The Rip Current with Jacob Ward

• How to Defeat Loneliness (with David Jay)

  We’ve all experienced loneliness, but could you really describe what it is, and what it does to you, beyond the physical experience of isolation? Before this conversation, I couldn’t. But David Jay has taken the invisible, unnameable effects of loneliness and turned them into an actionable recipe for evaluating and improving friendship and community in our lives. (He explains it all in his 2024 book Relationality.) It sounds hokey — and he’s the first to admit that we’re doing a terrible job in society of quantifying the value of this stuff — but his work on the subject is quite rigorous, and the stakes are enormous: cultural disconnection, political authoritarianism, a mental and physical health crisis, and a deepening inability to fight our way out of all of it.The good news is he has real advice, and shares it with me here. Please enjoy, and if you like the episode I beg you: share it with someone else!

  --------  

  1:04:02

  --------

  1:04:02
• The Life and Death of Booze (with Adam Rogers)

  Adam Rogers is a science journalist and the author of two amazing books about how we experience the world. His second, Full Spectrum, is about color. But we're here to discuss his first, Proof: The Science of Booze. Not just booze, though — what it symbolizes about magic and alchemy and history and chaos, and why our relationship to it is so fraught and fun and terrible. Basically what I learned is that it would improve the world enormously if everyone had to learn to handle themselves at a bar, but that we somehow need to do it without actually drinking. Also he's a great friend of mine, and it's my show, and I can have my friends on sometimes, okay? If you like this show, do me a favor and share it with someone else! It helps enormously in bringing me to a new audience.

  --------  

  59:31

  --------

  59:31
• The Trump Moment is Global (with Bart Bonikowski)

  Trump's sudden, strange appeal took most political observers by surprise (it broke their necks, frankly), but not Bart Bonikowski. The NYU professor of politics and sociology has been looking at the global rise of populism for over a decade, along with the ideologies and forms of nationalism that help to explain why it's got us all in its grasp at the moment. We talk about the common causes of this weird kind of politics, the most dangerous outcomes it might lead us to, and what the antidotes might be.Readings:“Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment” (British Journal of Sociology, 2017)Clarifies distinctions among populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism and shows that spikes in radical‑right support come from framing strategies resonating with folks experiencing national status threats pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+1cifar.ca+1sociology.berkeley.edu.“Varieties of American Popular Nationalism” (with Paul DiMaggio, AJS, 2016)Identified four distinct nationalist mindsets—disengaged, civic, ardent, restrictive—and mapped their prevalence russellsage.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4en.wikipedia.org+4.“The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’” (with Feinstein & Bock, AJS, 2021)Shows how Republicans and Democrats increasingly diverge in their definitions of America—Republicans leaning exclusionary, Democrats inclusive journals.uchicago.edu+2en.wikipedia.org+2cifar.ca+2.“Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020)” (2022)Uses neural language modeling to track ideological trends across historic campaigns cifar.ca+1journals.sagepub.com+1en.wikipedia.org+6pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov+6papers.ssrn.com+6.“Trump’s Populism…” (2019 chapter in When Democracy Trumps Populism)Dissects the nationalist rhetoric in Trump’s campaigns and situates it within broader democratic patterns nyuscholars.nyu.edu.

  --------  

  1:11:08

  --------

  1:11:08
• An Expert in Violence Explains the Path to Peace (with Lord John Alderdice)

  When I was writing my book The Loop, I was looking for experts in the degree to which we misunderstand one another, and several people pointed me at this week’s guest. He and I had an hourlong phone conversation, and while he undoubtedly doesn’t remember it (but is too polite to say so), for me it was a deeply formative experience.Lord John Alderdice grew up the son of an Irish presbyterian minister in and out of Belfast, and has been a psychiatrist, a politician, and a researcher into violence and peace. His work on the Good Friday Accords helped to end the troubles in Northern Ireland, and he’s been a trusted source of insight and scholarship for those seeking an end to violence in dozens of conflicts around the world ever since.In this week’s episode, he discusses the deeply misunderstood power of really and truly listening, over long periods of time, in correcting disturbed historic relationships and setting them back on a path toward peace, and our conversation is a very interesting accompaniment to my interview with John Patty and Elizabeth Penn about the frailty of democracy from a few weeks back.Here are three recent pieces of research from Lord Alderdice about the "how" of negotiation and why we're in such global disorder, as he puts it.Alderdice, John, Lord (2021) "Conflict, Complexity, and Cooperation," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 33 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol33/iss1/9 Alderdice, John, Lord, (2023) New insights into the psychology of individuals and large groups in a world of changing conflicts (2023) International Political Science Review, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231177444 Alderdice, John, Lord (2010) “Off the couch and round the conference table”. Chapter 1 in Off the Couch – Contemporary Psychoanalytic Applications, Eds Alessandra Lemma and Matthew Patrick, Routledge.Lord Alderdice is refreshing not just for his optimism that we can find a way to peace, but because that optimism is based in decades of hard experience pursuing it. I hope you enjoy it.

  --------  

  1:04:46

  --------

  1:04:46
• Bonus: What It's Like at a Protest, and Why It's So Dangerous!

  Here's what it's like on the ground when you're covering a protest, why it's so hard to give an accurate picture of what's happening, and why it can be misleading. Also: police targeting journalists is very much a thing.

  --------  

  9:47

  --------

  9:47

More News podcasts

Trending News podcasts

About The Rip Current with Jacob Ward