The Public Sphere: Recent Episodes
Contrivers' Review
A weekly discussion from the editors of Contrivers' Review.
Cover Art: This photograph is part of the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse.
As everybody knows, today the political landscape is sharply divided. This is especially true when it comes to economic redistribution. On the right, freedom means free markets. On the left, free markets produce inequality and oppression. This framing is of course hyperbole, but it does suggest how we take for granted the political alignment between certain economic principles.
As something of a corrective to this over simplified divide, Pete and Luke talk about Elizabeth Anderson’s Tanner Lectures in Human Values: "Liberty, Equality, and Private Government," which she gave at Princeton University in 2015. Anderson says we don’t really understand the relationship between the “free market” and some of our most cherished political ideals, namely freedom and equality. This is a historical misunderstanding that has lead to overlook how the modern workplace has become politically authoritarian even as it is championed by free market ideologues.
The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.
Rafael Khachaturian and Sean Guillory discuss their new article "Mapping the American Left." Both have been on the podcast before. Their article lists a few challenges faced by the Left in America.
"Mapping the American Left," Социология власти [Sociology of Power] Том 30 No 4 (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.
In a shorter episode, Pete and Luke are astounded by President Trump's declaration of a State of Emergency in order to find money for his border wall.
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.
A discussion about neoliberalism as a political and theoretical concept arising out of our research and reading.
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 controversial article from Andrew Sullivan, "America's New Religions," in New York Magazine. They debate the differences between small-L liberalism and small-C conservatism in political theory. They also probe the role played by religion in providing the background cultural resources for stable political disagreements (as Sullivan seems to believe it must).
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 talks with frequent guest Wes Bishop about how politics (mis-)characterizes and stereotypes the working class.
Wes Bishop, "The Public Stage: The Working Class in Theatrical Representations and the Fear of America’s Declining Public Sphere," South Atlantic Review 2018 (20:3) 130-149.
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 discuss a few articles about party politics in America.
- German Lopez, "William Barr helped establish mass incarceration. Now Trump wants him as attorney general." Vox.com (Dec 7, 2018).
- Charlie Savage, "Trump Will Nominate William Barr as Attorney General," New York Times (Dec 7, 2018).
- Dylan Scott, "What we know about the alleged election fraud plot in North Carolina," Vox.com (Dec 8, 2018).
- Sydney Ember, "North Carolina Republican Says He Would Support New Election if Fraud Occurred," New York Times (Dec 7, 2018)
- Julia Azari, "Weak parties and strong partisanship are a bad combination," Vox.com (Nov. 3, 2016).
- Yascha Mounk, "Is More Democracy Always Better Democracy?" The New Yorker (November 12, 2018).
- Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, "Political partisanship is vicious. That’s because political parties are too weak." Washington Post (Nov. 28, 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.
On this episode, Luke and Pete discuss "Scary Clowns,” an article in the Baffler by Brendan O'Conner. Luke begins with a monologue about his growing fear of extremist right-wing violence. We consider the connections between more mainstream conservative groups and fascist groups like the Proud Boys. We discuss the racial polarization of politics, and how race has crystalized into a political differentiator. Pete doesn't bother to talk Luke off the cliff after he makes the worst-case argument for a neo-fascist wave. Finally, we consider the complicity by silence of the GOP.
- Brendan O'Conner, "Scary Clowns," The Baffler (Nov. 21, 2018).
- "Political Violence", Public Sphere (Dec. 17, 2017).
- Luke Mergner, "Trump," Contrivers' Review (March 2016).
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Harper Brothers, 1951; reprinted Harper, 2019).
- John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Politics (Princeton, 2018). Summary at Vox.com by Ezra Klein.
- National Vanguard group.
- Turning Point USA
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 discuss Ryan Zinke, the scandal-ridden Secretary of the Interior. What does "public land for public use" mean? What is an "America First" energy policy? They also briefly revisit last week's topic, Matthew Whitaker, the newly appointed acting Attorney General.
Intro clip: Dogs at Dept of Interior, Fox New (May. 05, 2017).
Whitaker Redux
- Shawn Boburg, "Whitaker’s unusual path to Justice Department included owning day-care center, trailer maker and concrete supplier," Washington Post (November 14, 2018).
