Sean Guillory remembers when he realized the true nature of academic publishing.

It was a “formative moment” early in his time in graduate school, he said. “I asked my professor, who was the audience for his book? And he said, ‘Well, maybe about, like, 12 specialists.’”

Guillory was shocked. “Why the f*** do you want to write a book for 12 people?” he told me.

Today, Guillory is the digital scholarship curator at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and host of the Eurasian Knot podcast. He is one of the scholars bringing academic knowledge to the general public.

Generally, academics are not famous for their ability to express their ideas in a way that’s comprehensible to those who aren’t specialists in their field. But a new wave of enterprising scholars is using their specialized knowledge to educate the general public.

Doug Hartmann is a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and co-editor-in-chief of The Society Pages, where he is my boss. While academic perspectives and knowledge are valuable, he said they must also be “made manageable for regular audiences who don’t share our vocabulary or intimate knowledge of the methods and the data we use.”

Nate Sloan is a musicologist at the University of Southern California and co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop.

“The benefit of academia as a sort of closed system,” Sloan said, “is that it encourages a lot of rigor.” On the other hand, there’s “a certain insularity and inability to share some of these findings.”

“Institutions privilege writing about research that is hard to read and even harder to get your hands on,” wrote Kaitlyn Ugoretz, who runs a YouTube channel called Eat Pray Anime that explores religion through Japanese pop culture. “Isn’t our purpose to teach as many people as possible as best as we can?”

“It is good as a society to increase our understanding of the world around us,” Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who co-hosts the podcast Lingthusiasm, wrote in an email. “But this increased understanding isn’t worth as much if people don’t know about it!”

This isn’t just about boosting professors’ egos. Without high-quality information, the public will be misinformed on topics of vital civic importance. Andrew Mark Henry has a doctorate in religious studies from Boston University and runs the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast.

Especially when Henry started the channel eight years ago, he said most of the religion-related videos on YouTube were blatant propaganda. This misinformation continues to proliferate today.

“Very little is being talked about from an academic, non-sectarian perspective,” Henry said.

Henry argued it’s vital to have good information about religion.

“In order to understand the United States as a nation, you gotta learn something about religious studies,” Henry said.

Nick Mathews is a former board member of The Society Pages and is a professor of digital journalism at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Before all of that, he was a journalist for nearly two decades, editing newspapers like the Houston Chronicle.

He said his new professor job includes public-facing work in the job description. He said he’ll be “identifying challenges that local news organizations are facing, finding best practices that news organizations are using and sharing that knowledge.”

He also plans to write newspaper articles about his research into local news.

“Withholding knowledge from the public is just a disservice to the community,” Mathews said.

The scholars I talked to had a lot of ideas about how academia could better accommodate public-facing scholarship.

“I would like to see seed grants for YouTubers trying to get started, or content creators in general,” Henry said.

He pointed to universities and the American Academy of Religion as organizations that could potentially provide these grants. Similar grants have been provided by LingComm, a project run by McCulloch and her co-host, Lauren Gawne.

Mathews pointed out that, while he has language about public scholarship in his contract, the same can’t be said for scholars that have already been working for decades.

“Academia should count public-facing work as part of the ‘service’ component of academic jobs,” McCulloch said. Currently, “service” includes things like editing a journal.

“Most of the public-facing work done by academics is treated as additional to their workload rather than a core part of their job,” Gawne said.

But including public scholarship in academia might be more complicated than it sounds. One issue “is how to count that kind of work,” Hartmann said. “If somebody does an interview with you, is that a box you check or something you report, if you write an op-ed, or you testify in front of the legislature, that’s all very difficult to count, much less evaluate.”

Of course, journalists could do a better job, too.

“Academic experts tend to work in detail and nuance,” Gawne wrote, “and good journalists know how to work with that to tell a story that respects the complexity but cuts to the heart of it for a public audience.”

“Academics have to more fully appreciate the constraints that journalists are working under and what they bring, but also vice versa,” Hartmann said.

