Mansplaining Mark and Joe

Just as colleges are finally being forced to pay their long-exploited student-athletes commensurate with the revenue they generate for their schools, we’re beginning to hear about private equity firms investing in college sports programs. Joe and Mark give it the old college try in analyzing the implications of this development on college athletics specifically and higher education generally (hint: they ain’t good). (Recorded June 14, 2024.)

Over the past several years, bail reform laws—changes to the criminal legal system to reduce unnecessary pretrial detention, especially for non-violent offenses—were implemented in jurisdictions throughout the country, and many advocates for criminal justice reform welcomed these changes as long overdue. There ensued a backlash, howerver, in which conservatives blamed recent increases in crime on bail reform and claimed it led to a rash of opportunistic recidivism by folks who should ha...

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s neurotechnology startup, recently live-streamed footage of a paralyzed man with a brain implant playing video chess using only his mind. According to Musk, that’s just one of many medical applications for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). But it is BCI’s non-medical applications that are generating controversy among ethicists, in the way they aspire to create a symbiosis between people and AI meant to keep humanity from falling too far behind machines. ...

A common argument among sports fans is whether coming through “in the clutch” — where an athlete is said to raise his or her level of performance in the most important moments of the game — truly exists. Some cite chapter and verse of their favorite players doing spectacular things under intense pressure to bolster their argument for its existence, while others insist with equal vehemence that clutch is a figment of the imagination, unsupported by the data. Well it’s the bottom of...

"Inflation will be with us for years to come." "You can’t lower inflation without raising unemployment." "Supply chain disruptions will cause a recession." These are some of the fables told in recent years by economic forecasters. Their job is to use empirical methods to explain why certain things happen in the economy but they’re notoriously bad at it, their predictions no more reliable than that of a palm reader. Why is this so? Joe and Mark assess their record, offering s...

Electric vehicle charging stations were recently installed in the parking lot of Joe’s apartment complex, and that got him thinking about how our country’s transition to EVs is going. Have Americans been sufficiently incentivized to go electric? Are there enough public charging stations to accommodate growing demand? And what are the implications for America’s rickety power grid? With only a single charge, Mark takes us on a road trip through the history of EVs and for...