Why? Radio Podcast Archive

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  How do Muslims, Christians, and Jews See Each Other?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and David Nirenberg

  Muslims, Jews, Christians: they’ve been fighting for millennia and living next to each other for just as long. They share the same prophet—Abraham—and have many of the same beliefs. Yet, they define themselves in opposition to one another, demonizing and even killing each other along the way. Is this intrinsic to who they are or is this something that can be changed? Can they coexist or must they be enemies? These questions are the focus of this episode of Why? Radio.

  David Nirenberg is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences; Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought, a Professor in the Department of History, and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. Much of his work focuses on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. He has written Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages; Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern, and Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. His work on these three religious traditions ranges across literary, artistic, historiographic, and philosophical genres. But even more generally, he is interested in the history of how the possibilities and limits of community and communication have been imagined.

  His website can be found here: http://www.davidnirenberg.com/

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  The Moral Argument For Revenge

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Thane Rosenbaum

  We’ve been told time and time again that revenge is wrong, but is it? We’ve been taught that it’s savage, but if so, why do people turn to it so frequently? And, we’ve been encouraged to demand justice, even though most of us can’t tell the difference between it and vengeance. On this episode of Why? we’ll take a fresh look at one of the oldest practices in history, asking about the nature of revenge, honor, and the emotions that surround them both.

  Thane Rosenbaum is an essayist, law professor, and author of the novels, How Sweet It Is!, The Stranger Within Sarah Stein, The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible. His articles, reviews and essays appear frequently in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Haaretz, Huffington Post and Daily Beast, among other national publications. He moderates an annual series of discussions on culture, world events and politics at the 92nd Street Y called The Talk Show. He is a Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. He is the author of Payback: The Case for Revenge and The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right. He is the editor of the anthology, Law Lit, from Atticus Finch to “The Practice,”: A Collection of Great Writing about the Law. His forthcoming book is entitled The High Cost of Free Speech: Rethinking the First Amendment.

  Thane’s website can be found at www.thanerosenbaum.com

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  How to Think About Dance

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Helanius J. Wilkins

  Human beings dance for every reason imaginable: to protest, to pray, to court one another, to explore nature, to find truth, and simply to explore dance itself. But what makes dance “dance” and how are we to interpret the performances we watch? How theoretical are dancers when they perform and how well can they realize a choreographer’s vision? These questions are just a part of a wide-ranging discussion as we welcome choreographer, performance artist, scholar, and of course, dancer Helanius J. Wilkins.

  Helanius, a native of Lafayette, Louisiana, is an award-winning choreographer, performance artist, and instructor based in Washington, D.C. He is the Founder & Artistic Director of EDGEWORKS Dance Theater, an all-male dance company of predominantly African-American men that existed for thirteen (13) years, from 2001 – 2013. His honors include the 2008 Pola Nirenska Award for Contemporary Achievement in Dance, D.C.’s highest honor given by the Washington Performing Arts Society; the 2002 and 2006 Kennedy Center Local Dance Commissioning Project Award; and Metro D.C. Dance Awards. In addition he was a three times finalist for the D.C. Mayor’s Arts Awards and Bates Dance Festival, one of the premiere festivals in the United States, named him their 2002 Emerging Choreographer. Most recently, he was a lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

  Helanius’s website can be found at www.helaniusj.com

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  Cuisine and Empire: What Does Food Tell Us About Culture?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Rachel Laudan

  Do you know anyone who is following the paleo diet? How much do they really know about what people ate in our early history? Do you know people who are carb free? If so, what would they say to about the fact that grains have been the centerpiece of almost all human diets? Do you know anyone who loves Chinese food? Well, what makes food Chinese in the first place and why do the Chinese eat so little meat compared to Europeans? This episode looks at the history of cooking and examines its political and, of course, philosophical implications.

  Rachel Laudan is a food historian with a PhD from the University of London. She has taught history, philosophy, and science at Carnegie Mellon, She is the author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History and the prizewinning book, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary History. She has served as Scholar-in-Residence for the International Association of Culinary Professionals, written for Saveur, Utne Reader, the Boston Globe, and given keynote addresses for many academic, business, and culinary conferences. After fifteen years in Mexico, she now lives in Austin, Texas.

