In the finals days of the Trump Administration, the President attended primarily to one piece of business, the handing out of pardons.  We were told that Donald Trump liked this power because it was virtually absolute.  Others felt he he used it to keep authorities away from his front door when he became Citizen Trump by offering reprieves to those who could bear witness to any of his wrongdoing.  It is an awesome authority granted to the President in the Constitution and was meant to show mercy for those who were treated unfairly by the system, not to enhance the power of the President, like a monarch, to benefit friends and allies.  Mark Osler, Professor of Law, at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis is a scholar in this field and gives us the most granular view of clemency that you are likely to hear.  How did it come about?  Can a President self pardon?  Have presidents used it wisely and in what ways? Has the power grown with the onset of the Imperial Presidency over recent decades?  And how can we reform the process when the Constitution leaves little room to abridge this power granted to the chief executive?  If news coverage has whetted your appetite about this prerogative, take a listen. 

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What is the difference between pharmaceuticals and drugs?  Often it’s the type of person selling one or the other and the type of person consuming the product.  Patients who have become addicted to that which their doctor has prescribed generally have been viewed as innocent victims, while those who develop a similar habit outside of a doctor’s care are labeled junkies and addicts.  Our society has often made a dinstinction without a difference between licit and illicit drugs.  And that artifice has defined our drug policy for well over a century.  In his eye opening book, ‘White Market Drugs’, historian David Herzberg explains the impact of the ‘medicine’drug divide’ and how this misguided approach has allowed bad practices by some and imprisoned others wrongly.  Historically, because of the influence of big pharma, doctors and wholesalers, as a society, we have played down the addictive potential of prescribed drugs.  Herzberg recognizes the value that many of these prescribed drugs have but he would like to maximize their benefits and limit their harmful effects by a consumer protection approach to drug policy and by offering a way to curb the appetite for outrageous profits in the industry, which drives much of the problem.  He also approaches the street drug issue with a medicalized, rather than, a punitive approach.  This podcast will make you think differently about the issues surrounding America’s standing as the largest consumer of prescription and non-prescription drugs in the world.

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  America tells itself a lot of stories about its ethos that turn out to be misleading, or worse yet false, when put to true historical scrutiny.  Waves of immigrants have made their way here thinking that their lot would be so much better when they reach our shores, only to find many roadblocks and impediments toward assimiliation placed in their path. In the last four years, America essentially put up a ‘do not enter’ sign and reinforced it with a wall, just to make sure the message got through.  If concepts like reparations, migration taxes and taking compensatory actions to reimburse poorer countries for the wealth that immigrants have transfered to wealthier nations are beyond anything you’ve been exposed to on this issue, then you’ve come to the right place for a transformative education.  Suketu Mehta, himself an immigrant to America, is the author of an eye-opening book, ‘This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto’. Much of the injustice in the process of immigration owes its origins to colonialism.  Just imagine this one fact: forty percent of the world’s borders were established by two former colonial powers: Britain and France.  We’ll start there. And we will discuss the current crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

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Here’s some history to draw you into this podcast.  America was at the heights of solidarity and common purposes for over half a century beginning in the early 1900’s through the 1960’s and then we began to split apart as a society, as we had in the late 19th century.  America’s past was divided and troubled, found ways of cooperating and progressing and has since fallen back to atomized beings living isolated lives.  Can we find in our history ways to come together again in bonds of cooperation and social trust?  It is anything but certain that we can break the ‘I-We’I cycle’ that esteemed political scientist, Robert D. Putnam describes in his new book ‘The Upswing’.  However, it sure is an enviable goal.  In what Putnam says will be his last book, he signed on a co-author, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, who is a scholar and social entrepreneur.  Not only are we at present ‘Bowling Alone’, the title of Putnam’s profoundly impact book of two decades ago, but we are seemingly throwing bowling balls at each other.  Against the backdrop of economic inequality, political partisanship, a lack of social capital and cultural narcissism, we have a long way back in order for social scientists like the two involved in this project to ever write a book declaring that the upswing has arrived.  Garrett joins us to provide an interesting framework as to how we got to where we are today and what we might be able to do to leave the valley of despair we find ourselves in.                 

