Uncertain Things

About friendship: David French returns to the pod to discuss loneliness and the rise of "factional friendships" based on ideology. Here, David laments how, in 2016, politics became more salient than belief in his evangelical community.

Full interview: https://uncertain.substack.com/p/david-french-friendship-loneliness

From our upcoming interview with Prof. Mark Lilla about the importance of indifference. Subscribe to Uncertain Things podcast to catch the full episode!

American universities are going through a credibility crisis. Yale Prof. Nicholas Christakis shared with us his concerns a few episodes ago on Uncertain Things. What's interesting is that I remember having very similar conversations with academics 8 years ago, but with one major difference: nobody then agreed to go on the record. (How irritating!) A part of me is willing to find hope in the fact that by now this issue is a common item in the public discourse. The other part worries that many prominent, otherwise-intelligent and perceptive people still dismiss any attempt to shed light on the problem as right-wing disinformation (Which indeed in turn pushes many of the critics of the academic status quo into the fold of right-wing media.) As I expressed perhaps too mawkishly during the interview, I think it's obvious that the people who truly care about the mission of the liberal sciences should be the first to rage and rave about this academic malaise. And yet in what can only be attributed to my own desperate madness, I keep being surprised and baffled that this just isn't the case.

The full interview: https://uncertain.substack.com/p/nicholas-christakis-genetics-evolution

The art of trolling is knowing who not to troll. What got infamous defender and peerless Twitter combatant Shoshana Weissman into trouble?

Full episode: https://apple.co/2TOHDDG

Two real headlines. One fake.

Do you?

You know something's off when people of color are attacked, condemned, and silenced in the name of inclusivity. Batya Ungar-Sargon lifts the curtain on the media's blindest blindspot.

Yuval Levin is a political scholar and the intellectual guardian angel of the American right--or rather, of American conservatism. So yes, we talked about the great realignment that's taking place right now (here and around the world). And yes, he had plenty to say. But...

What really got us excited was to geek out about intellectual history. Yuval wrote his dissertation on the great debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. He then translated the work into an imminently readable book (titled, you guessed it, The Great Debate). In it, Yuval vividly revives the argument between the two thinkers by explicating the strongest, most capacious and capable arguments for both worldviews, from their deepest philosophical roots to their most urgent contemporary branches. Should society honor and protect the traditions that allowed it to thrive, or should it seek to reinvent (and reengineer) itself based on the wisdom acquired through prosperity? Are social institutions the oppressors of individual freedom, or are they the only capacity in which an individual can truly be free (oppression being humanity's natural state)? Can a society gradually ameliorate itself of systemic unfairness, or does injustice cry out for revolution?

Pandering to my own proclivity for cognitive dissonance, Yuval opts for more tolerance toward ambiguity and contradictions. Consistency isn't everything, as Burke taught him.
This conversation also prompted me to pilot my own model for measuring and locating political interactions, which I believe might a more effective tool for reading the current moment than good old horseshoe theory. But that's for another time.
Full conversation on Uncertain Things, wherever you get your podcasts (and links await below, of course).

Does empathy make us better people -- or worse?

"I feel like I'm gonna annoy you."
He wasn't wrong.

We ended up spending our Women's Day evening talking (arguing?) with the indestructible Caitlin Flanagan about s*x, puritanism, the wins and failures of feminism, and s*x work. (Full interview comes out this weekend.)

Paradoxical. Contradictory. Brutal. History is all that.
And this is the professor who made me fall in love with it. (New episode link in bio!)