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Failure

August 14, 2026

We live in an age with a curiously cheerful relationship to failure.  But that optimism was built for a world that no longer quite exists. For three generations now, doing everything right-- getting an education,  holding down a full-time job, following the sensible plan--  has stopped reliably buying a house or a secure retirement. When a single failure can be genuinely ruinous, the advice to dust yourself off and "fail fast, fail forward, fail better"  starts to sound like a privilege reser...

Multi/Race/Less/Ness (with Jon Ivan Gill)

August 07, 2026

Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his recent book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is trauma. Not that race "causes" trauma, but rather that the assignment of metaphysically fixed and static racial categories to people is itself a trauma.  Gill contends that we are coerced to accept the limitations imposed by racial categories, which not only severely restrict our life possibilities, but cause us to fundamentally misapprehend th...

Trust

July 31, 2026

Surveys say we're living through a "trust crisis," and some version of that has been true since at least the '70s. Confidence in the press, in the courts, in public health agencies, in elected officials, in one another has been down, and still going down. At this point, mistrust reads as our default civic posture. And yet here we all are, getting through our days by handing out trust more or less constantly and mostly without noticing. We tell a friend something we'd rather nobody else knew. ...