Episodes
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In this episode we will explore a specific slice of the legislative and judicial history of American Imperialism, namely the evolution of the policies under which the US governs it's overseas territories. My guests in this episode are Joseph Blocker, professor of constitutional law at Duke University and Mitu Gulati, professor of law at the University of Virginia.
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Missing episodes?
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When one inquires on what is and is not misinformation, the indirect but fundamental question that is being asked is what is truth? A question so hard to answer that it spawned its very own branch of philosophical study, known as Epistemology. Furthermore, it has been the root cause for potentially the greatest intellectual rivalry in western history, between the rationalist and the empiricist. Today's guest, John Wihbey, who is an associate professor at Northeastern University, an affiliate with Northeastern’s Ethics Institute and the co-author of the paper : “The Bipartisan Case for Labeling as a Content Moderation Method: Findings from a National Survey” attempts to tackle the management of misinformation not by proposing a single unified solution, but instead asks a narrower but still important question about what strategies for mitigating fake news are politically popular and thus in theory democratically possible.
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In this interview we will explore the work and life of the writer Jose Luis Borges. You may have never heard of this Argentinian writer but many critics consider him to be one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. In this conversation we will try to answer the questions why does Jose Luis Borges matter and what does it mean for something to be Borgesian. Furthermore we will explore the implications of the potentially unlawful publication restrictions that were placed on some of his most beloved translations. If you are anything like me, you will be surprised by just how Borgesian your every day existence feels, you just never knew the right word to describe it.
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If you follow the financial markets at all in the last year, it's likely you have heard about the newest shiny object on wall street, the SPAC, which is an abbreviation for the term Special Purposes Acquisition Companies. SPACs are a financial instrument for companies to raise capital for equity, having the same end result as a traditional IPOs but with many procedural differences. Essentially the way SPACs work is one company raises money from a set of investors to acquire another company, in exchange for equity in the new resulting merged company once the acquisition is complete. What is important to know going into this conversation is that SPACs were for a long time considered a capital raising tool of last resort, but there has been a significant increase in interest for this financing strategy both on the supply and demand side. In fact in the last year the number of SPACs in progress has exploded, with 248 being initiated in 2020 versus only 59 in 2019, which represents a 320% increase. However, the earnings data so far is showing that the returns on this investment class may not live up to the hype, as the 47 SPACs that merged between January 2019 and June 2020 have lost on average a third of their value. My guest today is Michael Ohlrogge who is an assistant professor at NYU School of Law and a co-author of the paper “A Sober look at SPACs”. In this episode we dive deep into the way SPACs work, how they differ from a more traditional IPO and the larger market forces that boosted it from being a capital raising tool of last resort to a mainstream financing model. We also discuss the economic realities of SPACs and why it might not be living up to the original expectation of investors.
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In this episode we explore the history and future of legal punishment. My guest today will give us an introduction to the debate around judicial sanctions and to the two dialectical forces that have historically driven it ‘retributivism’ and ‘consequentialism’. My guest Thom Brooks also lays out a vision for judicial punishment that may be able to resolve these conflicting views and explains how this new hybrid model may help us address some of the current moral short fallings in the American legal system
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One of the last laws Trump signed during his tenure as president was the Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, enacted only in the last month before he left office. The crux of this order is a directive for the federal government to favor more ‘traditional’ and what Trump considers more ‘beautiful’ styles of architecture when building new government buildings. A lot of the language in the order is relatively vague, prescribing for example and I quote “Care must be taken, to ensure that all federal building designs command respect [sic] of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of America's ideals''. However, this edict does pronounce that certain styles should be prioritized, specifically “Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture” at the cost of potentially excluding more recent schools of design like brutalism and postmodernism. My guest today, Jessica Rizzo, a writer and scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of law, makes the case that efforts to exclude specific art styles (and by implication elimination from the urban landscape the philosophical beliefs that underpin these artistic movements) is tantamount to censorship regime, which risks infringing on the first right amendments of architects and artist who don’t confirm to the same aesthetic principles as the Trump administration. In this conversation with Rizzo we explore the First Amendment implications of Trump’s EO , the limits on the public’s ability to use the First Amendment to contest offensive government speech, and the ways in which existing law fails to reckon with the unique limitations and possibilities of architecture.