There is so much fascinating and essential knowledge produced within the ivory tower. It’s a credit to the people I interviewed for this story that they’re able to bring that knowledge out into the world. But both academia and the media need to get better at seeking out and building upon each other’s strengths.

If you had to guess, which state would you say produces the most renewable energy?

It’s California, right?

With its vast size, sunny weather and crunchy attitude, you wouldn’t be far off. The Golden State falls second. Number one is none other than Texas. How is it possible that the Lone Star State, a stronghold of both conservative politics and oil interests, makes twice as much wind and solar energy as California?

Part of the answer is the weather: Texas is big, sunny and windy. But it’s also because of lax regulations.

However, that same easy regulatory process also means Texas is a leading producer of fossil fuels and only gets about one-quarter of its electricity from renewables.

Making the approval process for new energy projects faster and easier is called “permitting reform.” Nationally, some politicians support changing laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to make approval processes faster.

But a rigorous permitting process has advantages as well as drawbacks. Forrest Fleischman is a professor of environmental policy in the Department of Forest Resources at the University of Minnesota. A big advantage of NEPA review, Fleischman said, is it requires the government to tell the public what it’s doing.

As an example, Fleischman pointed to a 2012 case where, as part of environmental review, the government had to report it wanted to start flying drones along the U.S.-Canada border.

“I’m not quite sure what the impact of flying Predator drones is on the environment, but it makes me a little uncomfortable that the entire northern border [was included] which, let’s keep in mind, that includes places like the city of Detroit,” Fleischman said. “Our government is flying secret military weapons around there. I’m not sure I want that.”

Fleischman also said public participation is important.

“I have a huge amount of respect for the scientists and experts who work for the federal government, but they don’t know everything,” he said. “The classic example is they’re planning some activity on some land, and there’s a private landowner next to that land, and they say, ‘Wait a minute, don’t you guys realize that X is going on here?’”

Fleischman also pointed to research that found factors like inadequate staffing and other laws, not the rigor of NEPA review, were the real causes of delays.

Finally, Fleischman argued, if we really want to make things faster, exempting clean energy projects from NEPA would be a better idea than weakening the law overall. “You can do that. Congress can do that tomorrow,” he said.

However, NEPA is not the only law holding up clean energy. Madelyn Smerillo is a senior policy associate at the Clean Grid Alliance, an organization that represents a coalition of clean energy companies and nonprofits. They focus on state and local issues, rather than federal policies, Smerillo said.

Smerillo agreed with Fleischman that inadequate funding and staffing were major causes of permitting delays. However, she argued local and state agencies, as well as companies applying for a permit, have to do a lot of redundant work during the permitting process.

For example, power companies have to submit a certificate of need showing there is a need for the power they will produce with a new project. According to Smerillo, so-called “independent power producers” should not need this certificate because they wouldn’t be building if they didn’t already have someone to sell electricity to.

Smerillo also said energy projects should not have to propose more than one site. This is already the case for solar, but currently, many types of projects have to propose two potential sites.

Not only is this an unnecessary hurdle, Smerillo said, but it can also lead to consternation in local communities. “You’re saying, ‘Hey, we might build a transmission line in your neighborhood, but we don’t know,’” Smerillo said.

Smerillo said another barrier is laws around so-called “prime farmland.” This land makes up about 32% of Minnesota and is particularly well-suited for farming. However, in many cases, it’s also well-suited for solar energy.

Minnesota law significantly restricts electricity production on prime farmland, except if there is “no feasible or prudent alternative.” Currently, Smerillo said, state utilities regulators are “consistently having to override” this section because it is actually the case that there aren’t any alternatives.

“The risk,” Smerillo said, “is that if we were to get a [Public Utilities Commission] that was less renewable energy-friendly, it would be possible that they could use this rule against solar projects.”