"In 2004, when he started a five-year stint as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Iowa, Whitaker cited a personal-injury case and a dispute involving a dry-cleaning business as some of his most consequential legal work." 2. John Yoo, "Whitaker’s Appointment Is Unconstitutional," The Atlantic (Nov. 13, 2018). 3. Rational Security, "The 'Cocoon of Bitterness and Resentment' Edition (Nov. 15, 2018).
Ryan Zinke, or I can't remember which clown we're talking about this week…
- Media Matters, "A Timeline of scandals and ethical shortfalls at Ryan Zinke's Interior Department."
- Timothy L. O'Brien, "Ryan Zinke and the Murky Interior of Trumpworld," Bloomberg (Nov. 1, 2018).
-
Elliott D. Woods, "Ryan Zinke Is Trump's Attack Dog on the Environment," Outside (Dec 4, 2017).
-
Jimmy Tobias, "The Zinke effect," The Guardian (Nov 12, 2018).
"Williams dismissively characterized the approach taken by the administration of Barack Obama: “Anything you want to do on public land, they want to see what the carbon footprint is and what the social cost is.” Under Zinke, “we’re not looking at this”, he said. The new administration was instead focused on “economic impacts”." - Democracy in America, "Ryan Zinke's messy week," The Economist (Oct 19, 2018).
"In a more normal administration, Mr Zinke’s misadventures might have got him fired. In the current administration, they barely make headlines."
What does "public lands will once again be for public use" mean? What is an "America First" energy policy?
- Conrad Black, How Trump Stood up the the Environmentalist Left, National Review (Nov. 14, 2018). (A response was published in NR by Theodore Kupfer.)
- Shawn Regan, "A Monumental Mistake," National Review (Feb. 14, 2017).
- Bears Ears "defenders in this case have expressed contempt for Utah’s desire to choose its own land policies."
- "If government is the things we do together, then we should govern together. And if monument designations are truly good public policy, they shouldn’t require eleventh-hour executive actions that thwart the legislative process to become reality."
- Orrin G. Hatch, "It’s time to undo the federal land grab of Bears Ears," Washington Post (April 25, 2017).
"[Obama] ignored the best interests of Utah and cast aside the will of the people — all in favor of a unilateral approach meant to satisfy the demands of far-left interest groups."
=> Hatch does not explain why expanding protections causes harm other than to say that it was against the wishes of Utah's politicians. - Elizabeth Kolbert, "The The Damage Done by Trump’s Department of the Interior," The New Yorker (Jan. 22, 2018).
“One of Zinke’s first acts, after dismounting from Tonto, was to overturn a moratorium on new leases for coal mines on public land.” - Glenn Beck (Dec 5, 2017)
“The Antiquities Act was supposed to protect archaeological sites from souvenir hunters,” explained Glenn, adding, “Once the land is declared a national monument, it’s closed. And I mean closed to ranching, mining, and development — but also to you. Don’t you dare pitch a tent there. This is not a park.”
"...untapped natural resources" in protected federal land ?
Outro clip: "I Heart Huckabees."
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.
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.
Today we are discussing the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt.
His tenure has been controversial. He has been in the news for potential ethics violations regarding airline fares. There have been odd details about personal security and a lack of transparency. Environmentalists have voiced concerns about policy process and changes that have occurred under his orders.
Pruitt is, by all accounts, deeply religious and in this episode we'll try to connect the dots between his faith and environmental policy.
- Ralph Drollinger, "Coming to Grips with the Religion of Environmentalism," Capitol Ministries (April 2, 2018).
- Katherine Stewart, "A Christian Nationalist Blitz," New York Times (May 26, 2018).
- Jeremy Pierce, "Dominionismists," First Things (August 14, 2011).
- Scott Pruitt at the Federalist Society.
- Steve Eder, "Scott Pruitt Before the E.P.A.," New York Times (April 21, 2018).
- Scott Pruitt & Luther Strange, "The Climate-Change Gang," National Review (May 17, 2016).
- Margaret Talbot, "Scott Pruitt's Dirty Politics," New Yorker (April 2, 2018).
- Umair Irfan, "Scott Pruitt is slowly strangling the EPA," Vox.com (March 8, 2018).
On the show today, Pete talks to Samantha Parsons, a co-founder of Unkoch My Campus and Transparent GMU. These organizations expose the influence The Charles Koch foundation on colleges and universities throughout the United States.
In a recent episode of The Public Sphere, Pete and I discussed the lawsuit brought by Transparent GMU against the George Mason University Foundation, the fundraising arm of the school. We’ll get an update on that lawsuit and talk the problem of “dark money” from a national perspective.
