『unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc』のカバーアート

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

著者： Greg La Blanc
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 unSILOed is a series of interdisciplinary conversations that inspire new ways of thinking about our world. Our goal is to build a community of lifelong learners addicted to curiosity and the pursuit of insight about themselves and the world around them.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*All rights reserved. アート 文学史・文学批評 経済学
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  • 584. Examining School Closure Policies During the Pandemic: Untested Models vs. Empirical Evidence feat. David Zweig

    584. Examining School Closure Policies During the Pandemic: Untested Models vs. Empirical Evidence feat. David Zweig
    2025/09/15
    How did political and social pressures affect public health decisions during the pandemic, and how did media reporting amplify those effects? What is the cost when experts detach from evidence-based medicine for policymaking and defer decisions to those without the proper expertise?David Zweig is a journalist, novelist, and musician. He is also the author of An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.Greg and David discuss David’s journey from working on a different book during the pandemic to documenting the school closure policies and their implications. They cover various topics, including public health, expertise, the state of science, partisanship, tribalism in academia and the public sector, and how those factors influenced the policy and decisions during COVID. David talks about the decision-making processes behind prolonged school closures despite falling hospitalization rates, the role of media coverage, the politicization of public health recommendations, and the long-term impact on children’s education and mental health. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The failure of the expert class30:39: One of the reasons that I felt motivated to spend years writing this book [An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions], and just painstakingly trying to create a document. So I am hoping that, if I am not too big for my britches here, I hope in a decade, or a couple of decades or more from now, people will look back at the book and use this as a tool to understand: How does something like this happen, where science and evidence are ignored? And not only is it ignored, but it is ignored by the people who ostensibly are the experts who should know better. I do not spend a lot of time criticizing Trump, or, you know, Alex Jones, or conspiracy theorist people, because that's boring. I already do not expect them to know what is going on, but I do expect people with advanced degrees. I do expect physicians, I do expect these public health experts. And my book, in many ways, is a study of how those people—it is the failure of the expert class.Intuition over data15:28: Real-world, like empirical evidence, was ignored almost entirely. And when it was acknowledged, even in a minimal way, it was dismissed with a bunch of really contrived reasons that were based again on the expert's intuition. None of this was based on any evidence or data.When models reflect privilege01:07:54: It's quite important to note that the people who made the models also tended to be the people who did the best in the pandemic. That's what this guy Eric Berg's philosopher, who I interviewed, pointed out to me many times. Like, boy, that's pretty ironic that the people who chose how to create these models, they were the ones who were in comfortable homes. They were the ones who had their kid. They probably had one or another parent at home with the kid to help them with their studying. Maybe they could pay for a tutor. Maybe they went to their vacation home somewhere. If the people designing the pandemic response were in a studio apartment in the Bronx with four children, with one absent parent, and with one of the kids sick and with a learning disability, I'm pretty darn sure that their recommendations would have been quite different if those were the circumstances they were living in.Show Links:Recommended Resources:COVID-19Andrew CuomoAnthony FauciDonald TrumpCenters for Disease Control and PreventionThe New York TimesMegan RanneyWired (magazine)Graham AllisonEvidence-Based MedicineMIS-CVladimir Kogan ProfileEmily OsterDeborah BirxGuest Profile:DavidZweig.comProfile on WikipediaSocial Profile on XSocial Profile on FacebookGuest Work:Amazon Author PageAn Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad DecisionsInvisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-PromotionSwimming Inside the SunArticles for The AtlanticSubstack Newsletter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    1 時間 13 分
  • 583. Reflections on Literature's Enduring Role in Human Experience feat. Arnold Weinstein