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  The Rise of Writing: What Happens When People Write More Than They Read?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Deborah Brandt

  Have you noticed how much you’ve been writing lately? How many emails, texts, and Facebook posts you compose on any given day? Have you realized how much more you write than you read? Deb Brandt has and she wants us to all understand that we are experiencing a mass-writing revolution that will change our culture forever. On this episode we discuss the shift of focus from reading to writing and look at how it has changed both the workplace and the ways in which people express themselves.

  Deborah Brandt is professor emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author most recently of The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy(Cambridge University Press, 2015). For nearly 30 years at UW-Madison she taught undergraduate writing at all levels, as well as graduate courses in literacy studies, contemporary writing theory, and research methodology. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education, among other sources. In 2003 she was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Education for her book Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  This is Deb’s second appearance on Why? Radio, listen to the first, “Is Ghostwriting Ethical” by clicking here.

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  Equality and Dialogue in American High Schools

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Nel Noddings

  If you believe the news, you would think that American children are stupid and that schools only make them worse. Is this true? And, more importantly, what should learning look like? Do we continue to teach a specialized and standardized program or can we find a more integrated way to teach students about home and family, their future occupation, and civic life, all at the same time? On this episode of Why?, we discuss the future of education and what High Schools can do to education the whole person.

  Nel Noddings is Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University. She is also a past president of the National Academy of Education, the Philosophy of Education Society, and the John Dewey Society. Her most recent book is Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. She has written numerous others, including: Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Women and Evil, The Challenge to Care in Schools, Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, and Philosophy of Education, and more than 200 articles and book chapters on various topics ranging from the ethics of care to mathematical problem solving.

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  Why Not Socialism?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Robert Paul Wolff

  Anyone who lived through the 20th century will have a complex relationship with Karl Marx; some will see socialism as the glorious road not traveled and others will see him as the folly we defeated. Those who came to political consciousness in the 21st century, though, will have virtually no notion of him at all, he’s a relic, a demon from the past, and socialism is simply an epithet used during political debate.

  Robert Paul Wolff, emeritus professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of twenty-one books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics, and Afro-American Studies. His is one of philosophy’s most powerful voices articulating alternatives to capitalism including reconsiderations of socialism and anarchism.

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  Can a Philosopher Govern the United States? The Case of F.A. Hayek

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Bruce Caldwell

  If you’ve paid any attention to politics, you’ll know that libertarians are convinced they have a better way to govern. Much of their philosophy is built on the work of Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian philosopher and economist who saw the free market as an antidote to Nazism and the Soviet Union. Those threats are gone, does that mean Hayek is no longer relevant? On this episode we ask about Hayek, about the nature of economics, and whether specialized researchers have a duty to be relevant.

  Bruce Caldwell is a Research Professor and the Director of the newly Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He is the author of “Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the 20th Century”, first published in 1982. For the past two decades his research has focused on the multi-faceted writings of the Nobel prize-winning economist and social theorist Friedrich A. Hayek. Caldwell’s intellectual biography of Hayek, “Hayek’s Challenge”, was published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press. Since 2002 he has been the General Editor of “The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek”, a collection of Hayek’s writings published jointly by the University of Chicago Press and Routledge. Caldwell has held research fellowships at New York University, Cambridge University, and the London School of Economics. He is a past president of the History of Economics Society and of the Southern Economic Association, a past Executive Director of the International Network for Economic Method, and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

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  The Intelligence in Everyday Work

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Mike (Michael Anthony) Rose

  Mike Rose’s mother was a waitress. She worked for years negotiating the complex world of planning around, strategizing about, delivering to, and socializing with customers. She had to master timing, memory, efficiency, and psychology, but if you asked just about anyone, they would have said her work involved no deep thought at all. In his important book The Mind at Work, Mike challenges the idea that waitressing is thoughtless, while also looking at the complex intellect of hairdressers, electricians, carpenters, and others in similar professions. This episode of Why? asks us to relearn everything we claim to know about manual laborers and reexamine our assumptions about the role of thinking in jobs.

  The son of Italian immigrants, Mike Rose was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and raised in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Loyola University (B.A.), the University of Southern California (M.S.), and the University of California, Los Angeles (M.A. and Ph.D.). Over the last forty years, he has taught in a range of educational settings, from kindergarten to job training and adult literacy programs. He is currently on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

  He is the author of eleven books including Lives on the Boundary: the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared, Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, and Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.

