The Public Sphere

On this week’s episode, Pete and Luke talk about the 2018 midterm elections and the appointment of Matthew Whitaker. We also have a wide-ranging conversation about the undemocratic nature of the Senate and the Electoral College, redistricting, and the legitimacy and history of the federal system. All of that before we discuss the new acting Attorney General — a former district attorney for Iowa who loves crossfit and has a controversial “biblical view on justice” and dislikes Marbury vs. Madison. What even is federalism anymore?

• John E. Bies, “Matthew Whitaker's Appointment as Acting Attorney General: Three Lingering Questions,” Lawfare Blog.
• John Swaine, “Matthew Whitaker: acting attorney general said judges should be Christian,” The Guardian.
• Ezra Klein, “Republicans are paying the Trump Tax,” Vox.com. [Note: this is not about reforming the Electoral college, which Ezra discusses elsewhere on Vox.]

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Thanks for listening.

Pete and Luke are talking about the new Sokal Hoax, academic authority, and the economic context.

This new controversy was perpetrated by three scholars: James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. They wrote 20 fake papers in the style of cultural studies but with invented data or ostensibly ridiculous claims, as one title states: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." They targeted gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. The hoaxers claim that because 7 of 20 papers were published in important academic journals—for the most part they were actually marginal publications—journals, it proves that the intellectual bankruptcy of academic identity studies.

• Greg Afinogenov, "Orthodoxxed" N+1.
• Henry Farrell, "Move over Sokal Hoax," Crooked Timber.
• Zach Beauchamp, "The controversy around hoax studies in critical theory, explained," Vox.com.
• Yasha Mounk, "The New Sokal Hoax," The Atlantic.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Thanks for listening.

Pete and Luke talk about Bret Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Our discussion is not exhaustive; it could hardly be so given the controversy. We neglect to make many of the very good, salient points made elsewhere. Therefore, we encourage the listener to take our comments as provisional and part of a larger public conversation about these events.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Pete and Luke discuss a few articles that interrogate Silicon Valley culture and the limits of philanthropy.

• Christopher Mackin, "Silicon Valley and the Quest for a Utopian Workplace," The New Republic.
• David A. Banks, Silicon Valley Labor Organizing, The Baffler.
• Robert Homan, "Think Different: Apple’s Redistribution of Wealth to the Wealthy," Boston Review.
• Elizabeth Kolbert, "Gospel of Giving for a Dying Age," The New Yorker.
• Jeff Bezos' new philanthropic fund, Axios.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Wes Bishop joins Pete to discuss the second Gilded Age. The top 1% owns more wealth and has captured the majority of gains from economic growth than at any time since 1920s in the United States, even as worker productivity has increased across the board. In other words the 99% are producing more but receiving an increasingly smaller share.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

This is an emergency podcast to discuss the Bob Woodward excerpts published in the Washington Post and the anonymous "senior official in the Trump administration" op-ed in the New York Times.

• I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration
• Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency
• Chris Hayes tweet
• Naunihal Singh twitter thread on whether this is a "coup"
• Jeet Heer twitter thread
• David Frum, "This is a constitutional crisis" in The Atlantic.
• I AM PART OF THE RESISTANCE INSIDE NYARLATHOTEP’S DEATH CULT

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Pete and Luke discuss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America, the legacy of the Third Way, and what electoral success might look like.

Luke Mergner and Pete Sinnott discuss President Trump's European trip, the now-infamous Helsinki presser, and the conspiracy theories that help explain it all.

• Mueller's indictments
• CNN Clip of Trump
• The Atlantic roundup
• McKay Coppins, The Atlantic
• Andrew Sullivan, NYMag
• Ron Elving, NPR
• NY Times.
• Pod Save the World, Trump's Disastrous European Vacation

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Thanks for listening.

An interview with Mark G.E. Kelly about his new book For Foucault: Against Normative Political Theory.

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Today we are talking to Rafael Khachaturian again about the DSA or Democratic Socialists of America. You may have heard the name, but aren't sure what it is. You may, like me, be familiar with the DSA but remain skeptical of its goals, its effectiveness, or just the word "socialism." Rafael, whose been involved with the DSA in Bloomington, IN and Pittsburgh, PA is here to allay those fears.

• Democratic Socialists of America
• Eliza Griswold, "The Hard-Left Candidate Taking On the Democratic Establishment in Southwestern Pennsylvania," New Yorker (May 11, 2018).
• Eliza Griswold, "A Democratic-Socialist Landslide in Pennsylvania," New Yorker (May 16, 2018).

The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.

Visit www.contrivers.org to read great essays and interviews. You can also sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, or like our Facebook page. If you have a suggestion for the podcast, or an essay or review you'd like to pitch, get in touch with us through social media or email.

The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.

Thanks for listening.