The Future in Context

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson reflects on former President Jimmy Carter's Malaise speech. Seared in America's collective memory, even pilloried in popular culture, the speech was delivered 44 years ago. It was both earnest and tone deaf. The then president made the deliberate choice to tell the American people the truth, rather than the time-honored tradition of singing the Song of America.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, C-SPAN2 and YouTube.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson considers the enduring legacy of Jimmy Carter's presidency following word from the Carter Center that he had decided to enter hospice care and spend his remaining days with his wife, Rosalynn. History may well be kinder to Carter than his contemporaries during his time in the White House.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of the Carter Center, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, ABC, CBS, NBC and YouTube.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson sees a clear connection between the recent flap over spy balloons and the cold war stunt called Sputnik. As the American people decide whether to panic, assign blame or shrug at the violation of American airspace by a handful of strange objects, one of them certainly a Chinese spy balloon, it may be useful to look back to a previous moment of national space panic.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of CNN, Sunrise Recordings, Mark Fellow Productions, Max's Models and British Pathe.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson says the 2023 State of the Union address was in keeping with a tradition dating back to the republic's founding, including an increasing element of 'bread and circuses,' a mix of political policies and entertainment, ceremony and spectacle, in service of endless campaigning by both parties.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of C-SPAN, Lindrebox, Neural Network and Deep Learning, the National Archives and the Presidential Libraries of Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson set out to do something they used to teach in school — make sense of the American presidency. Each president campaigned and governed to suit their respective times with a mix of shared and unique traits.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of C-SPAN, The United States Army Band, Warner Bros., ABC, CBC, CBS, Smithsonian Folkway Recordings, Gerald R. Ford Library, electionsongs.com and YouTube.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson considers the future of second generation elites in context. He thinks Prince Harry erred in writing his autobiography Spare and would have done well to emulate American Princess Alice - that is, Alice Roosevelt.

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of The Daily Mail, TLDR News, Entertainment Tonight, Harpo Productions,carlanthonyonline, Epidemic and YouTube.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson suggests that the poem best known for its placement at the base of the Statue of Liberty may have created a case of false advertising to migrants around the world. America's incoherent immigration policy is caught between the competing instincts of "give me … your huddled masses" and "build that wall."

Stream the show from www.tfic.tech or subscribe to the show on the podcast app of your choice.

Additional audio courtesy of PBS Newsletter, Vice News, Washington Post, Beyond Measure Media and YouTube.

Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson puts the chaotic events in the U.S. House of Representatives in historical context, which were a sad reminder of how fraught and flummoxed our national politics are, and almost certainly a harbinger of the reign of craziness we can expect in the Republican Party for at least the next two years.

Too Much Stuff: Our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson on Americans and their storage units. The excesses of the American Dream fill 50,000 storage units across the country. This material overflow results from crisis, indecision, laziness and selective forgetfulness.

With his unprecedented call for the termination of the U.S. Constitution, former presdent Donald Trump seems to ignore the lesson of Andrew Jackson, another aggrieved presidential aspirant who lived to fight – and win – another election. It got our resident humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson thinking.