  His website can be found here.

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  What is Performance Architecture

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Alex Schweder

  Alex Schweder spent a week living with six other people, in a 24-inch wide apartment, to see what that experience would tell him living spaces. And he did it in a gallery in front of a live audience. He wasn’t just doing performance art. He’s an architect interested in learning about the relationships between psychology and the structures we build. Tonight on Why? we’ll talk with Alex about his experiments and what he calls performance architecture

  Alex Schweder works with architecture and performance art to complicate the distinction between occupying subjects and occupied objects. These projects include Practise Architecture at Tate Britain, Flatland at New York’s Sculpture Center, Its Form Follows Your Performance at Berlin’s Magnus Muller, A Sac of Rooms All Day Long at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Counterweight Roommate in Scope Basel, Roomograph at the deCordova Museum, and The Rise and fall in the Marrakech Biennial. The Pollack Krasner and Graham Foundations have funded his projects. Schweder is the author of Stalls Between Walls included in Ladies and Gents, the Gendering of Public Toilets and Performance Architecture included in Urban Interiors. He is a three-time artist in residence at the Kohler Company and was in residence at the Chinati Foundation and American Academy in Rome. Schweder has been a guest professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Pratt Institute, and the Institute for Art and Architecture in Vienna. Alex’s website can be found here.

  And for the record, Jack mentions William James and the penopticon, during the show. He meant Jeremy Bentham — making spontaneous mistakes is one of the perils of live radio!

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  How to Think about Antisemitism

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Daniel Johan Goldhagen

  Almost two decades ago, Daniel Goldhagen wrote a book about the holocaust that changed the entire discussion. For the first time, people were forced to consider how everyday Germans influenced the genocide. Since then, he’s written more books on related topics and watched as global antisemitism got worse and worse, publishing, finally, a powerful study called The Devil that Never Dies. On this episode Danny and Jack have a wide-ranging discussion about antisemitism itself, Israel, the use of language to describe Jews, and even Microsoft Word!

  Daniel Goldhagen is the author numerous books, including The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism; A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, and the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which has been published in fifteen languages, and named by Time one of the two best non-fiction books of 1996 and by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitungas “the most spectacular nonfiction success of this year.” He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a professor in their Government and Social Studies departments until he became an independent scholar. He is currently affiliated with Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

  A written version of the episode’s monologue can be found here.

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  Saying ‘No’ Through Civil Disobedience

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Jason D. Hill

  When Jason Hill was in Turkey, he met a family with a gregarious nine-year-old daughter. When he compared her lively personality with the distant, quiet, and isolated behavior of her burka-clad mother and sister, he began to shudder. He realized that in a few years, she too would be expected to put on similar outfits and withdraw from the world.

  Are burkas an example of something we shouldn’t tolerate? Are there other people we should just say no to: anti-gay marriage activists, xenophobes, those who oppose assimilation? On this episode we ask these questions and consider the possibility that we haven’t done enough to challenge profound moral wrongs.

  Jason Hill is a Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. His areas of specialization are Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Cosmopolitanism, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Education and Race Theory. He is the author of Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What it Means to be a Human Being in the New Millennium; Beyond Blood Identities: Post Humanity in the 21st Century; Civil Disobedience and the Politics of Identity: When We Should Not Get Along; and the forthcoming novel Jamaica Boy in Search of America.

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  Do we live in a commercial republic? A Discussion about American Government and its Economy

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Mike O'Conner

  If you believed the pundits, you’d think that America has always had one kind of economy; that our democracy has always relied upon the same kind of free market. But this isn’t the case. If you believe the politicians, you’d think capitalism and democracy are pretty much identical, that when you talk about one, you are really talking about the other. Are this episode of Why? Radio we are going take a journey through American history and examine the actual arguments that helped determine just what kind of economy America should have.

  Mike O’Connor is an independent scholar who has taught U.S History at universities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. H e writing has appeared in the scholarly journal Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties and in the newspapers Austin American-Statesman and The Daily Texan. One of the original bloggers on the U.S. Intellectual History blog, O’Connor later founded (with several others) the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

  Here is a link to a video in which Mike is discussing the historical aspects of his book. Part 1, Part 2.

