"It is far from easy to be a good man. In fact, as one gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to know what a good man is. Yet it also becomes increasingly important to at least try." -- Rudolph Wegener, The Man in the High Castle (1.10)
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People who think philosophy is useless also tend to think that society does not need to change. If you want to maintain the status quo, teaching people to question everything is a pretty stupid thing to do. (Existential Comics, March 21, 2018)
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—Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Proper Sense of Priorities" (1968)
MB: During my morning coffee ritual, I was reading about the 1961 Freedom Rides through Alabama and Mississippi in Mark Hamilton Lytle's excellent narrative history America's Uncivil Wars about the social/political conflicts of the long 1960s (mid 1950s to mid 1970s). The courage of these young activists and the vision of James Farmer is breathtaking to read about. I highly recommend the book, it reads with intensity, and it is thorough in its scope. It is relevant for out current era of sociopolitical conflicts.
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Armenikus, Vashik. "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli." Artidote (September 5, 2026) ["Why did Sir Isaac Newton spend decades studying alchemy? Is the octopus the closest creature that we have on Earth to alien life-forms? Which science is closer to Faith? Why did Einstein make so many errors in his calculations? How do we form Ideas? These are just a few topics that Rovelli covers in his essays and if any of those questions intrigued you I believe you will enjoy reading this book. Rovelli is peerless in his skill of communicating complex ideas in just two pages. For example his essay ‘Dante, Einstein and the Three-Sphere’ is only two and a half pages long. However, Rovelli explained to me Einstein’s theory of Three-Spherical cosmos, gave me a short commentary on Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and then finished by showing me how Dante ‘predicted’ (for the lack of better word) what Einstein would discover seven centuries later. But what I enjoyed most of all is Rovelli’s open-mindedness to everything in the world. Whilst some scientists (such as Stephen Hawking whom Rovelli admired) tend to disregard philosophy, poetry and generally everything that is not rooted in the material world - Rovelli finds science and art to be inseparable from each other."]
Bariach, Ben. "When AI and Human Worlds Collide." NOEMA (January 20, 2026) ["These challenges are profound, but they are not inevitable. The science of world models remains in relative infancy, with a long horizon expected before it matures into wide deployment. Thoughtful engagement with the world model paradigm now will shape not just how such future agents learn, but what values their actions represent and how they might interact with people. An overly precautionary approach risks its own moral failure. Just as the printing press democratized knowledge despite enabling propaganda, and cars transformed transportation while producing new perils, world models promise benefits that may far outweigh their risks. The question isn’t whether to build them, but how to design them to best harness their benefits."]
Bissonnette, Gilles and Sarah Hinger. "Department of Education Backs Down on Unlawful Directive Targeting Educational Equity." ACLU (February 18. 2026) ["Across the country, educators do everything in their power to support every student, so each feels safe, seen, and is prepared for the future. Donald Trump and Linda McMahon tried to use politically motivated attacks and vague directives to stifle speech and erase essential teaching and learning in our schools and universities. The courts rejected that attack on public education. While Trump and McMahon want to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion, educators know these values are at the core of our nation. Diversity is our uniqueness and our strength. Equity means every student gets what they need, when they need it, and in the way that serves them best. And inclusion means all students are seen, valued, respected, and have access to opportunities and support,” said Becky Pringle, president at the National Education Association. "The Trump administration’s unlawful Dear Colleague Letter and certification requirement have now been vacated and abandoned, underscoring how badly Trump and McMahon overreached in their attempt to interfere with curriculum and instruction. Educators, parents, and community leaders will continue to organize, mobilize, and take action to protect our students and their futures."]
