World Book Café travels to Paris to meet some of the French capital’s newest writers. Authors Mahir Guven, Blandine Rinkel, Laurent Petitmangin and Capucine Delattre discuss taking on the literary establishment and finding new ways to express themselves. Like many places in the world, questions of equality, diversity and freedom of expression are top of the agenda in France. But it is complicated; the ideal of universalism - meaning every citizen is considered to be the same regardless of class or ethnicity - is at the heart of the French republic. Does this 'universalism' leave space for the 21st Century desire to celebrate difference, and how can writing help reconcile these complex ideas?
Image: The skyline of Paris, 9 December 2022 (Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
Interview with Derek Muller from Veritasium; Update: Mask Wearing; News Items: New Lunar Space Suits, End of Life Care, GPT-4 is Here, Terminator Zones, Ohio Chemical Spill
When venture capital investors walk into a pitch meeting, they usually know if they’re saying yes before anyone starts talking. Uri Levine is the co-founder of Waze and the author of “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs.” Alex Friedman caught up with Levine to talk about: - The early days of Waze. - One way to know if a company “will die.” - What happens, behind the scenes, when venture capital investors choose investments. - ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving. Company discussed: GOOG, GOOGL Host: Alex Friedman Guest: Uri Levine Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Tim Sparks
Religious imagery, small town ideals, and complicated relationships shape the work of Andy Shauf, a Canadian singer-songwriter. We discuss his interest in God as a concept and the new album Norm.
Andy Shauf joins Reset ahead of his show in Chicago.
How much did the crypto banking crisis actually have to do with crypto?
NLW is joined by Austin Campbell, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and former banker and stablecoin operator, to discuss the recent crypto banking crisis. They discuss:
Why interest rate risk, not crypto troubles, was the source of the problems
Why even banal regulatory disinterest in crypto could create significant problems for the industry
What rules need to change for crypto to fit in a U.S. banking framework
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“The Breakdown” is written, produced and narrated by Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with today's editing by Jonas Huck, research by Scott Hill and additional production assistance by Eleanor Pahl. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. Music behind our sponsor today is “Foothill Blvd” by Sam Barsh. Image credit: BrianAJackson / Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk.
Join the most important conversation in crypto and Web3 at Consensus 2023, happening April 26-28 in Austin, Texas. Come and immerse yourself in all that Web3, crypto, blockchain and the metaverse have to offer. Use code BREAKDOWN to get 15% off your pass. Visit consensus.coindesk.com.
The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’.
– Michael Walzer, NBN interview (2023)
In the 1990 collection What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Solomon and Murphy and published by Oxford, teachers had a textbook to help introduce students to a broad cross-section of political thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel to Hayek to Mill, Nozick, Rawls, Sandel, Taylor and Walzer among others. It is worth mentioning because Michael Walzer insists he is not a formal philosopher, does not in fact, deserve to be grouped with the likes of a Dewey or a Hegel, as Richard Rorty had done in the introduction of his 1999 collection of essays in Philosophy and Social Hope:
‘Recently Michael Walzer, a political philosopher best known for his earlier work, Spheres of Justice, has come to Hegel’s and Dewey’s defense. In his more recent book Thick and Thin, Walzer argues that we should not think of the customs and institutions of particular societies as accidental accretions around a common core of universal moral rationality, the transcultural moral law. Rather, we should think of the thick set of customs and institutions as prior, and as what commands moral allegiance.’
Rorty’s broader point remains as relevant as arguably, the positions of the political philosophers as collected in the Solomon and Murphy reader mentioned above, What is Justice?, which also recognized the appeal of Walzer’s ‘very different approach’ to the Rawls’ paradigmatic A Theory of Justice. That same collection also shares Nozick’s critical response to Rawls - mentioned because of the well-known course, ‘Capitalism and Socialism’, that Robert Nozick and Michael Walzer taught together at Harvard.
A former student, the Washington Post columnist, Brookings senior fellow, and policy professor E.J. Dionne once said: it was one of the best courses he ever took, adding, it was Michael Walzer ‘who very much shaped my view’.
A short list of Professor Walzer’s book titles include Just and Unjust Wars, Spheres of Justice - A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, The Company of Critics, Thick and Thin - Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, On Toleration, Politics and Passion, The Jewish Political Tradition, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, A Foreign Policy for the Left, as well as a published conversation - Justice is Steady Work: A Conversation on Political Theory - published by Polity in 2020.
This interview focuses primarily on his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (2023, Yale University Press) which does much to clarify a simple, yet crucial distinction, between liberal and illiberal sensibilities underlying the pluralism, populism, and polarization today.
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.
Keith Krueger can be reached at keithNBn@gmail.com
Today, we’re focusing on two major money events impacting the economy and possibly your own bank account: The seemingly sudden failure of some U.S. banks, and stubbornly high inflation.
We’ll get into inflation in the second half of this episode with the expert best known as the Inflation Guy. Michael Ashton is the managing principal of Enduring Investments and the host of the “Inflation Guy” podcast. We’ll discuss what triggers inflation, why prices don’t typically come back down after they go up, and so much more.
But first, the story getting all the headlines over the past week: major bank failures on a scale not seen since the Great Recession. We wanted to take more time to explain how this all happened and what can be learned from it. We’re speaking with Justin Baer, a senior special writer at the Wall Street Journal who has been covering the collapse.
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