Lit Nerves Radio Will Madaus & Matt Ellison

We examine free speech and censorship on college campuses in this edition of Lit Nerves Radio. Our guest, Susan Kruth of FIRE, takes us through the legality of campus speech codes—more strict in recent years—and reviews the case of our own Georgetown Universitys as well.

This week we delve into how invention becomes innovation, innovation’s causes, consequences, and characteristics. James Bessen,  a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet andamp; Society and a lecturer at Boston University’s School of Law, is the author of Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth and is the perfect guide to this discussion.

We speak with Dr. Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health and former provost of Harvard University, who now directs the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Hyman co-authored “Darkness Invisible: The Hidden Global Costs of Mental Illness” in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs. We discuss the costs and burdens of mental illness, as well as the stigmas that impede care, and what we can do to alleviate them.

Civil liberties are at the center of any liberal democracy and this week’s show. We talk with Samuel Walker, Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who has served on the Board of Directors of the ACLU about civil liberties from World War I to present day.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.) joins host Will Madaus to discuss the military of tomorrow, informed by lessons learned from the recent past. Its not technology or tactics which hamper the latter day force, Zinni says, but strategy, mission and direction—or rather their perennial absence in U.S. foreign policy.

Fracking has brought an oil boom to America, setting her to overtake Saudi Arabia in the not too distant future. Oil prices have crashed, to the joy of drivers and consternation of certain regimes. What does the the oil market spell for the future at home and abroad? We take on different angles, talking with Steven Pruett, President and C.E.O. of Elevation Resources, an oil company in West Texas, Cole Stangler, writer for IB Times and Vice News, and with the global perspective, Alec Pharris.