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In this episode the paper we will be discussing is entitled ‘Fame as an Illusion of Creativity : Evidence from the Pioneers of Abstract Art’, in which today’s guest, Banerjee Mitali, strives to answer the following question : what are the main factors that determine an artist's likeness to become famous. Mitali, who is currently an assistant professor of strategy and business policy at HEC in Paris, was unsatisfied with the current research, quoting from her intro: “Little work has explored the factors that shape a producer’s fame in creative markets. Much of what exists, notably Simonton’s (1980) research, has focused on creativity as the sole driver of an innovator’s fame. However, the extant evidence is mixed regarding the link between creativity and fame”. In this discussion Mitali describes how her innovative empirical approach, where she partnered with the MoMA to analyze the social connections between 90 leading artists of the early 20th century, shows that one’s social context is among the strongest indicator of potential fame. As she explains it : “ past work overlooks a key insight that creativity in cultural and entrepreneurial contexts is itself a function of the social structure in which an individual is embedded”. So without further ado here is Mitali Banerjee to discuss ‘Fame as an Illusion of Creativity’.
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Welcome to the first episode of this new series Thesis, in which every other week I am going to be interviewing academics, hailing from all fields of study, about the themes and ideas that underpin their respective research. You might be wondering who I am and why I wanted to do this, so I decided to pick this episode as it might give you some insight into my brain. One tool I have found useful over the years in my quest for new and interesting ideas, is to look for any glaring chasms between how much time I have spent thinking about an issue and how much time someone else has spent writing about that topic. The greater that gap, the more likely an idea is going to surprise or shock me. For the sake of discussion, we will call this idea a curiosity gap. Today’s episode is about one of these such chasms, that I stumbled on while searching on the website SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, which is a great research paper aggregator. Today's curiosity gap concern's wallpaper, which this episode centers around. This very first installment of Thesis is an examination of why interior decoration is such a fundamental human drive and what it's evolutions says about various societies throughout the ages. My guest is Robert M. Kelly who has been working with wallpaper as a paperhanger, researcher, consultant, and writer since 1976. In this conversation Robert walks me through the fundamentals of wallpaper scholarship, what it means for wallpaper to be meaningful and how to read wallpaper as a material representation of our values and beliefs.
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In 1942 the famous Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter coined a pivotal notion in economics known as 'creative destruction'. The MIT department of economics refers to 'creative destruction' as " the incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones". Essentially, it is the idea that products or services will either become naturally ineffective or must be purposefully terminated, to make room for new ones to replace them. This process ensures that there is always something better, or at least newer, for the consumer to spend his or her money on. It is the cornerstone of any type of economic growth. So what happens when parts of the capitalistic structure itself prove to be faulty or outdated and a recession occurs. How do our financial systems re-invent themself and what phoenix rises from those economic ashes. That is what we are going to figure out in today's episode.
My guests this episode are professors Ross Buckley and Douglas Arner, who teach at the university of New South Wales and Hong Kong University respectively. Both are experts in financial law. They are joining me to discuss their paper “The Evolution of Fintech : a New Post Crisis Paradigm”. In this paper they explore how every major recession of the last 20 years has forced the financial industry to revisit, and often revolutionize, its relationship with digital technology. As a result of this process an entirely new industry was spawned, known as Fintech, which today is still largely guided by the destruction and losses incurred in economic recessions. -
One of the hopes I have for this show is to uncover the connections between seemingly unrelated aspects of our society and how these affect our daily life at scale. My guest this episode is Phil Lord, professor or law at McGill. Together we are going to examine two different types of story telling formats, known as the didactic and non didactic, and how these differing methods may affect how child assimilates meaning.
Don’t worry if these terms sound confusing we will go into detail about what they mean in this show. But importantly we will examine how these opposing forms of story telling might affect a child's propensity, once adult, to adhere or not to different laws.
