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Video: What’s your ‘red line’?

Video: What’s your ‘red line’?

“The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” In this episode of the Braver Angels Podcast, NYU professor and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt considers some of the big, hairy questions that challenge political bridge building.

Can we ever really claw our way out of tribalism? What would it take to fix the structures that warp our thinking? And what does this leading scholar of morality make of the popular notion that you can’t engage some ideas across the political divide and still be good?


Listen as Haidt — author of The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, and the upcoming Life After Babel: Adapting To A World We Can No Longer Share — joins Braver Angels’ Mónica Guzmán for a conversation that explores everything from Haidt’s favorite bit of ancient wisdom to the problem with kids these days (especially girls on the Left) and what it might ultimately mean to be loyal to truth.

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New York Post front page reads "Injustice." Daily News front page reads "Guilty."

New York's daily newspapers had very different headlines the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in s hush money trial.

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Why the American media and their critics won’t stop telling the same lie

The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.

Bootleggers and Baptists” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.

There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.

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city skyline

Reading, Pennsylvania, can be a model for a path forward.

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The election couldn’t solve our crisis of belief. Here’s what can.

The stark divisions surrounding the recent presidential election are still with us, and will be for some time. The reason is clear: We have a crisis of belief in this country that goes much deeper than any single election.

So many people, especially young people, have lost faith in America. We have lost belief in our leaders, institutions and systems. Even in one another. Recent years have seen us roiled by debates over racial injustice, fatigued by wars, troubled by growing inequities and disparities, and worried about the very health of our democracy. We are awash in manufactured polarization, hatred and bigotry, mistrust, and a lack of hope.

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