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While the Trump era is over, there looms a great question as to whether America is in any position to resume a leadership role in the world.  As past plagues and pandemics have revealed, the weaknesses of empires often is recognized well after their influence has peaked.  Wade Davis, an anthropologist from the University of British Columbia, who holds citizenship in both the U.S. and Canada sat down to pen a piece on the fissures and vulnerabilties of America’s collective being only to see it become an on-line sensation when released on the ‘Rolling Stone’ website.  He believes that the COVID pandemic will be remembered as a moment in history, as he calls it, ‘a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis’.  What he sees, in his perceptive and clear eyed way, is an America unmoored by a social contract which anchors so many other democracies, causing great divisions and inequality within that will continue to challenge the place America has among nations.  I asked my first question and then this brilliant professor took it from there.  You may want to imagine yourself in one of the great classes you’ve ever taken and take notes.

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On the heels of the pandemic, we see that government has issues responding to a major, largely unseen, crisis.  As trust in public institutions crumbles, the question is whether we can restore faith in our system by bold actions that jolt the public into a new belief in what’s possible.  It’s a big job.  Decades ago, when government challenged us to dream big, we found our way to the moon.  Will it require the new Administration to ‘go big’ to re-instill confidence?  It will be necessary given the challenges we face: climate change, crumbling infrastructure, yawning income inequality and racial injustice, among others.  Mitchell Weiss, a Harvard Business School professor and author of ‘We the Possibility’, believes the entrepreneurial spirit and savvy can be applied in the public sector.  He was a leader in one of the first big city innovation offices in the country in Boston some years back.  He sees encouraging signs in many of our laboratories of democracy, like cities and states, that we can reclaim the ambition to try new things and be bold.  Let’s catch some of his enthusiasm on this podcast.

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 As the US population grows-potentially by over 110 million people by 2050-cities and suburbs will continue expanding, meeting the suburbs of neighboring cities and forming continuous urban megaregions.  The United States now has at least a dozen such megaregions, including one extending from Richmond, Virginia to Portland, Maine and another running from Santa Barbara, California to the US-Mexico border.  In his book ‘Designing the Megaregion:  Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale’, Jonathan Barnett, an emeritus Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning, and former director of the Urban Design Program, at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses how this growth will be hastened by balanced transit alternatives and cooperative agreements among various governmental agencies and necessitated by climate changes issues which do not respect our town and state borders. Without cooperation and planning these megaregions will result in near continuous gridlock on highways by 2040.  While megaregions may represent a new concept, they are developing.  The question is whether they will grow purposefully or randomly.  The answer to that question may well determine the quality of life for most Americans in the decades to come.

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 More Americans live in suburban settings than any other. Suburbs are not a monolith.  Depending on factors like proximity to an urban center, they take on various forms. Sprawl is often noted as one of the worst aspects of suburban growth. As we continue to build more highways to satisfy the desire for many to get away from the urban core, we find issues of sustainability, walkability and receptivity to the needs of lower income families and the elderly of growing concern. Other changes are now impinging on these spaces often defined by shopping centers, garden apartment complexes and highway strip corridors, as well as the often venerated single family home. Many are being re-envisioned just as demographic shifts occur as a result of the pandemic.  To help us understand the impact of these shifts we turn to June Williamson of the City College of New York.  Her latest book, along with Ellen Dunham-Jones, is titled ‘Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia:  Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges’.  She often many strategies for change and will provoke your thinking about the built environments in which most of us live.  

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 Our podcast is about looking down the road a bit.  If we’re all honest with ourselves, we know how our personal story ends.  The truth is few of us want to plan for it in the way we do for the arrival of our first child, purchasing our first home or our retirement.  And that certainty, of course, is death.  If we pretend we cannot see the end, we risk leaving those we love, our children in most cases, with a real mess.  And now that we leave behind a physical and a digital footprint, the considerations are many.  Abby Schneiderman, our guest, and Adam Seifer with Gene Newman, have put together the most practical book we have ever featured.  It’s called ‘In Case You Get Hit by a Bus’.  If you have elderly parents or young children, or just want to be prepared, you must first listen to this podcast and then read this book.

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 ‘People are nuts’.  That was a maxim of my dear mother.  She was the kindest, most loving person I know.  She meant no ill will by that designation. In fact, there was wisdom in it.  In his new book, ‘Nobody’s Normal’, Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, reveals the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma. What might help is the realization that we all have emotional and psychological issues, some more severe than others.  Perhaps then we can provide more resources to unlock the complexities of the brain, which dwarf any other organ.  In the process, let’s work to make treatment more  available and assure comparability with physical diseases of the body.  Listen in to this important discussion. 

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