Samantha Parsons is a grassroots campaign organizer and co-founder of UnKoch My Campus. She provides students, faculty, and other university stakeholders with the support needed to investigate, expose, and launch strategic grassroots campaigns to address undue donor manipulation of their campuses. She is a 2016 alumna of George Mason University with a degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution. As a student, she supported the growth of campus activism throughout the state of Virginia as a member of the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and the Virginia Student Power Network. Her research interests include university policy development, institutional funding models, the role of the academy in a democratic society, and critical conflict resolution.
- UnKoch My Campus: http://www.unkochmycampus.org/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnKochMyCampus/
- Twitter: @UnKochCampus
- Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/demand-president-cabrera-release-all-donor-agreements-to-faculty
- To Donate to UnKoch My Campus: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/help-expose-the-koch-brothers-and-protect-our-universities
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 talks to Kate Doyle Griffiths about the teachers' strike in West Virginia and her article in Viewpoint Magazine.
Kate is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in the department of Anthropology. She writes about work, women and queers, strikes and social reproduction, health and healthcare in the USA and South Africa. She is a member of Red Bloom, and an organizer with the International Women’s Strike. Here's a link to Kate’s Patreon page.
The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review. The Public Sphere is on iTunes where you can rate and review us. 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. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon. 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.
Free speech is a core tenet of our democratic and academic systems. But as in politics, universities are increasingly under siege by large donors carrying bags of cash. What do billions of dollars entitle you to? Does it entitle you to shape what is taught and researched at a public university? How can you tell when or if ideology is subverting core institutional values?
These are the questions at the heart of controversies over the Charles Koch Foundation donating millions of dollars to US universities. The spirit of the questions also applies to other billionaires making donations like Phil Knight or George Soros, but the Charles Koch Foundation has stirred more controversy in part because of the lack of transparency around many of these donations and the strings that have come attached to the money, such as influence in faculty hiring, scholarship and fellowship awards, and curriculum decisions. They’ve also drawn attention because some feel that the far-right ideology of Koch funded “university-based research centers” may be itself be so extreme as to cast doubt on the scholarly validity of the research it produces and teaches.
We’ll be talking mainly about George Mason University today. GMU is a public university in northern VA that has received $95.5 million of that $142 million donated by Charles Koch Foundation since 2005. On Tuesday, April 24 a student group on campus, Transparent GMU went to trial against the GMU and their fundraising arm, The George Mason University Foundation to release documents under the FOIA. While that case is still undecided, documents detailing the donor agreements were released, providing us with direct evidence that the Kochs dictated hiring and other academic policies, which GMU is now admitting.
- Jane Mayer interviewed on NPR Fresh Air.
- Jane Mayer at Stanford University.
Today Pete and Luke are discussing John Dickerson's argument in May issue of The Atlantic that the modern presidency is too unwieldy for any individual to succeed. Implicitly he is pushing back against the idea that Trump's personality is ill-fitted to the job: Anyone would be overwhelmed by the office, he thinks.
This week, we’re talking about A Kingdom of Dust, by Mark Arax. This long-form article was published in California Sunday Magazine in late January. It’s a long winding lyrical account of the largest grower of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranate in the country. You would probably recognize the Wonderful brand from the bottles of pom juice you seen in the grocery store or Fiji water.
This is a story of a tycoon of American agri-business, the rights to California’s scarcest resource, water, the company town of Lost Hills and the workers who live there, and the role of philanthropy in providing what are usually public services.
Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.
- Brian Schatz, "California’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad, Families Are Squatting Abandoned Homes Just to Survive," MotherJones (March/April 2018).
- Clair Potter, "How to learn from Conservatives," Public Seminar (April 18, 2018).
- Ronan Farrow, "Inside Rex Tillerson’s Ouster," The New Yorker (April 19, 2018).
- Mark Arax, "A Kingdom from Dust," California Sunday Magazine (January 31, 2018).
- "Drought by the Numbers," KCET.org .
- Map of the Central Valley.
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.
Thanks for listening.
Joining us today is Sean Guillory, who teaches in the Russian and East European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Sean has a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. He is the host of the Sean's Russia Blog Podcast, a weekly conversation on Eurasian politics, history, and culture. You can follow him on Twitter at @seansrussiablog and support him through Patreon.