    583. Reflections on Literature's Enduring Role in Human Experience feat. Arnold Weinstein
    2025/09/11
    How does literature enrich our understanding of ourselves and of others, in ways that STEM fields and other forms of knowledge cannot? What is contained within the language of reading that you don't encounter with other art forms like painting or film?Arnold Weinstein is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of several books. His latest two publications are The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing and Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books.Greg and Arnold discuss how literature offers unique and invaluable insights into the human experience, bridging historical and cultural divides. Their conversation examines the connections between literature and self-discovery, the challenges of teaching literature in a contemporary academic setting, and the enduring relevance of classic works from authors like William Faulkner, William Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Life doesn’t come in disciplines01:02:54: Literature helps you see history. That philosophy, et cetera, needs a good dosage of literature, which is why we created that course and let the disciplines—not the people, the disciplines themselves—do battle with each other. And there's no obvious answer here. There's no winner or loser. But the students were confused. They wanted to get what's the right take on this. Well, has anybody ever offered the right take on reality? Universities come packaged in disciplines. Life doesn't. It doesn't. All of our major problems cannot be solved with any single discipline, including economics and, you know, and coding.Literature makes us more human09:25: It's a good workout to read literature. It makes us more generous, as being able to award the notion of humanity to other people. Because I do not think you can kill them. You cannot stamp them out if you do not think back.Why great books leave you uneasy30:13: We are supposed to exit literature course, not exactly being more confused, but more embattled in a sense to see that other ways of being, as well as other ways, other values that people might have, is a kind of absolutely basic "meat-and-potatoes" element of human life. You cannot just live in your own silo, in your own scheme, even though you are locked in it. That's the point. We cannot exit ourselves.History isn’t a fairy tale40:51: If we read the books, it only tells us what we want to know, which is what we are headed towards in this society today with the current political scene. Any text that is critical of American history is considered broke and therefore removed. And I'm worried that we are going to get a generation of people who think that American history is a fairy tale, which it is not, and no amount of rhetoric can change that. That we can police and prohibit these certain kinds of texts can take over the Kennedy Center, but we cannot, in fact, change what all of that is about, which is that we are still paying the bill for the history of racism and slavery in this country. It is not solved. We can just try to put it under the rug, but it is not solved by any means. So it is in that sense that the discomfort is required. If it simply massages us, say, "oh, this is terrific," then I think we are reading the wrong book.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Harold BloomFranz KafkaThe MetamorphosisSøren KierkegaardWilliam FaulknerMark TwainAdventures of Huckleberry FinnJamesBenito CerenoBlaise PascalWilliam ShakespeareKing LearHamletOthelloIagoToni MorrisonNaked LunchGuest Profile:Profile at Brown UniversityWikipedia PageProfile at Roundtable.orgGuest Work:Amazon Author PageThe Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, KnowingMorning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through BooksNorthern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to BergmanA Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About LifeRecovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, MorrisonNobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLilloThe Great Courses - Classic Novels: Meeting the Challenge of Great Literature
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    1 時間 1 分
  • 582. Our Ancestral Eves: How the Female Body Shaped Human Evolution feat. Cat Bohannon

    582. Our Ancestral Eves: How the Female Body Shaped Human Evolution feat. Cat Bohannon
    2025/09/08
    What does the female body itself contribute to the story of human survival and development, and how does it differ from other animals and specifically, other mammals? These contributions include but are not limited unique attributes for gestation, childbirth, and lactation.Cat Bohannon is a researcher, scholar, and the author of the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.Greg and Cat discuss the significant role of the female body in human evolution. Cat shares the origins of her interdisciplinary approach to writing the book. Their conversation explores the evolutionary importance of maternal and infant health, the implications of sex differences in biology, the historical intersections of gynecology and sexism, and the deeply ingrained cultural norms around reproduction. Their discussion also touches on the origins of patriarchy and the impact of modern medical advancements on child-rearing and fertility trends.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The deep story of mammals is reproductive investment06:13: “Eve,” [the book] in so many ways, was just—it's like a giant thought experiment, right? Like, okay, what if we do take this seriously? What if we say, what if sex differences do matter? What does the current science say about where they might and what that might implicate? And how does that change the story of ocean? You know, because like the big story, like you say, of mammalian evolution is reproduction. It's reproduction. I mean, it's cool that some little bit of a quasi-reptilian jaw broke off and now we have inner ear bones, but that's not a really interesting story in evolution. You know what I mean? 06:53: You know, that's not the deep story of mammals. The deep story of mammals is reproductive investment.Why are female bodies always regulated across cultures?59:52: We seem to, in every human culture, create rules that regulate access to female bodies. One way or another, we may have a subset of rules that are more liberal—that is distinct to our culture. We may have a set of rules that are more what we would call conservative or more controlling. That is distinct to our culture. It just depends on which culture you are in. What we all do have is these damn rules.Lactation is a two-way communication system55:40: We have to think of lactation then as this kind of two-way communication platform between the maternal body and the offspring's body, right? So whether that kid's getting stressed and there's more cortisol in its saliva, or whether the mothers experiencing a stressful environment, then they are effectively biochemically communicating that to one another through that bi-directional transfer point of the damn nipple, which is one incredibly cool. There's nothing like that in the animal world. Two. Oh, okay. So then we have to think of lactation as a thing that's more than simple caretaking. It's actually a major foundational thing that happens in mammals that have nipples.Why women store special fats in their hips and butt45:28: One of the things that is really interesting is that on the maternal body, different fat depots seem to have slightly different chops... [45:48] So this gluteal femoral fat, that is your upper thighs, your hips, and your butt — those fat deposits seem to specially store different kinds of stuff. There are these long-chain fatty acids, LCFAs — long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. Our bodies are not good at making them from different parts. [46:26] For females, we mostly seem to store them in our butts. We start storing them in childhood, and then we keep going, and it turns out they do seem to be really important for building baby brains and baby retinas, which, by most accounts, are just an extension of your brain anyway.Show Links:Recommended Resources:PlacentaMalariaPlasmodiumEpidural, see Tina Cassidy's unsILOed Podcast episodeBruce EffectSolomonAlloparenting, see Sara Hrdy's unsILOed Podcast episodeKatie HindeUpsuck HypothesisGuest Profile:LinkedIn ProfileAlumni Profile | ButlerSocial Profile on InstagramWikipedia Entry for EveGuest Work:Amazon Author PageEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
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    1 時間 5 分
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