Thesis

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.

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.

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.

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

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.