Sean recently wrote a great essay for Contrivers' Review on the Russian Revolution. When I approached him for the piece, my idea was to get a meta-review: a discussion of all the takes on the Russian Revolution — a timely but controversial topic. What we got was a richer critique of how writers in general mistreat the Russian Revolution. In some ways, any history of a revolution might fall prey to these errors. But America's long history with Russia, Marxism, and anti-communism makes our reading of the Russian Revolution particularly vulnerable.
- Sean Guillory, "Making Sense of the Russian Revolution," Contrivers' Review.
- Baskar Sunkara, "The Few Who Won," Jacobin.
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, "What's Left?" London Review of Books.
- Vladimir Tismaneanu, "One Hundred Years of Communism," Public Seminar.
- Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (University of California Press, 1997).
- Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Havard University Press, 2009).
- Reds (1981).
- Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).
- Lars T. Lih, Lenin (Reaktion Books, 2012).
- Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Belknap Press, 2017)
- Mark Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017)
- China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 2017).
- Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin's Men (PublicAffairs, 2017).
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.
Thanks for listening.
Our cover art a modified version of a photo from the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse.
This week we are talking about Facebook and the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since the story broke, it's morphed several times. At first we feared the manipulation of public opinion using "Big Data." Then public opinion seemed shocked at how much data Facebook was keeping and potentially reselling. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, people asked, "Why didn't we know this?"
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said to CNN (March 21, 2018) that he wasn't sure Facebook shouldn't be regulated, it set off a another wave of punditry: on privacy, data, social media, and democracy.
We also take a few minutes to discuss the ouster of David Shulkin at the department of Veteran's Affairs and the hiring of John Bolton as National Security Advisor.
- Charlie Warzel, "Facebook Has Had Countless Privacy Scandals. But This One Is Different." Buzzfeed.
- Matthew Yglesias, "The case against Facebook," Vox.com.
- "Is Facebook Bad?" The Weeds podcast from Vox.com.
- Eliana Johnson, "John Bolton's knife-fighting skills alarm his critics," Politico.
- Mike Allen and Johathan Swan, "How to survive in Trumpland," Axios.
Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.
The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review. Please consider supporting The Public Sphere and Contrivers' Review on Patreon.
Today we’re talking to Wesley Bishop, a PhD candidate in History at Purdue University. His writings have appeared at Jacobin, The Socialist Worker, and TERSE, where he is the assistant editor. He is also a campus organizer with the Purdue Social Justice Coalition.
In late April of 2017, Purdue University in West Lafeyette, Indiana, announced plans to acquire Kaplan University—an online, for profit school—its 15 campuses and learning centers, and its 32,000 students and 3,000 employees. The ostensible was to expand their presence in online education. They plan to continue running Kaplan online as a private company with a different name. This is a unique situation for a lot of reasons which we get into during our discussion.
We also discuss the West Virginia teachers' strike and revisit the essay Wes wrote for Contrivers' Review last fall.
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.
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Thanks for listening.
Hi and welcome to THE PUBLIC SPHERE from Contrivers' Review. I'm Luke Mergner joined by Pete Sinnott at our "studio" — in air quotes — in Glendale, CA.
Two weeks ago we discussed the collective autobiography, Quit Lit, documenting the mass exodus of non-tenured faculty from Higher Education to a depressed and depressing job market. Today, we're talking about Ron Srigley's "Whose University is it anyway?" — a diatribe about the balance of power between administrators and professors in the modern university. As educators at every level face funding crunches, how does the growing administrative bloat in higher education serve the students?
Rafael Khatchaturian joins the podcast again.
Today, we are talking about the bizarre circle that took Paul Manafort from the apex of K-Street to post-Soviet Eastern Europe and back. Mantefort was briefly the campaign manager of the Trump campaign and now is a major target of Robert Mueller's investigation.
Franklin Foer, now a national correspondant with The Atlantic, describes Manafort's rise as an influential Washington lobbyist to his work on behalf of an international rogues gallery including former Ukranian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. In this way, Manafort's career mirrors the arc of history since 1980: the rise of neoliberal, Reaganite conservatism in 1980, the exportation of US style democracy and campaigning to Europe after 1991, and the dubious rewards that both the US and Europe are now reaping.
One programming note: You can hear my cat, Imogen, on both this and our last episode.
- Rafael's breakdown of an anti-soviet cartoon.
- Sean Guillory - Sean's Russian Blog.
- Franklin Foer, "The Plot Against America," The Atlantic (March 2018).