Brabandere, Luc de. "A Very Short History of Critical Thinking." Philosophy Now #172 (2026) ["In Greece in the fifth century BC, some public speakers who were certainly cultured but who were also unscrupulous, made the most of their oratorical talents by turning them into a particularly lucrative profession. Armed with misleading arguments and fallacious reasoning, they were called Sophists. They were so good at arguing any case they were able to simultaneously demonstrate something and its opposite. To be a sophist is to argue in a way that appears to be valid, but where the argument has been deliberately manipulated to distract or mislead the listener. Sophism is not a way of thinking; it’s a way of arguing designed to dazzle and trick an opponent; or if they should suspect foul play, to cause them logical embarrassment. It then proves hard to refute the argument because the flaw is subtly concealed. A sophist cares not about ethics or justice. They have little regard for truth. What they’re interested in is power. If it takes a lie to win, then go ahead and lie! If cheating is necessary to get through, then go ahead and cheat! In the end it doesn’t matter, because the goal is not to prove, but to be approved, regardless of the route used. Whilst a good debate often starts with ‘May the best man win!’, according to sophists, the opposite is true: whoever wins is the best man. ... There are many definitions of ‘critical thinking’, but they all agree on one point: the necessity of intellectual rigour. Critical thinking is not linked to a particular discipline or a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it must operate through all disciplines and should aim to preserve the advantages of skepticism without having to pay the price of ignorance. Thinking in a critical manner means trusting with caution while being wary of four elements: the reliability of a source, the strength of the argument, the medium, and our own ability to judge the matter at hand. The emergence and subsequent rise of ChatGPT and other so-called ‘generative’ AIs make critical thinking more essential today than ever before."]
Capper, Daniel. "Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World." Emergence (February 5, 2024) ["Daniel Capper's book Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World (Cornell UP, 2022) delves into ecological experiences in seven Buddhist worlds, spanning ancient India to the modern West, offering a comprehensive analysis of Buddhist environmental ethics. Capper critically examines theories, practices, and real-world outcomes related to Buddhist perspectives on vegetarianism, meat consumption, nature mysticism, and spirituality in nonhuman animals. While Buddhist environmental ethics are often seen as tools against climate change, the book highlights two issues: uncritical acceptance of ideals without assessing practical impacts and a lack of communication among Buddhists, hindering coordinated responses to issues like climate change. The book, with an accessible style and a focus on personhood ethics, appeals to those concerned about human-nonhuman interactions."]
Carocci, Max. "What is a Shaman?" The Bureau of Lost Culture (February 3, 2026) ["Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels. In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power. Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation. Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised. Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss."]
Carroll, James, et al. "The Moral Crisis Faced by Christianity." Ideas (May 6, 2019) ["Christianity is the world's largest religion. One third of humanity identifies as Christian. Christian rituals and symbols have a special power even among non-believers in western countries — witness the outpouring of shock and sorrow over the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The moral codes of Christianity are intrinsic to western societies and form the foundation of the ethics and mores of hundreds of millions of people. And yet, some of Christianity's most daunting challenges have derived from the moral failures of its biggest institutions and the failures of Christians to follow their religion's core teachings. The object of worship may be divine, but the church and the worshippers are very human. Some of the crises facing contemporary Christianity are obvious, such as the ever-widening revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy and the role of bishops in covering it up. Some are less obvious, such as the embrace of anti-immigrant, xenophobic political movements in countries with large Christian majorities. On this month's edition of The Enright Files, conversations about the moral authority of the Church — and the struggles of Christians to live up to the principles of their faith — in the face of anxious, angry times and the Church's own crimes."]
Case, Oren. "The Wealth of Wall Street." The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (February 11, 2026) ["As the stock market continues to break records, Jon is joined by Oren Cass, Chief Economist at American Compass, to examine how America's economy was reengineered to serve shareholders instead of workers. Together, they trace the history of financialization that enabled this transformation, explore how shareholder capitalism has hollowed out worker prosperity, and consider what policy interventions could rebuild an economy that delivers shared gains."]
Chang, Ha Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. ["Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and-via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization-ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world. Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct-but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth-but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps."]
