The Same, but Worse

Marshall and Andrew got together to chat about Marshall's piece on the LPE blog about higher education: https://lpeproject.org/blog/should-higher-education-ratify-privilege-or-public-service/.

Andrew and a couple of special guests go deep on the Turkish election. Sorry for the lack of content lately, it's been a busy spring for all of us.

With Marshall sidelined by actual work, Andrew and Jerry discuss the recent FTX meltdown, Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and develop a typology of billionaires. Along the way we also discuss the repudiation of expertise as a relevant aspect of decision-making and establish which games are good for dads.

We discuss the proliferation of scams of all kinds in late capitalism and the failure of regulators to come to grips with this problem. After Marshall departs, Andrew and Jerry talk about the shortcomings of localism and the most important thing in politics, owning your ideological enemies online.

Marshall, Andrew, and Jerry discuss the Dobbs decision, how we got here over the decades, and the ultimate failure of Democratic centrism to protect abortion rights. In the second half, we sketch an outline of the evolving American constitutional order and come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of global warming and world peace (must credit TSBW if implemented).

Andrew, Marshall, and Jerry take a dive into Olufemi Taiwo's book "Elite Capture" and try to figure out what diagnostic as well as prescriptive lessons it can teach us.

We welcome to the podcast Sanjukta Paul to talk about her work in untangling the ball of twine that is modern antitrust. Come for the detailed history of trucking deregulation in the 90s, stay for the debate over how and to what end we should formulate social theories.

In the absence of Marshall, Andrew and Jerry set about performing discourse surgery (spoiler: the patient died), trying to figure out why the vibes are fucked, and deploying our most sophisticated numerological tools to determine the most appropriate number of bullet points to have on your platform.

We're joined by Mike Cheyne, a genuine doctor of suburban studies, to walk us through the way that postwar sitcoms functioned as loci of formation of ideas about civic participation and citizenship, and how the TV revolution of the 70s steered into the neoliberal turn.

We welcome our first guest, Cory Haala, to talk about the populist tradition in the Midwest. We discuss its roots and legacy and whether any lessons for our present moment can be gleaned from it.