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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This month, we talk to Greg Kobele (Universität Leipzig) about what linguistics is and how abstract mathematics can be of use to it. Click here to listen to our conversation.

Linguists study the rules that speakers of a given language actually follow when they speak. Not made-up rules like “never end a sentence with a preposition,” which no one ever follows (including the teachers who shame their students for not following them), but the actual rules you need to know in order to understand English. Like how you have to say “My name is Matt” rather than “My name are Matt.” This may seem like a trivial task, but in fact the rules that native speakers of a given language actually follow when they know the language are mind-bogglingly complicated, when you try to sit down and describe them precisely. Lots of incredibly smart people have been trying to sit down and describe the rules of English precisely, and they’re still nowhere near done.

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This month, we sit down with Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University) to discuss the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Click here to listen to our conversation.

It’s the end of the American civil war. 4 million slaves have just been freed. Now what do we all do? The question still wasn’t settled by the turn of the century, when an interesting debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois sprung up. Washington thought the best way forward for black Americans was to build up economic power and let political power come later. Du Bois, on the other hand, thought that becoming politically enfranchised (while concurrently building up economic power) was indispensable and a prerequisite for achieving full enfranchisement as citizens.

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