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  Are there too many people for our environment?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Philip Cafaro

  Right now waters are rising around the world, chemicals are seeping into our food and people are going hungry. Right now, wilderness is diminishing and cities are increasing in both size and density. In short we have an overpopulation problem and we have way too many environmental crises and no one seems to know what to do about any of it. On this’s episode of Why? we are going to tackle all of this at once by talking about overpopulation from an environmentalist’s perspective.

  Phil Cafaro’s research foci are environmental ethics, consumption and population policy, and biodiversity preservation. He is the author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue, co-editor with Ron Sandler of the anthologies Environmental Virtue Ethics and Virtue Ethics and the Environment, and co-editor with Eileen Crist of the forthcoming Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Population Growth.

  He has published articles in Environmental Ethics, the Journal of Social Philosophy, Philosophy Today and BioScience, and in the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, the Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. A former ranger with the U.S. National Park Service and an affiliated faculty member of CSU’s School of Global Ecological Sustainability, Cafaro is Vice President/President Elect of the International Society for Environmental Ethics.

  Visit his website at: http://www.philipcafaro.com/

  Here is a link to the video “Solar Freain’ Roadways” mentioned in our discussion: http://youtu.be/qlTA3rnpgzU

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  Are Indian Tribes Sovereign Nations?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and George E. Tinker

  It is no secret that there are strained relations between Native American tribes and the U.S. Government. In fact, many tribes want to be considered sovereign nations, free from US law and expectations. Even more so, most Americans understand little about American Indian life, traditions, and history. How are we to have a serious conversation about Indian liberation if we don’t know the basic facts? On this episode, we look not only at political question of tribal sovereignty, but delve deeply into its relationship to Native American culture, theology and history.

  George “Tink” Tinker is Clifford Baldridge Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He teaches courses in American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies and is a frequent speaker on these topics both in the U.S. and internationally. His publications include American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (2008); Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (2004); and Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (1993). He co-authored A Native American Theology (2001); and he is co-editor of Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (2003), and Fortress Press’ Peoples’ Bible (2008).

  Tink has volunteered in the Indian community as (non–stipendiary) director of Four Winds American Indian Survival Project in Denver for two decades. In that capacity he functions in the urban Indian community as a traditional American Indian spiritual leader. He is past president of the Native American Theological Association and a member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

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  Can There Be A World Without Borders?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Seyla Benhabib

  Our world is getting smaller and people are migrating from place to place. It feels like the old ideas of ethnicity and national origin just don’t hold the same power that they used to. Instead, the real question may turn out to be, how can we all be world citizens? On this episode we investigate cosmopolitanism and ask what it means to live without national boundaries and travel restrictions.

  Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (2002-2008). She was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize in 2009.

  Sheyla is the author of numerous books including, The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002) and The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2205) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004). Another Cosmopolitanism. Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, based on Professor Benhabib’s 2004 Tanner Lectures delivered at Berkeley, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka has appeared from Oxford University Press in 2006.

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  The Urbanization of Happiness

  Jack Russell Weinstein, Teddy Cruz, and Fonna Forman

  Think about the cities you love and the cities you hate. Think about those that work and those that are falling apart. What influences their character, and, perhaps, more importantly, why do some succeed and others fail? This episode of Why? asks these questions and takes a special look at how design creates urban problems, and how what and where we build encourages violence, poverty, and unhappiness.

  Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman are both Faculty members at the University of California, San Diego. Teddy is an architect and urbanist working out of the department of visual arts. He is the director of UCSD Center for Urban Ecologies. Fonna is a political theorist in the Department of political science and Co-Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. She is also the author of Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy and editor of the journal The Adam Smith Review.

  Teddy and Fonna are both Special Advisors to the City of San Diego on Civic and Urban Initiatives, leading the City’s new Civic Innovation Lab.

  Teddy’s Ted Talk on architectural innovation can be found here.

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  How to Tell the Story of Art

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Ross King

  When Ross Kind decided to tell the story of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, he didn’t start with the paint colors or brushes; he started with politics, gossip, power and intrigue. When he told the story of Brunelleschi’s dome for the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, he started with competition and rivalry. Is this how we should tell the story or art? Is one painting or one building so complex, that he needs hundreds of pages to prepare the audience? Ross King thinks so and we’re going to find out why.

