Slate critic, Katy Waldman, is joined by Parul Sehgal of the New York Times Book Review and culture critic, Meghan O'Rourke, to discuss Jonathan Franzen's Dickensian novel – Purity.
Next month, Slate's Audio Book Club will discuss A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. Read the book and join us for a conversation in February!
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On The Gist, Maria Konnikova of the New Yorker explains how the best con artists make their victims emotionally invested. She’s the author of The Confidence Game. For the Spiel, all the self-flagellation Ted Cruz thinks was missing from Obama’s State of the Union address.
The Gist and Story Collider Event, Jan. 15:
Coming up on Friday, Jan. 15, our host Mike Pesca and listener Frank Kennedy will be live onstage as part of the Story Collider STEM FEST. The show is sold out, but Slate Plus members are invited to a happy hour before the show. RSVP here.
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On January 11, 2016, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Under California law and existing Supreme Court precedent, unions can become the exclusive bargaining representative for the public school employees of their district and establish an “agency shop” arrangement requiring public school employees either to join the union or pay a fee to support the union’s collective bargaining activities. Although the First Amendment prohibits unions from compelling non-members to support activities unrelated to collective bargaining, in California non-members must affirmatively “opt out” to avoid paying for these unrelated or “nonchargeable” expenses. -- Here a group of public school employees sued the California Teachers Association and various other entities, arguing that the agency shop arrangement itself--as well as the opt-out requirement--violated the First Amendment. The district court denied their claim and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed based on existing precedent and the 1997 Supreme Court decision Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. -- The two questions now before the Supreme Court are: (1) Whether the Abood precedent should be overruled and public-sector “agency shop” arrangements invalidated under the First Amendment; and (2) whether it violates the First Amendment to require that public employees affirmatively object to subsidizing nonchargeable speech by public-sector unions, rather than requiring that employees affirmatively consent to subsidizing such speech. -- To discuss the case, we have Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University School of Law and Professor Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
On The Gist, the phrase you should listen for during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. Then, researcher Gordon Pennycook explains lessons from his study “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.” For the Spiel, please remember The Gist when you make your billions.
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The study of kinship, long the bread and butter of the anthropologist, has lost a bit of its centrality in the discipline, in large part, suggests Janet Carsten, because it became dry and fusty and associated mostly with the nuclear family. But as one of the leading exponents of what might be called the second coming of kinship studies, Carsten, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, has (literally) brought new blood into the field, exploring kinship’s nexus with politics, work and gender.
Kinship, she tells interviewer Nigel Warburton in this Social Science Bites podcast, is “really about people’s everyday lives and the way they think about the relations that matter most of them.” Whether those are siblings, in-laws or office-mates, those relations are the new focus of the academic investigation into kinship.
For her part, Carsten – a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh – has studied kinship, as well as ideas about ‘blood,’ both medically and metaphorically, from fishing villages in Malaysia to the affairs of the British crown. She’s also studied the legacy of an early proponent of kinship studies, the late Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Carsten completed her Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a lecturer at the University of Manchester before she joined the faculty in Edinburgh. Her books include the edited collections About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (with Stephen Hugh-Jones) and Blood Will Out: Essays on Liquid Transfers and Flow, as well as 2004’s After Kinship.
The Supreme Court is now weighting Freidrichs v. California Teachers Association. Mark Janus is the lead plaintiff in a near-identical case in Illinois. Jacob Huebert is his attorney.
Interview with Dan Arel. He is the author of the new book "Parenting Without God". He also has a blog called "Danthropology". Investing Skeptically: Lotteries and Mutual Fund Performance.
On January 2nd, 2016, Ammon Bundy and a group of like-minded individuals occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge as a protest against what they saw as federal over-reach and unjust sentencing practices. So what's the real story?
In this episode, the Goods from the Woods Boys are back in Los Angeles and they're talking about their holidays and also about animation with their very special guest, comedian John Faso! Follow John Faso on Twitter @JohnFaso. Song of the week this week: "Getaway" by Outskirts. Follow the show @TheGoodsPod Rivers is @RiversLangley Dr. Pat is @PM_Reilly Mr. Goodnight is @SepulvedaCowboy Pick up a Goods from the Woods t-shirt at: http://prowrestlingtees.com/TheGoodsPod
