The Argument

For many politicians and parents, there’s growing concern over critical race theory. It maintains that race and racism in America are about not individual actors and actions as much as bigger structures that lead to and maintain gaps between racial groups. The theory started in the legal academy, and some fear that it has begun to take over the American education system.

How concerned should you be? Jane Coaston and her guests disagree. Chris Rufo is a senior fellow and the director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute. Professor Ralph Richard Banks is a co-founder and the faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Critical Race Theory: An Introduction” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, published in 2001

“How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory” in The New Yorker

“Does Teaching America It’s Racist Make It Less Racist?” podcast episode by “The Argument”

“Critical Race Theory: On the New Ideology of Race” panel discussion from the Manhattan Institute

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It’s time to rethink what’s working in the modern workplace and what’s failing. Amid a pandemic that overturned how so many work, increased calls for racial and social justice put a new pressure on companies to ensure — or at least to seem as if they ensure — equality among their employees. Diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) programs are an increasingly popular solution deployed by management. But do these initiatives do marginalized employees any good? And who are the true beneficiaries of diversity programs, anyway?

Jane Coaston has spent years on the receiving end of diversity initiatives, and for that reason, she’s skeptical. To debate D.E.I. programs’ efficacy, she brought together Dr. Sonia Kang, the Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Toronto, and Lily Zheng, a D.E.I. strategy consultant and public speaker, to argue what works and doesn’t when it comes to making workplaces fair for all.

Mentioned in this episode:

Sonia Kang’s podcast, “For the Love of Work,” episode “Leaning Into Diversity, Equity and Belonging”

Lily Zheng, Harvard Business Review, “How to Show White Men That Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Need Them”

Kim Tran, Harper’s Bazaar, “The Diversity and Inclusion Industry Has Lost Its Way”

Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev “Why Diversity Programs Fail”

The Washington Post, “To improve diversity, don’t make people go to diversity training. Really.”

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The ousting of Donald Trump, the election of Joe Biden, a ransacking of the Capitol, a summer of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and a pandemic that is still raging in parts of the United States and abroad. It has felt like a very political few years. But should we not be allowed to talk about it at work?

Some bosses would strongly prefer that you stayed away from politics at work. A number of companies have proposed policies that would ban or significantly reduce political discussions at the workplace. But who gets to decide what’s political? And does it really benefit the company or its employees to keep these conversations from happening?

Liz Wolfe is an editor at Reason and Johnathan Nightingale is an author and a co-founder of Raw Signal Group. They join Jane to debate whether eliminating politics is possible and how it would change the future of the workplace.

Mentioned in this episode:

“Basecamp Becomes the Latest Tech Company To Ban Talking Politics at Work,” by Liz Wolfe at Reason.

“Fundamentally, this is a story about power,” in Johnathan Nightingale’s newsletter.

“Breaking Camp,” by Casey Newton at The Verge.

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You might be someone who has spent a majority of the past year working from home. A survey from October 2020 found 71 percent of American workers turned their apartments into office spaces. But starting this fall, companies are opening up their offices again. The C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley made it clear that its employees have to be back by September. Amazon is hoping for the same.

But is returning to in-office work the right move for everyone?

Over the next three weeks, we’re going to be focusing on what work could and should look like as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. This week, Jane Coaston is joined by Sean Bisceglia, the C.E.O. of Curion, a consumer insights company, and Anne Helen Petersen, the writer of the newsletter “Culture Study” and the author of “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” to debate the pros and cons of returning to the office.

Mentioned in this episode:

Sean Bisceglia’s interview with CNN: “Why Some Companies Want Everyone Back in the Office”

“Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future,” by Anne Helen Petersen

The Slate podcast episode of “What Next: TBD”: So, What Happens to WFH Now?

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With the U.S. government puzzling over U.F.O.s, and potentially habitable exoplanets in our telescopes, earthlings are closer than ever to finding other intelligent life in the universe. So the existential question is: Should we try to communicate with whatever we think might be out there?

That’s the argument this week between Douglas Vakoch and Michio Kaku. Vakoch, the president of the research and educational nonprofit METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, has dedicated his life’s work to intentionally broadcasting messages beyond our solar system.

Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and a co-founder of string field theory, thinks reaching out to unknown aliens is a catastrophically bad idea and “would be the biggest mistake in human history.”

Together, they join Jane  to debate the question of making first contact and our place in the cosmos.

Mentioned in this episode:

Adam Mann, The New Yorker: “Intelligent Ways to Search for Extraterrestrials”

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker: “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously”

Arik Kershenbaum, The Wall Street Journal, “Alien Languages May Not Be Entirely Alien to Us”

“Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Season 4, Episode 15: “First Contact” (Netflix)

The Ezra Klein Show: “Obama Explains How America Went From ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘MAGA’”

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Could the Catholic Church pressure a politician into changing his or her stance on abortion? A debate has erupted in the Catholic community over whether a politician, like President Joe Biden, should be denied communion for supporting abortion rights.

This week, Jane Coaston debates the pros and cons of using communion as punishment with Ross Douthat, a Times Opinion columnist, and Heidi Schlumpf, the executive editor of National Catholic Reporter.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ross’s column “The Bishops, Biden and the Brave New World”
• National Catholic Reporter’s editorial “Why We Support the Bishops’ Plan to Deny Communion to Biden”
• “United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Vote to Write a Document on the Meaning of the Eucharist in the Life of the Church” and its subsequent Questions and Answers page that says, “There will be no national policy on withholding Communion from politicians.”

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We're off this week! So we're bringing you an episode of another great Times Opinion podcast, Sway.

The fitness industry has exploded into a nearly $100 billion sector, and Alison Bechdel is among the exercise-obsessed. Bechdel, the cartoonist whose comic strip inspired the Bechdel Test for female representation in Hollywood, says she has found transcendence in everything from yoga and karate to weight lifting and biking. Her new book, “The Secret to Superhuman Strength,” examines the exercise craze, and what it exposes about our attitudes around self-care, the booming fitness economy and even our mortality.

In this conversation, Kara Swisher and Bechdel discuss the evolution of workout culture (“yoga boom” included), the politics of art (especially during the Trump era) and how mainstream cultural norms have finally caught up to, as Bechdel puts it, “where lesbians were back in the ’80s.”

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Sometimes, it takes just one tweet to spark a debate.

This month, the journalist Matt Taibbi suggested that the “financial/educational/political elite” hold real influence in America — not Fox and its viewers. According to Taibbi, America is controlled by the sensibilities of the few — especially those who run tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter. But where does that leave politicians, or the media, in the struggle for power in America?

This week, Jane Coaston debates who’s really wielding power in America right now and to what ends, with Matt Taibbi, author of several books, including “Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another,” and writer of the newsletter “TK News”; and Michelle Cottle, a member of the Times editorial board.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The book “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America” by Chris Arnade.
• Jane’s 2020 piece in Vox, “Trump was supposed to change the GOP. But the GOP changed him.”

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U.S. birthrates have fallen by 4 percent, hitting a record low. And it’s not just America — people around the world are having fewer children, from South Korea to South America.

In some ways, this seems inevitable. From an economic standpoint, there’s the expensive trio of child rearing, education and health care in America. From a cultural perspective, women have more financial and societal independence, delaying the age of childbirth. What might be troubling are the consequences on our future economy and what an older population might mean for Social Security.

This week, Jane Coaston talks to two demographers who have differing levels of worry about the news of our falling birthrate. Lyman Stone is the director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a Robert Novak Journalism fellow and a Ph.D. student in population dynamics at McGill University. Caroline Hartnett is a demographer and an associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Ramesh Ponnuru’s interview with Lyman Stone in Bloomberg, titled “Want More American Babies? Make the U.S. More Livable.”
• “Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Falling Birth Rates” in The Washington Post
• “The Daily” episode “A Population Slowdown in the U.S.”
• Ezra Klein’s interview with the psychologist Alison Gopnik on what adults can learn from children, on “The Ezra Klein Show.”

You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts. A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.

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In this bonus episode of “The Argument,” Jane Coaston has an extended chat with the late-night host Trevor Noah. They discuss taking on the mantle of “The Daily Show” from Jon Stewart, cancel culture and why you can’t take old jokes out of the context of the society in which they were made.

Mentioned in this episode:

Trevor Noah’s memoir, “Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood”

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