In my view, one of the biggest risks of permitting reform is that loosening regulations for energy overall will make it easier to build fossil fuels as well as clean energy. Texas, in this case, is not a model. Smerillo is not concerned about this in Minnesota; we already passed a law to transition to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. But I think it’s still not worth the risk. We should be making clean energy easier to build, and fossil fuels harder.

“I went to college in the late 1990s,” Fleischman said. “We knew we had to be doing this when I was in college. So, to some extent, yes, it takes a little bit of time to plan things. Well, we should have been doing that all along.”

Fleischman is right: we’ve known we have to build clean energy for decades — and Exxon has known for even longer. But where I disagree with him is I think the present situation really does justify speeding up the process. And we definitely need to get rid of redundant and counterproductive regulations. We’re running out the clock on a habitable planet. Let’s act like it.

Do you think former Vikings quarterback Brett Favre’s family is “needy”?

Apparently, John Davis does. Last year, Davis, the former executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and theft.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a federal program where states get annual grants to spend on, well, assisting needy families. Allegedly, Davis and four cronies misdirected TANF funds, including to a nonprofit that paid Favre a total of more than $1 million to give two speeches.

Incredibly, he didn’t even show up to give the speeches!

“If you were to pay me,” Favre asked nonprofit founder Nancy New in a text, “is there anyway [sic] the media can find out where it came from and how much?”

New, who has pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud, assured him there wasn’t. Oops. (Favre denies he knew the money came from welfare).

I’m glad the perpetrators are facing legal consequences in this case, which is the largest corruption case Mississippi has seen in decades.

But, as the saying goes, the real scandal is what’s legal. TANF funds have gone to abstinence-only sex ed and pro-marriage ads. Ten states use TANF money to fund so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which essentially attempt to trick people in crisis out of getting abortions by posing as legitimate medical facilities.

A 2018 article in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics described these centers as “legal but unethical.”

Minnesota funds crisis pregnancy centers through a non-TANF state program designed to discourage abortion. Gov. Tim Walz has said he’s ready to end this program.

States are largely free to spend TANF dollars how they want, so long as it fulfills four purposes. These broad goals include things like assisting families, reducing dependency on government by encouraging job preparation, work and marriage, reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and promoting two-parent families.

While many of these goals are laudable, not all of them are always helpful. Take the promotion of two-parent families, for example.

“I would argue that it varies on a family-by-family basis what’s best for that individual parent and that individual child,” said Ashley Burnside, senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a progressive think tank. “There are quite a few people who apply for TANF who are in domestic violence circumstances. And, of course, nobody would argue that parent should be getting married to the person that they are potentially fleeing from.”

According to Burnside, the four goals focusing on family structure threaten the autonomy of poor families.

“I don’t think it’s the business of the government or the administering agency to necessarily tell the family what they should or should not be doing when it comes to marriage or pregnancy,” Burnside said.

Instead, Burnside argued, TANF caseworkers should try to determine what families need on a case-by-case basis.

Suzanne Shatila is the director of the social work masters’ program at the University of Minnesota and she used to work for Tennessee’s TANF program. She argued TANF’s current set of goals is paternalistic.

“It really shifts the focus from providing assistance to those who are the most vulnerable to pushing a specific set of values,” she said.

Shatila said the most important value for a program like TANF should be making sure kids have their basic needs met, such as food, shelter and medicine. Like Burnside, Shatila pointed out that sometimes a two-parent home isn’t the best choice for a particular child.

Another criticism of current TANF funding is states spend too little on direct cash assistance. In fiscal year 2020, 22% of TANF funds went to cash assistance. Minnesota spends 24%. Fifteen states spend less than 10% of their funds on cash assistance.

Burnside argued TANF should add the eradication of child poverty as a goal.

“To eradicate child poverty, the most effective way to do that is providing cash directly to families,” she said.

According to a 2021 study, states with a higher percentage of Black residents are less likely to allocate TANF money towards cash. A 2019 study found that, from 2001–2015, declines in cash welfare (beyond just TANF) were associated with increases in homelessness among public schoolchildren and food insecurity.

