129 | Solo: Democracy in America

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you're probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I'm not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I'm using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We've talked about related topics recently with Cornel West and David Stasavage, but there are things I wanted to say in my own voice that fit well here. Politics is important everywhere, and it's a crucial responsibility for those of us who live in societies that aspire to be participatory and democratic. We have to think these things through, and that's what this podcast is all about.

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Apologies to Alexis de Toqueville, who wrote an important book whose name I stole, and who is mentioned nowhere in this episode.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(427)

103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

103 | J. Kenji López-Alt on Cooking As and With Science

Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can't think of anyone better ...

29 Kesä 20201h 15min

102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for unde...

22 Kesä 20201h 20min

101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses

101 | David Baltimore on the Mysteries of Viruses

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A h...

15 Kesä 20201h 14min

100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning

100 | Solo | Life and Its Meaning

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebr...

8 Kesä 20201h 33min

99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity

99 | Scott Aaronson on Complexity, Computation, and Quantum Gravity

There are some problems for which it's very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answer if someone gives it to you. At least, we think there are such problems; whether or not they reall...

1 Kesä 20201h 52min

98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird

98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird

Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never stops letting them know. Societies set up "norms" th...

25 Touko 20201h 1min

97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working prett...

18 Touko 20201h 22min

96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there ar...

11 Touko 20201h 21min

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