How Do We Fix It?

In some ways, our culture is less tolerant and more fragile than it once was. The teaching of literature in schools and colleges is often caught in the crossfire of the culture wars. Support for canceling books and authors by the illiberal left and demands to ban books from the reactionary right have led to the removal of important literature from classrooms and libraries. In this episode author and literature professor, Deborah Appleman mounts a rousing case for teaching troubling texts in troubling times. "Our classrooms need to remain a space where critical thinking is taught, tolerance from different viewpoints is modeled, and the sometimes-harsh truth of our history and literary heritage are not hidden," she says. Her latest book is "Literature and The New Culture Wars."Professor Appleman taught high school English for nine years before receiving her doctorate from the University of Minnesota. She is chair of Educational Studies at Carleton College. Her recent research has focused on teaching college-level language and literature courses to the incarcerated.We discuss how free speech and free thinking are under assault from puritans from the right and the left. We examine the costs to curiosity as well as to open and free inquiry— so essential to a thriving democracy. We look at the impact of the recent global pandemic on teaching and education. "Life is tough. Life is hard and full of bumps and bruises,' Professor Appleman tells us. "You can't hide the hurt of life from young people. Literature is not life but it can be in some ways a preparation for what life has to offer us.""Doing no harm does not mean causing no discomfort for students. Learning requires cognitive dissonance. Learning requires that you are off-balance both psychologically and emotionally sometimes....It's in disequilibrium that we learn."Read more here from Pamela Paul of The New York Times. She wrote this year about the impact of book bans on the publishing industry: "Parents, schools and readers should demand access to all kinds of books, whether they personally approve of the content or not. For those on the illiberal left to conduct their own campaigns of censorship while bemoaning the book-burning impulses of the right is to violate the core tenets of liberalism. We’re better than this."Recommendation: Richard has read "This Is Happiness" by Niall Williams and set in a remote village in Ireland. Richard calls the novel "enchanting and wonderful."  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every day Americans take the reliable supply of electricity for granted. Except during severe storms, we rarely, if ever, think that the lights might not turn on in the morning.But in some parts of the country, consumers face the threat of rolling blackouts, and sudden surges in the price of electricity. Nearly two years ago, nearly 300 people died when the Texas power grid partially failed during a winter cold snap. California came close to a grid collapse last summer. And New England might be in big trouble this coming winter. Energy analyst, author, and chemist, Meredith Angwin, is our guest in this episode of "How Do We Fix It?" Her latest book is “Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of our Electric Grid.”  In recent years, our podcast co-host Jim Meigs has written extensively on energy, and says it's a bad idea to shut down nuclear power plants that supply large amounts of reliable energy and aren't dependent on the weather.   But the threatened electricity grid crisis is not just about how we make power—it’s how we deliver power to users. For big chunks of the country that system has changed radically in recent decades. Reforms that were meant to make our energy system more competitive backfired. The fragile gird matters more than at any time in memory for three reasons: - The need to decarbonize energy production to limit the future impacts of climate change. - Modern technology requires a big increase in electricity output.- The geopolitical clash over energy has grown more intense and violent since Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.We also discuss why it's not enough to add more solar panels, wind turbines and hydro-electric power to the system. We need new and improved transmission lines to move all that power.Recommendation: Richard is watching "Extraordinary Attorney Woo", a South Korean TV series about a brilliant rookie attorney who has autism spectrum disorder.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have a 2022 post-election show with a twist. Instead of focusing on which party is up or down, we open the hood and examine the engine of our democracy. Voters delivered a clear verdict: Most election deniers were defeated as many voters, especially independents, split their ballots, and shunned the extremes.Our guests are Layla Zaidane, President and CEO of Millennial Action Project— the nation's largest nonpartisan organization of young lawmakers— and David Meyers, founding Executive Editor of the democracy newsletter, The Fulcrum.In the days before the election, the media was full of warnings, and perhaps some hyperbole, about the perilous state of American democracy. Both of our guests and podcast co-hosts agree that many of the results were reassuring for the guardrails of the electoral system."I think when the dust settles we're going to feel pretty good about this election," Layla told us. "Things went really well," said David. "The continued use of voting-by-mail and early voting has gone a long way towards making sure more people had the opportunity to vote and not wait in very long lines."We also examine the arguments over Ranked-Choice Voting, open primaries, and the need for a quicker vote account in some states where results took well over a week to come through.In their conversation after the interview, Jim and Richard debate voting-my-mail, early voting, reforming the primaries, and how to encourage states to make improvements in vote tabulation. Richard favors limited action by Congress, but Jim is vigorously opposed to any federal reforms or interference in how states conduct their elections.Recommendation: Richard is reading "Broken News. Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back", by political journalist Chris Stirewalt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No other issue has greater potential for common ground than America's housing affordability crisis. Progressives and conservatives alike agree that for far too many Americans there is a critical shortage of available homes.Since COVID erupted in 2020 the costs of apartment rentals and homes to buy have soared. According to the real estate firm Zillow, average U.S. home prices doubled in the past decade. In recent months mortgage rates went up to levels not seen in nearly two decades. With the growing possibility of a recession in the near future, there is no shortage of pessimism in the housing market today.We discuss solutions to the housing mess with Harvard University economist Ed Glaeser, author of "Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable", "Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation" and many other books. Among the topics raised: The role played by zoning and environmental regulations in limiting homebuilding, Long-standing local resistance to new housing, The potential for pre-fabricated building to sharply reduce the cost of construction, Why giant companies face far few hurdles to business growth than many small neighborhood firms, and recent moves by some urban politicians on the left to support plans by developers to build new homes, even if much of it is neither subsidized nor fully affordable.  "The whole COVID era has been a spectacular time for housing price increases," Glaeser tells us. The shortage of homes for sale is one reason. So is rising demand for additional space as millions more people work from home. Another cause is "the longer-term dysfunction of our housing markets in failing to produce enough supply."Recommendation: Jim is reading "How The World Really Works" by Canadian professor Vaclav Smil, author of more than forty books on topics including energy, environmental and population change, food production and nutrition, technical innovation, and public policy.A special thank you to The Manhattan Institute and Director of Marketing Aaron Ricks for help with producing and recording this episode.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For much of the past fifty years, American political leaders of both parties have assumed that globalization and free trade would lead to more opportunity, higher living standards and increased business efficiency.But our guest, author and Financial Times columnist, Rana Foroohar, argues that with supply chain disruptions and growing economic insecurity in much of the world, the long reign of globalization is coming to end. A shift to more resilient and local businesses is now at hand. We discuss the reporting and findings in the brand new book, "Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World.""I think the pendulum of the old way is tapped out," Rana tells us. "Cheap money is over. Cheap labor from China is largely over. Cheap energy from Russia is definitely over."The war in Ukraine and the political and economic chaos that followed have brought the fragility of the global economic and political system into sharp relief. We discuss the argument that our economy is far too financialized and that this is leading to greater mistrust, vast inequality and more populist autocrats. As we do in all of our shows, we hear potential solutions. Rana argues that place-based economics and a wave of technological innovations now make it possible to keep investment and wealth closer to home. She makes the case that our economic system needs to be transformedRecommendation: Jim is thoroughly enjoying "Fly on the Wall", a podcast with Saturday Night Live alumni Dana Carvey and David Spade. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you tell the difference between truth and lies? The answer involves a careful process of seeking knowledge that may contradict our long held beliefs.  In this episode, our hosts share two conversations with expert guests who changed Jim and Richard's minds about how they approach topics central to our understanding of politics, science, and society.Journalist and scholar Jonathan Rauch is the author of the best-selling book, "The Constitution of Knowledge". He makes a stirring case for the social system of checks and balances used by scientists, lawyers, business leaders, and researchers to turn disagreements into verifiable facts. Alina Chan is a Canadian molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a postdoctoral fellow. Chan is the co-author of "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19."When she and several other scientists raised the possibility that the SARS CoV2 could have escaped from a lab, Chan's research was dismissed by many leading scientists and mainstream journalists. Some declared that her work was "a conspiracy theory." But Chan continues to ask crucial questions. The world needs to know the true origins of the pandemic in order to prevent the next dangerous virus from causing a future pandemic. A full and open investigation was never done.Both of our interviews underline the need for nuance, curiosity and open-minded approaches to the world's great problems. The "global network of people hunting for each others' errors is far and away the greatest technology ever invented," Rauch tells us. The constitution of knowledge, he says, "is a global conversation of people looking for truth, and more especially, looking for error."Recommendation: Richard is reading "Broken News" by political journalist Chris Stirewalt. This new book provides a crisp, passionate, well-judged argument of how the media rage machine divides America. Reporters in newsrooms are incentivized to write news stories that are full of emotion and anger. These reports very often get the most clicks and social media attention. This emphasis on anger and rage has polluted journalism, Stirewalt argues. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No one will ever know how many innocent people have been sent to prison because of junk science and flawed forensics. In this episode, we hear from Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant about how America’s broken and racist criminal justice system often relies on bogus scientific evidence for convictions. Chris is the author of the new book, “Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.” Best-selling writer John Grisham calls it an “intriguing and beautifully crafted book that …illustrates how wrongful convictions occur.”We explore the urgent need to fix the system and improve the quality of evidence presented in courtrooms. Independent crime labs are among the solutions that we discuss.“Jurors go into court with the expectation that there will be scientific evidence available, and that this evidence will be conclusive. This is just not the reality at all,” Chris tells us.We learn that forensic “experts” call themselves scientists but the current system lacks safeguards that keep science objective. Worse, this very questionable discipline has been corrupting the American justice system since at least the 1970s.Chris Fabricant is the director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project— a remarkable legal organization that works to free prisoners jailed for crimes they did not commit. Over three decades, the Innocence Project has freed more than 300 unjustly convicted prisoners. And more than 40% of those cases involved the misuse of forensic evidence.In this episode, we hear about cases of people wrongly convicted, many of them on death row. The interview begins with the remarkable and tragic case of Eddie Lee Howard, who spent 26 years in prison insisting that he was innocent. He was finally freed early last year after his murder conviction was overturned after a years-long legal defense by The Innocence Project.Recommendation: Richard and Jim both read and recommend “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World”, by Simon Winchester. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Energy prices have skyrocketed this year. Rolling blackouts are still a threat in California, and as winter approaches Europe is facing a full-blown crisis that may cause widespread suffering, factory closures and a deep recession.Angered by the West's support of Ukraine, Russia has shut down supplies of natural gas that European nations had relied on for decades to heat homes and run industry. The EU, United Kingdom and others are now scrambling to find new supplies and reassure their citizens that the crisis can be contained. In this episode we discuss efforts to reduce carbon emissions and consider why the outlook for affordable energy has deteriorated.Our podcast co-host Jim Meigs is the expert source for this episode. He argues that shutting down nuclear power plants, having unrealistic expectations of solar and wind production, and ignoring years of threats from Russia have all contributed to the energy crisis.Earlier this year, Jim joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow and a contributing editor of City Journal. His recent commentary for the magazine, "The Green War on Clean Energy", makes the case that progressives and socialists in the environmental movement have waged a fight against technology that would cut carbon emissions.Jim says that "nuclear energy is the only technology to dramatically reduce America's carbon footprint." We consider the case for and against this view. We examine promising new technologies such as carbon capture and improved battery storage. And we look at the Republican ridicule of ambitious attempts to fight climate change, and consider whether conservative views about the need for action are fundamentally changing.Recommendation: Richard has just read "Land: How The Hunger For Ownership Shaped The Modern World", by Anglo-American author and journalist, Simon Winchester. This 2021 book received glowing reviews.may  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Starting this week we will publish new shows every other Thursday. After seven plus years of being a weekly podcast, Jim and Richard decided that we need a little more time and love to make and share each new show.We will also be sharing more details on our newsletter sent to friends and free subscribers of our podcast. You can sign up for regular updates right here on the website. Unlike substack and other independent publications, our solutions journalism podcast is entirely free. If you'd like to support us, please go to our funding page at Patreon. Since we started "How Do We Fix It?" seven years ago both hosts have become even busier. Richard works as a consultant, producer or host of other podcasts and writes a column for The Fulcrum, a daily online newsletter about bridging divides and democracy.Jim was recently given the honor of being a senior fellow and contributing editor of City Journal at the Manhattan Institute. Next week we'll release a new podcast episode based on some of his latest research and reporting on energy.As always, thanks for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The recent controversy about the seizure of classified government documents at Mar-a-Lago is only the latest example of outrage over former President Trump's behavior, and the responses to it. But the forces shaking American democracy didn't begin with Trump's arrival on the political scene. We learn why populism, polarization and other threats to public institutions will likely last for the foreseeable future. Our guest, Darrell West, vice president of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., is the author of "Power Politics: Trump and the Assault on American Democracy." He's the author of 19 books on American politics and has won several prestigious awards for his writing. In this episode we discuss why the grievances exploited by Trump that existed well before he became president, the threat of extreme authoritarianism, the role played by technological and social media, and Darrell West's constructive advice for protecting people, organizations and the country from challenges to democracy. Our lively conversation also looks at the systemic causes of current threats to American democracy, procedural justice, and a reason-based society. Jim and Richard also debate Darrell West's analysis of the challenges that we all face.Recommendation: Jim is reading "The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War 1" by Lindsey Fitzharris. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.