When Experts Attack!

Stephen Jackson, an education professor who prepares future teachers on instructing students in history, discusses how controversies in teaching history have become part of the culture wars, how teachers are scared and why some have said this era is worse than McCarthyism.

A year ago, police officers executed a search warrant on a small-town Kansas newspaper, triggering worldwide outrage over the seizing of newspaper equipment. The stress of the raid is said to have helped lead to the death of the publisher’s mother. Journalist and professor Steve Wolgast discusses why the raid happened and just why it’s so problematic for government to obstruct freedom of the press.

Brian Donovan is teaching a university course on the artistic and sociological influence of Taylor Swift. He outlines how the semester’s lessons mirror the performer’s career from a breakout country music star to the gazillion-selling icon of her recent Eras tour.

Mahbub Rashid says his book is the first to examine how spatial qualities impact health issues for people living in areas that aren’t strictly rural or metropolitan.

Sara Reed, an expert in transportation logistics, has extensively researched autonomous vehicle delivery. She discusses the technology’s benefits for businesses and whether they’ll outweigh potential drawbacks for customers and human employees — as well as other considerations for society’s driverless future.

Linguist Lacey Wade has discovered many of us shift our speech in expectation of what others might sound like, especially in respect to the U.S. Southern accent.

People don’t learn the same way everywhere — in large part this comes down to culture. Guest Michael Orosco says new culturally responsive studies in neuroscience show working memory, executive function and other cognitive functions are influenced by how we grew up, where we were raised and the languages we speak.

Public policy expert Kevin Mullinix discusses how policy reforms to reduce wrongful convictions depend on political sentiments in any given U.S. state, along with leanings of the governor and sway held by innocence-advocacy groups.

Kathryn Conrad, University of Kansas professor of English, says artificial intelligence can no longer safely be ignored in academia. It’s better, she believes, to try to establish some guideposts in a wild and wooly AI frontier.

Robert McDonald resents the intrusion of incentives into virtually every facet of modern life, from healthcare to education to the legal system. He lays out how this happened and offers ways to counter the false choices offered from on high.