path to a Miss. Senate seat. Here's why it's a bumpy road" by William Douglas (McClatchy DC Bureau)

--"Will a Black-Latino alliance in Mississippi change politics in the Deep South?" by Alexia Fernández Campbell (The Atlantic)

--"Long before sinking Roy Moore's candidacy, black women in Alabama were a force for change" by DeNeen L. Brown (Washington Post)

--"Mississippi bans abortions after 15 weeks; opponents swiftly sue" by Richard Fausset (New York Times)

--"Controversial HB1523 now Mississippi's law of land" by Jerry Mitchell and Geoff Pender (Clarion-Ledger)

--"Why is the Democratic Leadership Council shutting down?" by Espeth Reeve (The Atlantic)