Can international finance systems be harnessed to protect human rights? While historically financiers have funded some of the worse of human rights abuses, finances also enabled great human leaps. Our guest argues that it is time to alter the financial system for the good of humanity. [ dur: 29 mins. ]

• David Kinley is Professor and Chair in Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney Law School. He is the author of Necessary Evil: How to Fix Finance by Saving Human Rights, and Civilising Globalisation: Human Rights and the Global Economy. He is also the co-editor of Human Rights: Old Problems, New Possibilities.

Then, our guest studies factors that shape our lives and ways of being in life, like ideas and events. What does it really mean to be responsible? It might depend on where you live. [ dur: 29 mins. ]

• Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland. She is the co-editor of Competing Responsibilities: The Politics and Social Ethics of Responsibility in Contemporary Life and State of Suffering: Political Violence and Community Survival in Fiji.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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What can we make of the latest revelations from inside the Trump administration? We spend the hour with three top scholars of the U.S. presidency. [ dur: 58 mins. ]

• George C. Edwards III is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Jordan Chair in Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University. His books include Predicting the Presidency, The Strategic President, Governing by Campaigning and On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit.
• Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. He holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. His books include, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office, Henry Kissinger and the American Century, and Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama.
• David Stebenne is Professor of History and Law at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal and Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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In this hour, what types of criminal proceedings are possible for a US president? What types of secrets can they keep? Who can they fire and who can they pardon? We spend the hour with two constitutional law professors who untangle these and other legal issues. [ dur: 58 mins. ]

• Heidi Kitrosser is Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is the author of the book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, and the articles, The Shadow of Executive Privilege, and Accountability in the Deep State.
• Eric M. Freedman is a Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Rights at Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University. He is the author of Making Habeas Work: A Legal History and the article, On Protecting Accountability

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, how emigration could lead to greater democratization in the world. [ dur: 12 mins. ]

• Margaret Peters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She is the author of Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, and the co-author of the research paper Restraining the Huddled Masses: Migration Policy and Autocratic Survival.

Then, climate change is here. How does climate change affect conception? [ dur: 15 mins. ]

• Alan Barreca is Associate Professor at the Institute of the Environment & Sustainability at UCLA. He is the author of the research papers Does hot weather affect human fertility? He is the co-author of Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates , and Adapting to Climate Change: The Remarkable Decline in the U.S. Temperature-Mortality Relationship over the 20th Century

Finally, one Stanford University scientist maps out the way to slow down climate change and even reverse some of the damage. [ dur: 30 mins. ]

• Marc Jacobson is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University. He’s also the Co-Founder of The Solutions Project, 100.org, and the 100% Clean, Renewable Energy Movement. He is the author of A path to sustainable energy by 2030 (Scientific American, 2009); 100% clean and renewable wind, water, sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States (Energy & Environmental Sciences, 2015; 100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for 139 countries of the world (Joule, 2017); and 100% clean, and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for 53 towns and cities in North America (Sustainable Cities and Society, 2018)

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, tons of discarded plastic are choking off the ocean, killing wildlife, and building islands of garbage. How bad has it become and what can be done about it? [ dur: 19 mins. ]

• Captain Charles Moore is founder of the ALGALITA Marine Research & Education Institute.

Then, how is the anti-government movement a type of constitutional coup? How does civil service provide a check on presidential power? [ dur: 39 mins. ]

• Jon Michaels is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, the makings of a scandal. Why are some perceived as big scandals, while a rash of other wrongs are ignored? [ dur: 21 mins. ]

• Robert Entman is a Professor of Media and Public Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University. He is the author of, Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy, and ,The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America.

Then, while many argue that we are in a post-truth era, some scholars argue that deception has always been ubiquitous. In this hour, we get some truth about lying. [ dur: 37 mins. ]

• Timothy R. Levine is Distinguished Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the editor of Encyclopedia of Deception, Vol. 1 & 2 and many scholarly articles on deception.
• David Livingstone-Smith is Professor of Philosophy in the University of New England. He is the author of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others and The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War.
• Briony Swire-Thompson is a Ph. D. student in the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia. She is a co-author of the studies Processing Political Misinformation: Comprehending the Trump Phenomena, and Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, the dark side of Uber, AirBnB and the rest of the so called “sharing economy.” We speak with Steven Hill. [ dur: 30 mins. ]

• Steven Hill is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Fair Vote: Center for Voting and Democracy. He’s the author of Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Naked Capitalism are Screwing American Workers.

Then, we explore Anonymous and the political ethos driving it with Luke Goode. [ dur: 28 mins. ]

• Luke Goode (profile page) is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests focus primarily on the connections between media, technology and democracy. He is the author of Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (Modern European Thinkers) and has published on a range of topics including public service broadcasting, social media, citizen journalism and hacktivism.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, when does democracy have a dark side? Michael Mann says that majorities can and do oppress minorities in the name of majoritarian democracy. He is the author of The Dark Side of Democracy. [ dur: 15 mins. ]

• Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is author of The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing.

Then, what is consciousness? Is it just brain activity? and how does it differ from the subconscious? [ dur: 43 mins. ]

• Valerie Gray Hardcastle is Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Locating Consciousness, The Myth of Pain, How to Build a Theory in Cognitive Science, and Constructing the Self.
• Dr. Rocco J. Gennaro is the Philosophy Department Chairperson and a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of Consciousness, The Consciousness Paradox: Consciousness, Concepts, and Higher-Order Thoughts, and is the editor of the anthology Theories of Consciousness and Psychopathology and the Routledge Handbook of Consciousness.
• Hakwan Lau is Professor in the Department of Psychology (Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience) & Brain Research Institute at UCLA. His numerous research papers include What is consciousness, and could machines have it? Should a few null findings falsify prefrontal theories of consciousness? and Heuristic use of perceptual evidence leads to dissociation between performance and metacognitive sensitivity.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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First, hacking, fake news, paid trolls both from within the country and from afar, are they destroying democracy? [ dur: 28 mins. ]

• Chris Tenove is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics and the Munk School of Global Affairs of the University of Toronto. He studies international relations and political theory, with an emphasis on issues of global governance and global justice. He is also an award-winning freelance writer and broadcaster.
• Jennifer Forestal is an Assistant Professor of Political Science (Theory) at Stockton University in New Jersey.

Then, what are the politics of Muslim Americans? And how might they be changing with the current political climate? [ dur: 30 mins. ]

• Emily Cury Tohma is a Research Fellow at Northeastern University’s Middle East Center. She’s the author of the research papers Muslim Americans and the 2016 Elections and Muslim American Policy Advocacy and the Palestinian Israeli Conflict: Claims-making and the Pursuit of Group Rights.
• Aubrey Westfall is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Wheaton College. She is the author of the research papers Gender and Political Behavior among Muslim Americans, The Complexity of Covering: The Religious, Social and Political Dynamics of Islamic Practice in the United States, and the forthcoming Islamic Headcovering and Political Engagement: The Power of Social Networks.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

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We spend the hour exploring the latest nominee for Supreme Court justice, the possible role for the four so-called liberal justices, and how privatization has amounted to what our guest calls a Constitutional Coup.[ dur: 58 mins. ]

• Jon Michaels is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic.

This program is produced with contributions from the following volunteers: Ankine Aghassian, Melissa Chiprin, Anaïs Amin, Tim Page, Mike Hurst and Sudd Dongre.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download