- Masha Gessen, "The New Politics of Conspiracy," New York Review of Books (November 2nd, 2016).
What is Quit Lit? And what does it says about the universities and professors.
- Erin Bartam, "The Sublimated Grief of Being Left Behind."
- Rebecca Shuman, "Thesis Hatement," Slate (April, 2013).
- Funding for Maryland Universities.
- Guns vs. Butter (12:25)
- US Discretionary Funding: CBO infographic, 2017 Budget Priorities.
- Malcolm Gladwell, "My Little Hundred Million," Revisionist History podcast.
This is the podcast on podcasts. This week, Pete and Luke discuss which podcasts we listen to, why, and what makes them work.
- Slate's Trumpcast
- Rational Security from Lawfair.
- The Weeds, Vox.com
- Pod Save America, Crooked Media
- The Dig from Jacobin
- Chapo Trap House
Today we're talking about Nancy Fraser, eminent political and critical theorist. She is a professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research. Her work addresses the intersection of feminism and Marxism, by arguing in part that the exploitation of unpaid domestic, mostly female labor is a key aspect of capitalism.
She recently wrote an essay for the journal American Affairs: "From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond." It was later republished at Public Seminar.
- Nancy Fraser, "From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond," Public Seminar. American Affairs
- Nancy Fraser, "Behind Marx's Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism." NLR 86 March-April 2014
- Nancy Fraser, "Contradictions of Capital and Care," NLR July-August 2016.
- Nancy Fraser, "How Feminism became capitalism's handmaiden — and how to reclaim it," Guardian Oct 14, 2014.
This week we're discussing "Greate White Hype" by Ned Resnikoff published by The Baffler.
In the article, he argues against a new dynamic influencing public debate.
The primary example he cites is Steve Bannon, now-discredited presidential advisor and former CEO of Breitbart News, who was portrayed as a genius in some media accounts. "A legion of pseudo-Bannons and mini-Bannons are scrambling to replicate his success," Resnikoff warns.
But his argument is a deeper indictment of a the emergence of the "though-leader" and "think-piece" — which we're putting in scare-quotes.
This week we are talking about "Rescuing Economics from Neoliberalism" by Dani Rodrik, published in the Boston Review. Rodrik is a well-known economist and long-time critic of globalization. While he's no black-flag, brick-throwing anti-capitalist, he was one of the earliest voices questioning the post-1991 free trade orthodoxy. Of course, the story has changed since then, not least because of the 2008 Great Recession. In this essay, Rodrik is keen to disentangle the valuable parts of Economics from the bowdlerized, neoliberal version popular today.
Today we're talking about Michael Wolfe's book on the first 200 days of the Trump administration. Fire and Fury is the the dramatic title for a controversial book.
Links
- Michael Wolfe, Fire and Fury
- Devil's Bargain
- Andrew Prokop, "The controversy around Michael Wolff’s gossipy new Trump book, explained." Vox.com (Jan. 5, 2018).
- Nausicaa Renner and Pete Vernon, “Every Age Gets the Boswell It Deserves,” Columbia Journalism Review (Jan. 5, 2018).
- James Fallows, “It’s Been an Open Secret All Along.” The Atlantic (Jan. 4, 2018).
- Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Secret Shrinking Schedule,” Axios (Jan. 7, 2018).
This week we're engaging in some good old fashioned punditry. December saw a couple of profiles published about how the Trump White House operates. We've been getting edges of the puzzle for months now as personnel, like Steve Bannon, have left and the Russia investigation continues. But the Dec. 9 NY Times article from Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker is daily picture of life in the White House (and the Florida golf resort that they call the "Winter White House."
"Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation" is a classic example of palace intrigue. But what do we learn that we didn't know before?
The Public Sphere is a podcast from Contrivers Review.
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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.
Thanks for listening.
This week, Pete and Luke talk about "Generation Screwed" by Michael Hobbes, published by the Huffington Post.
The Public Sphere is a produced by Contrivers' Review, where you can find lot's of things to read. Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, or subscribe to our mailing list.
This week, Pete and Luke discuss the NY Times Magazine profile of Sean Hannity and Justin Peter's "Watching Fox" blog from Slate.com. Is Fox News propaganda? How does it impact public opinion? Is there a middle ground between a dogmatic insistence on "facts" and a postmodern world of competing narratives?
The Editors Podcast is a production of Contrivers' Review.