This month, we talk to Brian L. Frye (University of Kentucky College of Law) about how we deal with and react to plagiarism. Click here to listen to our conversation.

Plagiarism is obviously terrible, and plagiarizers should be punished to the full extent of the law. Or should they? Our guest this month thinks there are a number of issues with that position. For one thing, plagiarism isn’t illegal–it’s a social rule that’s unofficially enforced–so it isn’t even clear that the law has much of an ‘extent’ in this case. That is, plagiarists don’t go to jail; they’re just subject to other kinds of punishments, like expulsion from school or social ostracism. In the educational context, Brian L. Frye argues that punishing students for plagiarizing doesn’t contribute to the main purpose of education, which is to make as many students as possible learn as much as possible. If a student cheats on an assignment by copying an article written by someone else, the real problem is that they aren’t learning anything, because they aren’t doing the work they’re supposed to be doing. He thinks that what an instructor should do in that situation is tell the student they’re slacking off and that they need to do the work if they want to learn–rather than go ballistic and do what they can to ensure the student will never work in this town again.

This month, we sit down with Tommy Curry (University of Edinburgh currently; Texas A&M at the time of the recording) to discuss a new area of academic research called black male studies. You can see his full bio at the end of this entry, and you can click here to listen to our conversation.

When we think about examples of people being oppressed on the basis of their gender, the go-to case is women. Which makes a lot of sense–women have of course been the target of oppression on the basis of their gender across many different cultures and across a long historical timespan. But what about other demographic groups? Can other people also be targeted for oppression on the basis of their gender? If we scratch our heads a little further, the example of gender non-binary or genderqueer people might also come to mind, and it can be interesting to compare and contrast their lived experiences with those of women. But is there anyone else? Our guest this month says yes! Black men. Black men in the US have historically been the victims of oppression on the basis of their gender, and this has manifested itself in the ways they are depicted in the media, the social opportunities they are given, the tracks they are placed onto in our legal and economic system, and so much more.

This month, I sit down with Katherine Ritchie (CUNY Graduate Center, City College) to talk about what a social group is. Click here to listen to our conversation.

What is there to being a group of people? Does being in a group basically just mean you’re on the list of people who are in the group, or is there more to it? Our guest this month argues that a group of people isn’t just a selection of people taken at random; rather, it’s a collection of people who stand in different relations to each other. So for example, on a baseball team there’s a pitcher and a catcher, and the pitcher stands in the “I throw the ball at” relation to the catcher. Or in a small company, the CEO stands in the “I am your boss” relation to their employees. What makes a group a group isn’t just who’s in it, but what role each person takes on relative to each other person.

This month, Emily Dupree and I talk to Sally Haslanger (MIT) about ideology. Click here to listen to our conversation.

We throw the word ‘ideology’ around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Well, unfortunately, different people mean different things by it at different times. One thing we often mean by it is ‘a person’s political outlook or worldview.’ So suppose that’s what it means. What constitutes a person’s political outlook? Is it just a list of all the things they believe?

Ever wonder what quantum mechanics is? You are not alone. This month, we talk to Tom Pashby (University of Chicago) about what makes quantum mechanics so hard to interpret, despite the fact that it makes incredibly accurate empirical predictions. Click here to listen.

Quantum mechanics is hard to interpret for a number of reasons, but very high on the list is the way it uses the notion of probability. In a more commonsense physical theory, we might say things like ‘there’s a 50% chance that the explosion collapsed the cave.’ Arguably, that’s just a way of saying ‘we aren’t more than 50% sure whether the explosion collapsed the cave–to be sure, we have to get up and go check.’ In quantum mechanics, the probabilities don’t describe what we know; they describe the physical system itself. So the ‘50%-ness’ can be part of the actual state of some configuration of tiny particles. What the what?!

In this episode, Myisha Cherry (UC Riverside) and I talk about talking. What makes someone good at at, and what makes someone bad at it? Click here to listen to our conversation.

We don’t always think of conversation as a skill. Often, we think of it as something that just happens automatically; I need to talk someone, and I walk over and just tell them what’s on my mind. But there’s a lot of careful work that goes into having a good conversation: you modulate the way you address the person based on your knowledge of how they are and aren’t comfortable talking, you take into account what you know about their experiences, and approach the exchange as an opportunity to learn. In this episode, Myisha Cherry runs through some of what it takes to be a good conversationalist, in the hope that being our best selves while talking to one another can facilitate difficult conversations.

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