  Ross King is the bestselling author of six books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. He has also published two historical novels, Domino (1995) and Ex-Libris (1998), and edited a collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s fables, jokes and riddles. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his books have been nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize, and the National Award for Arts Writing. He has won both the Governor General’s Award in Canada (for The Judgment of Paris) and the Book Sense Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the United States (for Brunelleschi’s Dome).

  His latest book, Leonardo and The Last Supper, has been described as ‘gripping’ (New York Times), ‘fascinating’ (Financial Times), ‘engaging’ (The Guardian), ‘enthralling’ (Daily Mail), ‘absorbing’ (Kirkus), ‘engrossing’ (Booklist), and ‘extraordinary’ (Irish Times). Leonardo and The Last Supper was awarded the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.

  Ross King’s website can be found here.

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  What is happiness?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Sissela Bok

  Everybody wants happiness, but no one seems to agree on what it is. This is not new; figuring out what it means to be happy is one of the most longstanding and difficult philosophical problems in history. So, obviously, WHY? Radio is going to ask it.

  Sissela Bok is the author of Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science and numerous other books, among them are Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life; Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation; A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War and Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment. She is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies at the Harvard University School of Public Health.

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  Civic Renewal in America

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Peter Levine

  Every one of us has been encouraged to be an involved citizen, but what exactly does this mean? Every one of us has been told that small groups of thoughtful people are the only things that change the world? Is this true? Every one of us has been told that the government represents our interests, but the government doesn’t seem to know that. This episode of looks at all these puzzles and examine activism, democracy, the attempts to influence government policy.

  Peter Levine is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s Jonathan Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. He has a secondary appointment in the Tufts philosophy department. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in philosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving his doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at Common Cause. In the late 1990s, he was Deputy Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Levine is the author of the forthcoming book We are the Ones We have been Waiting for: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America (Oxford University Press, fall 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a novel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks, Street Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Kettering Foundation, the American Bar Association Committee’s for Public Education, the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.”

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  The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Joseph Margolis

  Why? Radio is, of course, a philosophy show, but our guests aren’t just philosophers. They are historians, artists, scientists, musicians, sociologists and specialists from many different fields. Are we doing something wrong? Aren’t all these disciplines different? On this episode of Why? we are going to tackle these questions. We will ask about the classic “unity of the sciences,” look at the relationship between how cultures describe knowledge and how they describe themselves.

  In this episode, the guest turns the tables on Jack by forcing him to answer a different starting question. This leads the discussion into unforeseen territory and forces all of us to dive headfirst into some of the deepest and most important (and abstract!) conversation about what it means for human beings to understand one another and the world around them.

  Joseph Margolis is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy of Temple University. His main interests are in the philosophy of the human sciences, the theory of knowledge and interpretation, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, American philosophy, and pragmatism. He is Past-President of the American Society for Aesthetics, Honorary President and Lifetime Member of the International Association of Aesthetics. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. He serves on the editorial board of many philosophical journals and is completing the third volume in a trilogy of books on contemporary American philosophy. Professor Margolis is currently participating in the Department’s Vietnamese Philosophy Exchange.

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  Should There Be A National Standard For Education?

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Michael W. Apple

  Education in the United States has changed radically in the last twenty years – standardized tests and the new Common Core goals have changed the way students are taught. At the heart of the debate is a complex philosophical question: should there be national standards for education or should educational goals be determined on the local level? Does the federal government have the best idea of what students should learn, or do local school boards, towns, cities, and counties? Should politicians and policy makers determine standards, or should teachers and parents? On this episode we discuss the Common Core, the purpose and nature of education, necessary educational goals, and Michael Apple’s new book “Can Education Change Society?”

  Professor Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He teaches courses in curriculum theory and research and in the sociology of curriculum. His major interests lie in the relationship between culture and power in education. He has many influential publications including the books Ideology and Curriculum, The State and Politics of Education. Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God and Inequality, Official Knowledge: Democratic Knowledge in a Conservative Age; Cultural Politics and Education; Education and Power.

  Michael Apple was also one of WHY? Radio’s earliest guests. His episode titled “Ideology and Curriculum: 30 Years of A Discussion” can be found here.

