EP 316 Should Compulsory Schooling Be Abolished?

EP 316 Should Compulsory Schooling Be Abolished?

https://www.amazon.com/Student-Resistance-Handbook-Cevin-Soling-ebook/dp/B00Q3QCI14   Did you feel imprisoned as a student in K-12?  Was the experience one that caused you harm and that you would like to see your child avoid?  Cevin Soling, the l’enfant terrible of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who writes and directs films about this topic, has a very dark vision of …

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EP 315 The Ambassadors: America’s Diplomats on the Front Lines

EP 315 The Ambassadors: America’s Diplomats on the Front Lines

https://www.amazon.com/Ambassadors-Americas-Diplomats-Front-Lines-ebook/dp/B07P5GH8QD The perception of the diplomatic corps for many is a well connected person who takes on a plush assignment overseas with all the trappings of privilege.  Yet throughout the impeachment hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives, the public was introduced to career diplomats whose love of country, precision in the use of language, …

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EP 314 Can Medical Ethics Keep Up With Medical Advances?

EP 314 Can Medical Ethics Keep Up With Medical Advances?

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Youre-Dead-Concerned/dp/1616209224   Medicine’s advances are happening so quickly can the ethics and laws surrounding these changes keep up?  In the new book, ‘Who Says You’re Dead'(yes there are different definitions for that, too), Dr. Jacob Appel, an attending psychiatrist ay Mount Sinai and celebrated bioethicist, serves up provocative scenarios which demonstrate how complicated this all …

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EP 313 Sports Free Agency Has Been a True Game Changer

EP 313 Sports Free Agency Has Been a True Game Changer

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Afraid-Win-Business/dp/1635766788   America seems to be hanging together by a thread these days.  In some ways the only normalcy seems to be between the lines when we see our professional sports teams come together to compete.  We get lost in it for a few hours and put aside all else in the world.  And yet …

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EP 312 Leadership in the Age of Trump

EP 312 Leadership in the Age of Trump

https://www.baypath.edu/ Donald Trump has a unique leadership style, to say the least.  In this episode, we explore his impact on the notion of what a leader should, or should not, be doing going forward. Thanks to the expertise of Dr. Joshua Weiss, Director of the MS program in leadership and negotiation at Bay Path University …

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EP 311 Is the Cemetery Dead?

EP 311 Is the Cemetery Dead?

https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Dead-David-Charles-Sloane/dp/022653944X While we have professionalized the rituals of dying, from our care in the final days of life to the processes of interment with funeral home directors, it is fair to say that a trend in our society is that Americans are taking back control of the process.  People seem to be craving a more …

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EP 310 The Common Wellspring of Religious and Political Zealots

EP 310 The Common Wellspring of Religious and Political Zealots

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Reality-Political-Religious-Zealotry/dp/1620974991 : Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and public intellectual, has been working on the sources and dangers of inhuman zealotry for decades.  The conditions and individuals he studies involve brainwashing, religious extremists, political cultists and mass murderers.  In the process he examines totalitarian politics from the left and right, disinformation and social media impacts.  …

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EP 309 Baldwin vs. Buckley: The Fire is Still Upon Us

EP 309 Baldwin vs. Buckley: The Fire is Still Upon Us

https://www.amazon.com/Fire-upon-Us-Baldwin-William/dp/0691181543 On February 18, 1965 a packed hall at Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England came to see a historic, televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley, Jr., a relentless critic of the movement and America’s most influential conservative intellectual.  The topic was ‘the American …

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EP 308 College Admissions and the Tilted Playing Field

EP 308 College Admissions and the Tilted Playing Field

https://www.amazon.com/Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges-Outside-ebook/dp/B000WJVKBC   Candidate one has good grades, great SAT scores, and a boatload of extracurricular activities.  Candidate two has OK grades, average SATs and his parents donated $1 million to the school’s capital campaign.  Who gets in?  Take a guess.  In America’s most elite colleges only 40 percent of the students enrolled are strictly there …

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EP 307 How a Bill Doesn’t Become a Law

EP 307 How a Bill Doesn’t Become a Law

https://publicintegrity.org/author/liz-essley-whyte/ How do you imagine most bills are constructed in state legislatures in America?  Is it by one aggressive lawmaker having a novel idea and drafting the bill from scratch for their fellow legislators to review and vote on?  That’s one way, but increasingly there is a trend of policy plagiarism or cut and paste …

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