Episode summary: Today’s episode explores one of the big counterfactuals of twentieth-century American politics: David talks to historian Benn Steil about how close the ultraliberal Henry Wallace came to being FDR’s running mate in 1944 and successor as president in 1945. How near did Wallace get to...

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Episode summary: An age of invention and mass production, propelled by a new mechanism – the corporate research lab – leads to a surge in material wealth like the world has never seen. How does a new nation, the United States, overtake its parent as the leader of the surging capitalist order? And wh...

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Episode summary: The War on Cars: Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 2

Episode summary: We now have many ways to tell the story of America’s tilt towards authoritarianism, but for your host one image sums up the whole sordid business: a mashup of Donald Trump and the Marvel comic book character The Punisher. In this episode we talk with Kent Worcester, author of a new...

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Episode summary: The War on Cars: Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 1

Episode summary: Economic change happens in a cultural context. We trace the tectonic shifts in the Western mind that made capitalism thinkable – in part through a look at two Enlightenment thinkers: Baruch Spinoza and Adam Smith. (The real Smith, not the one held up as the patron saint of unfettere...

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Episode summary: The concept of presidential immunity is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Constitution. That hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from essentially creating a law-free zone around the President.

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Episode summary: Michael Wood-Lewis from Front Porch Forum joins us for this second (maybe third?) appearance to help us kick off our Good Web series, where we’re highlighting the successful people building a better, smaller Internet. Michael was gracious enough to have producer Mike Sugarman up to...

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Episode summary: If you know and love the Vidalia onion—an onion sweet enough, its fans say, to eat like an apple—you likely also know it as a product of Georgia, as proudly claimed as the peach. But the story of the Vidalia’s popularity is far more complex than just one of a local onion made good....

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Episode summary: Come for the churrasco. Stay for the economic deep dives across Latin America.