Chang, Ha Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. ["Using irreverent wit, an engagingly personal style, and a battery of examples, Chang blasts holes in the "World Is Flat" orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman and other liberal economists who argue that only unfettered capitalism and wide-open international trade can lift struggling nations out of poverty. On the contrary, Chang shows, today's economic superpowers-from the U.S. to Britain to his native Korea-all attained prosperity by shameless protectionism and government intervention in industry. We have conveniently forgotten this fact, telling ourselves a fairy tale about the magic of free trade and-via our proxies such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization-ramming policies that suit ourselves down the throat of the developing world. Unlike typical economists who construct models of how the marketplace should work, Chang examines the past: what has actually happened. His pungently contrarian history demolishes one pillar after another of free-market mythology. We treat patents and copyrights as sacrosanct-but developed our own industries by studiously copying others' technologies. We insist that centrally planned economies stifle growth-but many developing countries had higher GDP growth before they were pressured into deregulating their economies. Both justice and common sense, Chang argues, demand that we reevaluate the policies we force on nations that are struggling to follow in our footsteps."]
Eckholm, Andrew. "The Art of Nostalgia: Wes Anderson's History Films." The Point #36 (February 1, 2026) ["Most of us, at least once, come to a moment when the contradictions between the world as we prefer to imagine it and the world as it apparently is become impossible to ignore. Our defenses overwhelmed and our sustaining delusions exposed, we feel an acute sense of loss, a falling away of fixity and coherence. It is at these moments that nostalgia’s pull is strongest. The same could be said in times of cultural and political crisis. The world is burning; the country is collapsing; the only thing certain about the future is that it won’t look like the past. In this situation, we can argue with our feelings and prove the safety we yearn for is another delusion: our childhood wasn’t actually happy; our nation’s past was full of horrors. Or we can pick up the sword of reaction: take our longing for the past at face value and attempt to reorder the world back into its proper shape. Both quests, however, are quixotic and never-ending. Nostalgia is ineradicable: dangerous when channeled, but even more dangerous to ignore. The question, then, is not whether to feel nostalgia but what to do with it. When the rush of events debunks our received wisdom about history and our place in it, new myths must be made that can explain how the world is supposed to be and why it isn’t that way, at least not yet. New objects for our nostalgia are needed. In America, the argument over what those new objects should be, the debate over when things went wrong (2016, 2008, 1992, 1964, 1865, 1776, 1619) is what we call “culture war.” And it’s a marker of the depth of our crisis, in symbolic terms at least, that politics and culture war have become virtually synonymous."]
Fitzpatrick, Megan C., et al. "Improving the Prognosis of Healthcare in America." The Lancet (February 15, 2020) ["Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care. Efforts are ongoing to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would exacerbate health-care inequities. By contrast, a universal system, such as that proposed in the Medicare for All Act, has the potential to transform the availability and efficiency of American health-care services. Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo."]
Folbre, Nancy. "Making Care Affordable is Key to Our Economic Future." UC Press Blog (January 2, 2026) ["At some point in our lives, most of us commit time and money to taking care of others, especially children, the elderly and people experiencing illness or disability. Most of us consider such commitments both morally valuable and personally satisfying. Yet there is widespread disregard for their economic value to society as a whole—a disregard that contributes to mounting private costs. My forthcoming book, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First, traces this long history of misplaced priorities. It explains how unpaid care came to be disqualified as productive work and how expenditures on ourselves and others came to be classified as consumption rather than investment. Not everything we produce can be bought or sold, and market prices seldom reflect the social benefits of good care or the social costs of failing to provide it."]