There is an emerging body of research on the effects of cash assistance. Cash isn’t a panacea, but it can be helpful in many circumstances.

Burnside pointed to a statistic called the “TANF-to-poverty ratio.” This number measures the percentage of families with kids in poverty who are receiving TANF benefits. This varies widely: in California and Vermont, it’s 71%, but in Texas and Mississippi, it’s only 4%.

Joshua McCabe is a sociologist and director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank. He said in the 1990s, the U.S. welfare state shifted from focusing on the unemployed to the working poor, rather than the absolute worst-off.

While he praised the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which targets the working poor, he said, “We sort of overshot.”

McCabe said some states, like Massachusetts, could stand to spend less on the EITC and more on TANF.

Another issue experts pointed out is the size of these block grants hasn’t been adjusted for inflation or changed over the years. Burnside said the block grants have lost 45% of their value since 1996.

McCabe said inter-state politics have contributed to this freezing. In comparison to the current system, a more equitable distribution of TANF funds would hurt rich blue states and help poor red states.

If blue state reps voted to change TANF distribution, McCabe said, “Governor is gonna be mad. State interests are gonna be mad at them.”

While the juicy details of the Mississippi scandal are very interesting, TANF has bigger problems than Brett Favre.

Feb. 24 marked the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

March 30 was the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

A couple of weeks before that, on March 17, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed during the invasion of Ukraine.

One would think the U.S. government would be doing everything it could to help the ICC prosecute Putin. Last Sept​​ember, President Biden said Russia’s conduct in Ukraine “should make your blood run cold.”

Evidently, though, the blood of some U.S. officials is running nice and warm. In March, the New York Times reported that intelligence agencies, as well as the Departments of State and Justice, favored sharing evidence of Russian atrocities with the ICC. Howev​​er, some military leaders opposed doing so, arguing that it could set a precedent that might lead to the court prosecuting Americans.

I do support criminal justice reform. But, even I have to say the best way to not get prosecuted for war crimes is to not commit war crimes.

But, maybe the Pentagon brass have a point. After all, U.S. leaders haven’t always covered themselves in glory when it comes to the laws of war. The legality of the Iraq invasion has been hotly debated. Former President Donald Trump pardoned Clint Lorance, an Army lieutenant who was convicted of second-degree murder by a military jury.

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a United Nations special rapporteur for counter-terrorism and human rights. She once led an expert review for the ICC’s Trust Fund for Victims. She doesn’t think the Lorance case would lead to ICC prosecution of Americans.

“Countries argue, ‘Oh, that one guy who got pardoned is gonna bring us into the ICC territory,’” Ní Aoláin said. “That’s just not consistent with the reality of how the court operates.”

The U.S. has been remarkably hostile to the ICC in comparison to other rich democracies, Ní Aoláin said. The Rome Statute, which created the ICC, was signed by President Bill Clinton.

“Signing doesn’t bind a state to a treaty,” Ní Aoláin said. “It simply says, we support it in kind of an abstract way, and we won’t do anything to hinder the operation of this body.”

President George W. Bush declared he would un-sign this treaty.

From the perspective of international law, you can’t un-sign a treaty, Ní Aoláin said. “But we take that as a symbolic gesture that said the U.S. was not gonna support, and it was actually gonna work actively to undermine the ICC,” she said.

In some cases, the U.S. actively tried to hinder the ICC, Ní Aoláin said. For instance, the Trump administration threatened to impose sanctions on entities or individuals associated with the ICC. This order was revoked by the Biden administration. This is part of a broader pattern. Relations with the ICC got better under President Barack Obama and then swung back under Trump, Ní Aoláin said.

Some Americans have raised principled critiques of the court. For instance, the ICC lacks some protections for the accused that are present in the U.S. legal system.

Robert Stein is a law professor at the University and former executive director of the American Bar Association. He used to be co-chair of the International Bar Association Rule of Law Action Group.

