Episodes

Most families require two incomes these days to survive. Thus, by definition the working parent is populating every workplace. And while accommodating the needs of working parents may be difficult for some small companies with not a person to spare at any time, what about the larger companies that have infrastructure to do so? Are they waking up to the types of policies and approaches that allow the working parent to thrive in their corporate environments? And why should they? Our guest Mason Do...

Have you ever heard the word gerontocracy? Well, according to our guest, you’re living in one. The point may be best illustrated by the last two presidential campaigns where we elected an elderly man, Joe Biden, to be our president in 2020 and when feeling that he was too old to serve another term, we replaced him with another old man, Donald Trump. It’s not only happening in our politics among the candidates, funders and voters (oh it’s true that older Americans outvote and other demographic gr...

Our guest feels that we are in the midst of the greatest transformation in high education in over a hundred years. The factors at play are the demographic shifts in the country, the economy and technology. Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University and co-author of the new book, “From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed,” says that we can even look at twenty percent of colleges closing their doors in the period ahead. COVID was an accelerant in this process, but certainly n...

Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on day one of his second term in 2025. One of those executive orders was the beginning of the end for the agency known as USAID. It was started in 1961 by President Kennedy in order to advance human survival around the world, stabilize economies in the developing world and make the path to peaceful democracy smoother. It was, and for all these intervening years remained, a noble cause credited with saving the lives of tens of millions around the wor...

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that pushed many institutions, including corporations, to confront racial inequality. Looking back at 2020 to 2024, companies issued public statements embracing racial justice causes in the hopes of protecting their reputations from claims that their practices perpetuate inequality, particularly in regard to race. In response to a furious conservative backlash, many began to withdraw those commitments. The pendulum of retraction has swung qui...

Much has been written about the ill effects of our over-reliance on our on-life life with endless content, algorithm-driven polarization and pressure to publicly present oneself. In this podcast, our guest, Patricia Martin, author of “Will the Future Like You: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention,” argues that the damage goes even deeper. It is eroding the ability to form and sustain one’s identity. Are we hyper-focused on presenting a version of ourselves that will get likes and friends ...

I ran a few small state house and senate races in Connecticut back in the day. It was an era of news releases, radio ads, bumper stickers and small events in the district. To be honest, I cannot imagine the pressures of running campaigns today given the fractured and interactive media of this era, constant need to raise funds and to respond to incoming attacks every hour on the hour. Early in our conversation with Eva Posner, the CEO and Founder of Evinco Strategies, who does this for a living, ...

The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, and considered to be the most important civil rights legislation in American history, was effectively jettisoned by the ruling of the United States Supreme Court last week, according to our guest, David Daley, one of the leading experts in the country on the Act itself, and partisan and racial gerrymandering. The majority opinion in the case was written by Justice Samuel Alito and while he calls it an updating of the statute, others like Professor of law R...

Greek mythology. Greek tragedy. Greek philosophy. Any of us who took a course or two on Western civilization remembers the name John Davies Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We may not revisit them, but they revisit us in many of the traditions that are woven through to our modern- day concept of the world. And for anyone who wants to grasp where they still stand today in time, place and in Western traditions of thought, may I recommend a book? It’s John Davie’s “Greek to Us: The Fascinating...

Whistleblowers in our society our either considered heroes or traitors. In any event they have a massive impact in our history. For those who compile such lists of modern-day whistleblowers often Mark Felt, Deep Throat from Watergate is number two and Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers, is number one. Ellsberg’s son, Michael Ellsberg, and Daniel Ellsberg’s long-time assistant, Jan Thomas edited Daniel Ellsberg’s unpublished works into a new book, entitled “Trut...

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940’s, when the urgent economic problems were totally different from those of our times. In her book “The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters”, Cambridge professor, Diane Coyle, helps us understand how inadequate our system for assessing the economy is as it is undergoing a radical digital transformation. Particularly lagging is the key measurement, that being the measure of Gross Domestic Produc...

Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, has been seen as a stabilizing force in the Catholic Church after a tumultuous papacy of Pope Francis. And while he is disciplined, thoughtful, and measured in his words and deeds, perhaps more traditional than Pope Francis, he has also been very vocal about his concerns about the actions of political leaders in the United State and elsewhere, as evidenced by his back and forth recently with President Trump. His watchword as Pope seems to be to spread the J...

There is a largely invisible pricing structure in the American health care system that dictates the types of medical procedures that are most valued and therefore best compensated. It affects the way you interact with the system day after day. In her short, but clear-eyed, dissection of why specialists and surgery are often the weapon of choice to fight disease, as opposed to front end interventions focused on prevention, Dr. Robin Blackstone, author of “American Health: Who Gets Paid” unwraps h...

If you’re paying attention these days, and in the wake of the NCAA basketball tournament, it’s hard not to notice how legalized gambling has crept into every facet of American life. You see it during sports games and with the full involvement of the leagues. You pass signs on the highway daily about games of chance being run by your state. And you see the proliferation of Native American and other gambling facilities sprouting up far from Las Vegas. And the bookie on the street corner is still t...