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  Holding the Police Accountable

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Samuel Walker

  Samuel Walker has spent his career asking who polices the police. His books and paper titles read like a laundry list of horror stories – police abuse of teenage girls, the unsuccessful nature of police “sweeps” – but he also expresses an optimism about community influence and citizen involvement. On this episode, we dive headfirst into the controversial and complicated world of law enforcement.

  Samuel Walker is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He received a Ph.D. in American History from Ohio State University in 1973. He has taught at UNO since 1974. He is the author of 11 books on policing, criminal justice history and policy, and civil liberties. Professor Walker’s current research involves police accountability, focusing primarily on citizen oversight of the police and police Early Warning (EW) systems. The research on citizen oversight is published in Police Accountability.

  Samuel Walker’s website and blog can be found here.

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  Reinventing Government: Twenty Years Later

  Jack Russell Weinstein and David Osborne

  The American Government is a large. Many claim it is also slow to move and wasteful. In 1993, the book Reinventing Government took this monolith as its target and offered up a way to change it, to make government nimble, responsive, and efficient. In doing so, it brought the ideas of privatization and entrepreneurship out of the business world and into Democratic public policy. The Clinton Administration was one of the books most enthusiastic supporters and Vice President Gore spearheaded a reinventing government commission. On this episode, we revisit that book to ask about its solutions and its legacy.

  David Osborne is the author or co-author of five books: The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis (2004); The Reinventor’s Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government (2000), Banishing Bureaucracy: The Five Strategies For Reinventing Government (1997), Reinventing Government (1992), and Laboratories of Democracy (1988). He has also authored numerous articles for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Harpers, The New Republic, Inc., Governing, and other publications.

  He is also a senior partner of The Public Strategies Group, a consulting firm that helps public organizations improve their performance.

  Two papers that David mentioned in the show (click link):

  “A New Model for American Education”

  “Improving Charter School Accountability: The Challenge of Colsing Failing Schools.”

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  A Conversation with a Playwright

  Jack Russell Weinstein and Tony Kushner

  Tony Kushner is probably the most important and most influential living American playwright. At this year’s UND Writers Conference, WHY?’s host Jack Russell Weinstein had the pleasure and honor of talking to him about the Pulitzer Prize winning play Angels in America, his movie Lincoln, and writing for the theater in general. It was a remarkable conversation in front of a very large appreciative audience.

  WHY? Radio would like to thank the UND Writers Conference and its donors for inviting Jack to interview Tony, and for allowing us to broadcast the discussion as a whole.

  In “After Angels,” a profile of Tony Kushner published in The New Yorker, John Lahr wrote: “[Kushner] is fond of quoting Melville’s heroic prayer from Mardi and a Voyage Thither (“Better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals”), and takes an almost carnal glee in tackling the most difficult subjects in contemporary history – among them, AIDS and the conservative counter-revolution (Angels In America), Afghanistan and the West (Homebody/Kabul), German Fascism and Reaganism (A Bright Room Called Day), the rise of capitalism (Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne), and racism and the civil rights movement in the South (Caroline, or Change). But his plays, which are invariably political, are rarely polemical. Instead Kushner rejects ideology in favor of what he calls “a dialectically shaped truth,” which must be “outrageously funny” and “absolutely agonizing,” and must “move us forward.” He gives voice to characters who have been rendered powerless by the forces of circumstances – a drag queen dying of AIDS, an uneducated Southern maid, contemporary Afghans – and his attempt to see all sides of their predicament has a sly subversiveness. He forces the audience to identify with the marginalized – a humanizing act of the imagination.”

  Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs!, Hydrotaphia, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille’s The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children, and the English-language libretto for the children’s opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels In America, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich as well as Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising and Brundibar: the Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. His latest work includes a collection of one-act plays, titled Tiny Kushner, featuring characters such as Laura Bush, Nixon’s analyst, the queen of Albania and a number of tax evaders, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism & Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures (which premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in May 2009, opened in New York in May 2011). During the 2010-2011 season, a revival of Angels in America ran off-Broadway at the Signature Theater in New York, winning the Lucille Lortel Award in 2011 for Outstanding Revival.

  Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, among many others. Caroline, or Change, produced in the autumn of 2006 at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, received the Evening Standard Award, the London Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best Musical. In September 2008, Tony Kushner became the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the largest theater award in the US. He was also awarded the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.