After a long break...I'm back! In this episode, I speak with Dr. Patricia Schwerdtle about epistemology, the difference between social justice and critical social justice, and whether a merit-based approach to science is adequate for addressing inequality. She is the co-author of "In Defense of Merit in Science," an essay in Journal of Controversial Ideas that draws upon evidence from across different disciplines to question critical theory. Dr. Schwerdtle is a research fellow of nursing at Monash University in Australia, serves on the board of Doctors without Borders, and is affiliated with University of Heidelberg in Germany.

In this episode, we focus on REASON. I interview Lee McIntyre, the author of "How to Talk to a Science Denier." We talk about his previous book, Post-Truth, which discusses how factors ranging from the decline of traditional media to the rise of post-modernism in the humanities undermined our shared understanding of truth. The book also has a great overview of classic findings on cognitive bias, and in this dialogue he gives us an update from the latest psychology research. Professor McIntyre is Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School.

Austin Aigbe of the Centre for Democracy and Development joins me for a conversation with Jean-Baptiste Guiatin, a PhD candidate at Université Thomas Sankara Ecole Doctorale Sciences Politiques et Juridiques in Ouagadougou about the coup in Burkina Faso. An alum of American University’s School of International Service, his current research explores neo-realism to understand state response to jihadist insurgencies in the Sahel. We ask him about coups in comparative perspective, misinformation, French foreign policy, and the geopolitics of Russian and Chinese engagement.