A Gentlemen’s Disagreement

We, rather reluctantly, wade back into the Covid conversation in this week's episode where we are joined by musician Brian Scully. Scully shares with us how Covid and all of the accompanying restrictions over the past eighteen months have affected his family and his career. We also debate the responses from our leaders at the local, state, and national levels from March of 2020 through today.

20 years, $2 trillion dollars, and countless lives. The toll of America's longest war is difficult to quantify, and perhaps even harder to swallow given its inglorious ending. On this week's episode, we get a Marine's perspective on the war in Afghanistan as Marine Corps veteran Captain Colin Murphy joins us for a discussion on what we gained, what we lost, and, hopefully, what we learned over these past two decades in conflict.

We begin this week by recapping some of the major storylines from the first week of the Olympics (0:30-25:23) before having a discussion specifically about neoliberalism, more generally about how the economic policy pendulum has swung back and forth in the U.S. over the past century, and more generally, still, about what we think government should be doing for its citizens (25:47-1:09:33).

With the 2020 Summer Olympics finally starting this week, we spent this episode discussing all things Olympics, including whether the Games should be taking place at all (0:30-22:25), our favorite events, and some U.S. athletes to keep an eye on in these Games (22:41-40:32). We conclude by reminiscing about some of our favorite all-time Olympic memories and debating U.S. participation in the 2022 Beijing Games (40:43-1:01:12).

We spend the first segment of this episode diving into the NYC Mayoral Race and discuss everything that was on the ballot in that race, including the candidates themselves, crime and the police, and ranked choice voting (0:30-26:34). We then hit on a variety of different topics including the revival of bipartisanship with the infrastructure agreement, the conclusion of the Supreme Court's term, and the newfound ability for college athletes to get paid (26:50-56:17). 

This week we discuss Juneteenth (0:30-19:28), the Tulsa Massacre and Critical Race Theory (19:46-44:50), and then we close by profiling two, perhaps lesser known, Black Americans (45:44-1:03-:39).

We begin this week's episode by considering some listener feedback we received about last week's Israel-Palestine discussion (0:30-27:12). We then spend some time discussing the state of bipartisanship in D.C. through the lenses of the filibuster, infrastructure, and voting rights (27:30-51:26). We wrap up by analyzing Naomi Osaka's withdrawal from the French Open, what it says about the mental health of athletes, and what it means for their relationship with the media who cover them (51:44-1:07:00).

We (try to) tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this week. We begin by discussing the history of the region (0:30-24:02) before analyzing the conflict that has engulfed the region over the past couple of weeks (24:14-49:05). We then spend some time looking at the role the United States plays in the region and the reaction to the current conflict here in the U.S. (49:49-1:21:06), before wrapping up by talking about antisemitism (1:21:23-1:27:26).

 

We start this episode by analyzing the initial census data recently released by the government (0:30-34:44), then we spend some time examining Liz Cheney's last stand in the GOP leadership (34:57-53:41), before considering the latest CDC guidelines and reflecting on the NBA's Hall of Fame class that was inducted this past weekend (53:54-1:08:46).

With policing still making headlines over the past couple of weeks, we spend this episode thinking about policing in the United States from a couple of different perspectives. We are joined first by Salome Kassini (3:11-33:31) and then by Ratko Aleksis (34:05-1:45:03) who give us their unique perspectives on the big picture role of policing in this country and on several particular incidents, including the Derek Chauvin verdict and the killings of Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright, and Ma'Khia Bryant, before we try to weave together all of our different perspectives into some kind of coherent takeaway (1:45:30-1:53:31).