Each year The Economist selects its country of the year: a place that has improved the most. Improvement, though, was damnably rare in 2021. We run through our nominations and the shortlist, and take a close look at why the winner won. And we examine what has gone on in South and South-East Asia, which offered no contenders whatsoever.
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education.
In Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary(Duke UP, 2019), Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.
Dr. Kamola is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science and President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University.
I’m Sorry is another Lemonada Media series produced by the same team as In the Bubble! As a holiday treat, we’re sharing a recent episode of theirs that features In the Bubble’s very own Andy Slavitt. I'm Sorry is all about apologies and how they play out in the court of public opinion. It’s hosted by comedians Hoja Lopez, Mohanad Elshieky, and Kiki Monique. This show unpacks the latest in Twitter gaffes, petty beef, and not-so-subtle shade. Check out I’m Sorry to explore the latest in celebrity apologies, help guests and listeners get their own redemption, and say sorry to stars who never got the apology they deserved. In this episode, Kiki, Hoja, and Mohanad sit down with Andy to answer all of your COVID-related apology questions. Who owes us an apology for Omicron? Does Trump need to say sorry to Biden for exposing him to COVID? Should we feel remorse for the joy we get when anti-vaxxers get sick? I’m Sorry is back with brand new episodes on January 7th.
Please note, this episode contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt and Instagram @andyslavitt.
You can find out more about our show @lemonadamedia on all social platforms, or follow us on Instagram @imsorry_podcast.
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For additional resources, information, and a transcript of the episode, visit lemonadamedia.com.
The news to know for Wednesday, December 29th, 2021!
We're detailing another round of severe weather in the U.S. We'll tell you which states will be most impacted.
Also, we're remembering two legends: a man who was once one of the most powerful politicians in D.C. and another who changed football forever.
Plus, why a popular video game developer is paying $100 million, why some retailers will refund your post-holiday returns but let you keep the items, and which companies were listed as the best places to work this year.
Top 5 of 2021 Day 3: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays.
Thomas Sowell is considered by many to be one of the most influential and brilliant minds of the past half-century. He is most famous for his work as an economist, but is also a bestselling author, syndicated columnist, historian, and academic.
Yet he hasn’t received much recognition. “When people talk about the great black intellectuals today, you hear names like Henry Louis Gates at Harvard or Cornel West … or today you hear Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi,” says Jason Riley, a journalist, scholar, and member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
“But in my view, Tom has written circles around those guys and is much broader in subjects that he’s covered as well as much deeper and his analysis is much more rigorous than those guys’,” Riley says.
We’re re-running some of our favorite episodes from the past year. This episode originally aired in June 2021.
The Las Vegas Raiders’ defensive end, Carl Nassib, came out in an Instagram post back in June, making him the first openly gay active player in NFL histroy. The league immediately posted in celebration of Nassib’s announcement. But given the NFL’s sorry history of standing by players on the vanguard, will the league really put its money where its mouth is this time?
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Danielle Hewitt, Elena Schwartz, Davis Land, and Carmel Delshad.
It seems that in any world, no matter the number of eyes, Jason Momoa is king. We watched Apple TV's See and had a good look see at what it says about the social model of disability and the potential limits of that model.
Many skin conditions, from rashes to Lyme disease to various cancers, present differently on dark skin. Yet medical literature and textbooks don't often include those images, pointing to a bigger problem in dermatology. Today on the show, we take a close look at how the science of skincare has evolved to better serve patients of color, but still has a long way to go.
William Shakespeare had a son, Hamnet, who likely inspired one of his most famous plays and who died when he was 11 years old. Novelist Maggie O'Farrell was disappointed that more people weren't familiar with him, so she set out to fix that with her book, Hamnet. O'Farrell wanted to reimagine Hamnet's life, his death, and William Shakespeare's family life. But, she told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, she had a much harder time writing this book than she thought she would.