Central Air

This week: Annie Lowrey on the time, effort, money, and psychological costs some government policies impose on us. Filling out endless forms, repeatedly proving eligibility, telling the government what we owe in taxes even though it already knows what we owe — we love a conversation about how the government is ineffective and how it could be more effective.


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This week: Cranks make society work. We challenge the popular consensus, and we aren’t afraid to speak up even when we know what we have to say will be poorly received. Thank you to all the Central Air listeners who answered our call for your crankiest policy proposals. We discuss some of them: Should tax returns be public documents that any citizen can look up? Should you be able to submit a standing order that all your votes should be cast for your favorite political party, instead of having to tediously complete a ballot at every election? Should we geo-engineer a tornado inside the Astrodome to produce clean energy? Should we do daylight saving time backwards, so we spring forward in the fall?
Probably not. But maybe. Let’s discuss.

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This week: David Ellison is displeased about the California-led lawsuit to stop the Paramount-Warner merger, and he’s threatening to move both studios out of the state. Is this threat credible?
Also this week: the Democratic establishment held off Thanksgiving-canceler Francesca Hong in the primary for Wisconsin governor, and we discuss the unhinged responses to the very grim news with the Jason Arday situation. And during cocktail hour, we look for silver linings — who in the Trump cabinet is actually doing a good job?
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This week: UCLA sociology professor Gabriel Rossman joins us this week to talk about rough times in elite higher education. We start with a problem at the UC system itself: California’s top public universities haven’t considered test scores for admission since 2019, and that has led to the universities admitting some students who are wildly unprepared for college-level work. Then, behind the paywall: star scholar Jason Arday has resigned from Cambridge University in scandal, and it reflects a phenomenon Tyler Austin Harper complains about in his Atlantic essay about his time as a professor at Bates College: universities being more interested in black academics’ political symbolism than their academic output, which is pretty racist, if you think about it.
Plus: ideological homogeneity in the humanities and humanistic social sciences (and in sociology specifically) and what could be done to combat it, and during cocktail hour, we talk about what “Woke 1” is and whether it’s really over, and we talk with Gabriel about his academic work on the laundering of disreputable financial exchanges — a useful lens for talking about both Melania Coin and the debate over whether men are really expected to send Ubers to fetch women for first dates.
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This week: pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson tells us all about the state of polling, what American voters are thinking about heading into the midterms, how AI and the death of the phone call are changing polling, and how polls identify fake responses. Kristen tells us about the “political tribes” that make up the Republican and Democratic parties, and how the middle-aged millennials and young adults of Gen Z are changing the landscape — that conversation is mostly for paying subscribers. Then, during cocktail hour (also just for paying subscribers), we discuss exciting food news: Alison Roman, like David Chang, shares my once-controversial-but-now-conventional opinion that grills ruin food.
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