The Curious Middle

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Historian Joseph Moorw Wants You to Know It's Never Been Easier to Get Ahead in America

August 02, 2026

Dr. Joseph Moore is a historian who spent a decade testing every financial strategy Americans have ever tried: he Airbnb'd every room in his house, bought land on the moon, founded a cryptocurrency, and invested in a startup that went to zero — to write How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked and Didn't. He started the project as a "lefty humanities professor" trying to prove the American Dream was a myth. Ten years of evidence later, he'd changed his m...

They Are Training Teachers Not to Tell You - PragerU CEO Marissa Streit Joins us to Discuss the Fight For America

July 29, 2026

Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, is back! Last time,  she told us serving your country can mean enlisting as an educator, a line we still bring up constantly. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation: why personal responsibility beats collective grievance, how socialism and communism sell real problems with fake solutions, a teacher's union resolution instructing teachers not to tell parents when a student is transitioning, intersectionality as what Marissa calls "victim bingo," and why P...

Liza Libes Shares How Academia Turned Jane Austen Into a Colonizer (and Buried Tolstoy's Best Lessons)

July 11, 2026

Liza Libes is defending literature like it's under siege, and after this conversation, you will understand why. Liza went to Columbia wanting to study Tolstoy and came out having read more Edward Said and Sartre she signed up for. We got into how her English degree turned into a theory degree overnight, why Anna Karenina isn't the feminist manifesto her professors taught it as, and why so much of what gets published now has had the backstory and the beauty edited right out of it by agents ch...