Mansplaining
Episodes
139 episodes
Episode 139: Standardized Testing and the Pretense of Meritocracy
With only 24 of 777 incoming seats in New York’s City’s premier public high school being offered to Black and Hispanic students, even though they make up 62% of the population, standardized testing has once again come under scrutiny. There’s a ...
Episode 138: Geoengineering Our Way Out of Climate Disaster
With the world’s progress toward reducing carbon emissions fitful at best, people are slowly waking up to the possibility of not meeting international targets and staring instead at potential worst-case scenarios. Enter geoengineering, in which...
Episode 137: Should Billionaires Exist?
The recent IPO for SpaceX briefly turned Elon Musk into the world’s first trillionaire. One person having a net worth involving 13 digits is staggering to comprehend, leading Joe to ask Mark a question floating around liberal and progressive ci...
Episode 136: Living a Meaningful Life
So much has been written and said about how to live a meaningful life. It’s been the pursuit of philosophers for millennia, a central focus of psychology for the last century and a half, and a recurring topic of TED Talks online, not to mention...
Episode 135: Gerrymandering: A Jerry-Built Contraption
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s disemboweling of the Voting Rights Act, many (former?) Confederate states are redistricting away Black members of Congress who aren’t Republicans. We seem to have entered a golden age of gerrymandering, the ma...
Episode 134: The Clock is Ticking to Doomsday
You’ve probably heard of the Doomsday Clock. It’s the clock whose hands move closer to midnight every time humanity is judged to be closer to annihilation. A few months ago, it inched a tiny bit closer to midnight. Mark wondered whether this ph...
Episode 133: What is It About Dogs?
It is thought that somewhere in Eurasia during the Late Pleistocene, an intrepid pack of gray wolves made a fateful decision to approach a human campfire seeking scraps. From that humble beginning was forged a love affair for the ages. But why ...
Episode 132: Who’s Happier: Liberals or Conservatives?
The media images we see of conservative politicians and voters depict people who are angry, fearful, and full of suspicion and outrage. So, why does study after study suggest that there’s a measurable happiness gap between conservatives and lib...
Episode 131: The Next Pandemic
Though the truly horrific COVID-19 pandemic, which killed 1.2 million Americans and many millions more worldwide, is barely in the rear-view mirror, public health authorities keep telling us the next pandemic is inevitable. Joe wondered how ine...
Episode 130: Flat Earthers Are Still Around
In our post-truth era, perhaps it’s not surprising that a growing number of people say they believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Earth is flat. Mark struggled to understand how anyone can believe this, so he asked Joe to get ...
Episode 129: Mansplaining Mailbag
Imagine producing a podcast with well over a hundred episodes, soliciting feedback after every episode, receiving dozens of comments and questions, and then sitting on them for nearly six years. Guilty as charged! After being derelict in their ...
Episode 128: We’ve Got a Gambling Problem
Gambling is having a moment. Not only have a majority of states legalized sports betting since the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 2018, but prediction markets have also enjoyed explosive growth in the last few years. With huge amounts of mo...
Episode 127: The Proper Retirement Age
Millions of Americans associate the number 65 with the end of their working years and the start of what they hope is a long and pleasant retirement. But why 65, as opposed to younger, older, or never? Joe and Mark trace the history of social in...
Episode 126: The Decline and Fall of Expertise
There’s a strong anti-intellectual vibe running through American politics and culture. It’s visible in MAGA’s ongoing assault against the administrative state, in the growing distrust of educational institutions, and in anti-vaccine sentiment—t...
Episode 125: Darkness Over Light in Film and TV
The fact that the heavy drama The Bear has won Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series speaks volumes about how the industry values drama in comparison to comedy. Indeed, the last time a real comedy film won the Best Picture Oscar w...
Episode 124: The Best (and Worst) Holiday Music
For Mansplaining’s 6th annual holiday episode, we examine the holiday music that gets played endlessly, in our homes and everywhere we go, at this time of year. What makes a holiday song good? Which songs resonate for Mark and Jo...
Episode 123: Tripping Your Way Out of Trauma
Psychoactive substances have been ingested by human beings for millennia. But for a few decades at the end of the 20th century, many were banned in the U.S. as part of a cultural backlash manifesting itself in the disastrous War on Drugs. Now t...
Episode 122: Why Gas Stoves Stink
A few years ago, we all started hearing about how gas ranges, which have been popular in our country for at least a century and are favored by professional chefs, were dangerous to our health and should be replaced by electric or induction cook...
Episode 121: Halloween: A Singularly American Stew
Back in its early days, this podcast explored the cultural and economic juggernaut that is Christmas. Time now to take a gander at Halloween. It’s unique among American holidays in that it’s neither religious nor patriotic nor sentimental, yet ...
Episode 120: Potatoes and Tomatoes: Hardy Migrants
Overshadowed by all the anti-immigrant rhetoric afflicting our country today are wonderful stories of non-human immigration, such as the ones about how certain foods made their way from the New World to the Old World. Take potatoes and tomatoes...
Episode 119: Flag Fetish
Based on recent proclamations from the MAGA government and the zealotry that some of its partisans have for the American flag, you’d never guess that flag worship was really not a thing in the United States for a very long time. Most Americans ...
Episode 118: The Pros and Cons of Gerontocracy
You may have noticed that there are a lot of very old people clinging to positions of authority, from our current president (79 years old) to our former president (82 when he left office) to other leaders in politics, business, and culture. Why...
Episode 117: What Rousseau Might Say About the USA
In The Social Contract, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that democracy was feasible only in smaller polities where the citizens have shared common interests. What might Rousseau have to say about the current-day United ...
Episode 116: The Cemetery Industry is Not Dead Yet
When visiting a few cemeteries recently, Joe was struck by how clean and well-maintained but desolately empty they were. That prompted him to ask Mark about the economic viability of cemeteries and whether they were becoming relics of a bygone ...
Episode 115: Will There Be Enough Water?
Water seems to many of us like an unlimited resource, what with oceans covering 71% of the Earth’s surface. But less than 3% of the world’s water is fresh, and nearly a third of that is groundwater, found deep beneath the surface in aquifers be...