Gillan, Zach. "Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism." The Ancillary Review (May 2, 2025) ["It boils down, I think, to two axioms: 1) To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root. 2) To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.) The first step toward envisioning a better world is recognizing what is wrong with this one. Weird fiction prepares us for the process of seeing society’s dominant ideology not only as Wrong—an unsettled, disturbing way of interpreting and interacting with the world—but also as irreal, as fictional. It gives us a metaphor—dark, disturbing, alarming—for the theory and structure of thought that precedes the action of praxis, and engage in active resistance. This action is key: not to fall into the nihilistic madness of the Lovecraftian victim or the passivity of the status quo. Weird fiction must prepare us not to surrender to or deny the horrors of the world, but to read and understand them. Before it was killed and messily reanimated as a boogieman by the Right, this is what Black activists meant by “woke”—the injunction to have your eyes open and consciousness aware of the horrific structures underlying daily life. Weird fiction is a useful metaphor for this awakening; we must, in other words, read the social world in which we live as a work of weird fiction. "]
Grimm, Ryan and Emily Kashinsky. "Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers For BIOHACKING 'Manhattan Project'." Breaking Points (February 11, 2026) ["Ryan and Emily discuss Epstein recruiting NSA codebreakers for biohacking."]
Kampf-Lassin, Miles. "Let's Legalize Public Drinking." Current Affairs (February 10, 2026) ["Laws against public drinking criminalize working-class people and make public life less fun. It’s time to repeal them."]
Koebler, Jason. "Our Zine About ICE Surveillance Is Here." 404 Media (February 2, 2026) ["We are very proud to present 404 Media’s zine on the surveillance technology used by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While we have always covered surveillance and privacy, for the last year, you may have noticed that we have spent an outsized amount of our attention and time reporting on the ways technology companies are powering Donald Trump’s deportation raids. When we announced this zine in early December, we hoped that people would want it. Trump’s dehumanizing mass deportation campaign is perhaps the bleakest, most horrifying aspect of an administration that has reveled in its attacks on civil liberties, science, and government expertise."]
Rovelli, Carlo. "Mein Kampf." The Word / Te Kupu (March 14, 2022) ["We are going through some seriously trying times right now, times that are unprecedented for all of us - and as is usually the case during such times, uncertainty and fear creep in. Trying to rationalise global affairs is hard during such time, so I felt the need to record something that could perhaps shed at least a little light on what is happening in the world. So, here just a short podcast to try and frame what is going on, not from a geopolitical perspective, but more from a human and psychological one. In this episode I read an essay by Carlo Rovelli, one of the greatest minds of the 21st century, an essay he penned 6 years ago in response to the re-publication of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Italy. It is a poignant analysis of what really drives dictators and tyrants to do what they do. This essay is one of many recorded in Rovelli’s genius book There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. A mesmerising journey through science, philosophy and history, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness is a luminous new collection of essays from the 'the poet of modern physics' Carlo Rovelli - I highly recommend it. Will make you feel better about the planet we currently call home."]
---. "White Holes, Where Time Dissolves." To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 18, 2023) ["Carlo Rovelli takes us into the heart of a black hole, where space and time dissolve and a white hole is born. As a theoretical physicist, Rovelli has devoted his career to bridging the gap between Einstein's time-warping relativity theory and the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. In "White Holes," the beloved author of the internationally best-selling "The Order of Time," and "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" returns to the subjects that fascinate him most: time and impermanence, which he says have brought him a kind of serenity."]
