What Happens Next in 6 Minutes – Details, episodes & analysis

Peter Moskos is the author of the books Cop in the Hood as well as In Defense of Flogging. Peter is a Professor in the Department of Law and Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I want to find out from Peter what it is like policing in the Eastern District of Baltimore when he was a police officer and why he thinks we need to reconsider physical punishment in lieu of incarceration.   

Michael Walzer is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has previously taught politics and government at Princeton and Harvard as well. Michael has written the leading book in his field entitled Just and Unjust Wars. I want to discuss with him his moral philosophy of war and then apply it to the current conflict in Gaza.

Luke Nichter is the author of the new book entitled The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. After LBJ decided not to seek another term, the election was wide open for the candidates Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace.

Our first speaker will be Harvey Silverglate who is one of America’s top defense lawyers. Harvey has represented criminal defendants in some of the most famous cases.  He has taught at Harvard Law School and has been the Chairman of the Board of the ACLU’s Massachusetts Affiliate.  Harvey is an expert on the FBI and he feels that the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover haunts the FBI, and as a result, the FBI needs to be shut down, the staff fired, and a new national police force needs to be created to handle national crimes.  This will be a provocative discussion.

Our second speaker is Nick Eberstadt who is the American Enterprise Institute Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy. Nick is the author of the book Men Without Work, and the second edition of the book will be released tomorrow.

Nick is going to discuss the steady increase in the number of men who are 25 to 54 who do not work and are not looking for work.  We are going to find out who these men are, what they do all day, and whether they are happy.  And finally, we are going to hear about what public policies may have exacerbated this problem and what we can do about it.

Parents and kids spend a lot of time worrying about getting into college.  But as soon as they enroll, their next concern is landing a big internship, because it may help in landing a job after graduation.

On today’s program, I want to focus on three issues.  How do kids get an internship?  What would be an ideal internship for a particular individual?  And what skill building should the inter focus on?

Our speaker will be John Ellis who is the former Dean of the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Professor of German Literature. The topic is the corruption of the Humanities, and what this means for the University.

I’ve raided the What Happens Next archives to find additional material that supports John Ellis’s discussion. We are going to hear from Arnold Weinstein who is a Professor of English at Brown University who will discuss the increasing resistance to teaching Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

We will also hear from my friend David Grazian who is a Professor of Sociology at UPenn who will discuss the challenges of teaching Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and why it is much easier to teach the HBO Series The Wire than the novels of Tom Wolfe.

Our final speaker is Patrick Allitt who is a Professor of History at Emory University.  Patrick is going to discuss the increasing relevance of George Orwell and his central role in the American literary canon.

Richard Fontaine and his team at the Center for a New American Security or CNAS developed war games with retired defense officials and members of congress.  A few days ago, there were war games to see what happens if China were to invade Taiwan.

Our speaker will be Mark Galeotti who is the author of the books We Need to Talk About Putin and The Weaponization of Everything.  Mark will speak about Putin’s war objectives and his implementation strategy. A couple of months ago the Russian government banned Mark from entering the country.

Our speaker is Paul Mango who helped manage Operation Warp Speed as the former deputy chief of the US Health and Human Services.  He has just written a new book entitled Warp Speed: Inside the Operation that Beat COVID, the Critics and the Odds.

Our first speaker is Moises Naim who is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the new book entitled Revenge of Power.

Moises will tell us about how populism, polarization, and post-truth undermine the democratic process.  And that there is a global trend in the past few decades away from democracies towards more authoritarian regimes.

Our second speaker will be Julian Waller who is a political scientist at George Washington University, and he has a new paper that was recently published in the magazine American Affairs entitled Authoritarianism here?

Julian will speak about why strong democratic governance in the US makes it unlikely that authoritarianism can take hold in the US because of the diffusion of power within the Federal government and how state and local control through federalism strengthens democracy.