Rubsam, Robert. "Wild Facts: Varieties of Spiritual Cinema." The Baffler (February 11, 2026) ["Spiritual cinema is fundamentally an aspiration: it must reach out toward something it cannot ultimately depict. Yet it reaches all the same. Practitioners of the art pursue what William James called “wild facts,” that mixture of the impossible and the unassimilable which crops up in any study of the affective dimensions of human culture. Levitation is a wild fact; so are mystic visions, holy apparitions, and inexplicable physical transformations. James called such events “paradoxical absurdities,” yet he sought to understand them all the same. In his book They Flew, the historian Carlos Eire attempted to parse what such impossible absurdities meant to the people who believed in them—and what it might mean for those on the other side of modernity, with its redefinition of the line between the rational and the irrational, to allow themselves at least the potential for belief. I’d venture that anyone who hopes to make a great work of art must do something similar: to believe, like the Shakers, in the possibility of impossible things. In taking seriously the visions of Ann Lee, Fastvold does this. So does Caroline Golum, the director and cowriter of Revelations of Divine Love. Golum’s film is many things: a dramatization of the life of the fourteenth-century anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich; a catalog of her holy visions; a plague story; a rebellion story; an expression of the persistent supremacy of love in a world of nearly unbearable suffering. It is both period-accurate and pointedly anachronistic, carefully handmade and plainly artificial. It is totally remarkable, and then some. ... Our age is not fit for angels. I don’t mean this literally, or even spiritually. I’m talking about art here. Ours is a culture of persistent literalism, a society which routinely mistakes surfaces for depths. We celebrate finely formed but ultimately shallow novels, films that serve only to demonstrate their maker’s formidable technique. Whether secular or religious, such artists are incapable of reaching beyond themselves, because they do not believe any other world to be possible. This is not just about the presence of miraculous or impossible events, such as those our ancestors routinely allowed themselves to experience. You don’t have to be religious, and you certainly don’t need to be Christian; Fastvold and Golum certainly aren’t. But you must have the sense that something—anything—might reside beyond the visible world, and that we might attempt to reach it. ... If you never expect more from the world, how could your art ever hope to? ... I want this: an art of expectation and aspiration, an art that levitates and revelates, that shakes and speaks in unknown tongues—a miraculous art that pushes beyond itself, that reaches toward the impossible, and makes contact. I want the art of wild facts. Don’t you?"]
Sarkar, Sahotra. "Defining when human life begins is not a question science can answer – it’s a question of politics and ethical values." The Conversation (September 1, 2017) ["The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human. Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges."]
Schaake, Marietje. "Can Democracy Coexist with Big Tech." Capitalisn't (September 26, 2024) ["International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at the expense of the public and democratic institutions, Schaake writes. Schaake joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss proposals for reversing this shift of power and maintaining the balance between innovation and regulation in the digital age. If a "tech coup" is really underway, how did we get here? And if so, how can we safeguard democracy and individual rights in an era of algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism? Marietje Schaake’s new book, “The Tech Coup: Saving Democracy From Silicon Valley."]
Tabor, James. "On the Real Mother of Jesus." Radio West (December 16, 2025) ["Jesus’s mother Mary likely lived for over 40 years, but many believers only think of her in two places, the Nativity and the Crucifixion. The scholar James Tabor wants to change that. Tabor’s new book is called “The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus.” It’s the result of many years of work, trying to piece together who Mary really was. Which isn’t easy, because as Tabor says, the actual Mary — the Jewish woman living in Galilee, the mother of eight children and central figure in the Jesus movement — has been largely erased by a religious idea of Mary, the eternal virgin of the utmost purity. James Tabor joins us to reintroduce her. He calls Mary the best known, and least known, woman in history."]
Wilkerson, Isabel. “We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be.” On Being (March 9, 2023) ["In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson’s eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings “caste” into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but “caste is the bones.” And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that."Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.]
Wilkinson, Richard. "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies." TED Talks (November 2, 2011) ["We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust."]
Williams, Michelle A. "How W.E.B. DuBois and James McCune Smith Helped Combat Medical Racism in America." Literary Hub (February 4, 2026) ["The most prominent of Du Bois’s intellectual influences was James McCune Smith. Brilliant and uncompromising, Smith was a public intellectual with the distinction of being the United States’ first university-trained Black doctor. In 1846, in a stinging and exhaustively researched rebuttal, he showed how John Calhoun’s racist analysis was spurious. Using the relatively new field of biostatistics, along with demographics, he exposed the Southern senator’s questionable claims. Specifically, he did a spatial analysis using latitude coordinates to show that Black people lived longer in states that abolished slavery, like New Hampshire and Connecticut, than in Georgia where slavery was legal. He also stratified mortality rates by age, race, and place to demonstrate that Black people in New England lived longer than those in the South. And finally, he showed that racial differences in longevity were due to socioeconomic factors and were not inherently biological. “There are sufficient grounds for the belief that the slaves…under all [their] disadvantages, would, if freed from slavery, attain a longevity not very much below that attained by the Europe-American population.”"]
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