“The court doesn’t have the constitutional safeguards that all Americans enjoy,” Stein said. “The right to face accusers, privilege against self-incrimination, the right to know the charges against a person.”

However, the ICC has implemented something called complementarity. If a war criminal is charged in a country’s domestic legal system, and that system looks like it will give a fair trial, the ICC will not prosecute its own case.

“It’s not perfect, and there’s no guarantee that the international court will waive a trial,” Stein said. “But for those countries that want this international institution of justice, it’s a way of accommodating their objections as much as possible.

Ultimately, Stein said he does think the U.S. should join the ICC.

“It’s long been the wish of many people who believe in international justice to have some tribunal that can hold countries and individuals for crimes that are international crimes,” he said. “This is mankind’s best effort so far.”

Ní Aoláin didn’t agree that the ICC lacks necessary protections for the accused. “I think that’s a kind of parochial view, actually,” she said. “Every system has its own balance of protections.” 

She said common law systems like the U.S. and civil law systems like France have different approaches to the presumption of innocence. “We don’t walk around saying you should never get arrested in a non-common law country,” Ní Aoláin said.

In fact, in some ways, protections in the U.S. system are lacking.

“There are some things that the U.S. does that many would consider antithetical to fair trial,” Ní Aoláin said. “Like the scale of plea bargaining that happens in this country.”

Almost all criminal convictions in the U.S. come not from trials, but from plea bargains.

Another critique of the ICC is its narrow geographic focus. Since it began in 1998, every single person indicted by the ICC has been African.

Ní Aoláin said this is partly the result of the ICC’s role as a court of last resort.

“I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve had the vast majority of cases coming from one continent,” she said. “But it’s also important to remember a couple of things about those referrals.”

In some cases, she said, it’s the countries themselves who are referring cases to the ICC if they can’t do the prosecution on their own.

In addition, she said, “It speaks to the reality that we have many countries in which there are primarily conflicts taking place where those countries do not have the capacity. They don’t have functional courts.”

Part of the solution, she said, is to invest in these countries’ legal systems so that they’re able to better prosecute these crimes.

There are multiple countries in Africa that meet those conditions. But one continent does not have a monopoly on dysfunction and disorder.

In 2021, Cornell professor Oumar Ba wrote in Foreign Affairs that the institutions of the international justice system “point to the contradictions of the liberal world order, which espouses universality in theory but in practice exonerates the West while disciplining and condemning the rest.”

Ní Aoláin pointed to a couple of investigations outside of Africa, including in Colombia and the occupied Palestinian territories. The ICC is also interested in Afghanistan and Venezuela.

I hope these investigations harbor the possibility of a truly global ICC. This is a vital international institution. The U.S. must engage with it more fully.

Imagine studying for years — staying up late, missing out on other parts of your life — to get a degree. Maybe it’s in medicine, law or engineering. When you finally graduate, you’re ​​excited to put your skills to work, to help people, to make money to support your family. Maybe you even get a chance to do that for years or even decades.

Then, something happens. Maybe the local economy dries up. Maybe war breaks out, and you’re forced to flee. Either way, you move to another country. And you get lucky — really lucky. You’ve made it through the American immigration system. Give me your tired, your poor, and so on.

But, once you get here, it turns out people think your degree and your experience are all but useless.

“You see, basically everywhere across New York City, cab drivers who have PhDs is a classic example,” said Van Tran, a sociologist at the City University of New York who is also a refug​​ee from Vietnam.

Credentials from certain countries are valued higher than others.

“For example, if you come from France and you graduated from Sciences Po, people would accept your degree as appropriately credentialed,” Tran said.

By contrast, countries from the Global South are less likely to be seen as properly credentialed.

“To be fair, there are reasons why we question them,” Tran said. “One of them is the lack of equivalency.”

Take medical education, for example. “To get a medical degree here, you have to go through undergrad plus some more,” Tran said. “In other countries, medicine is one of the undergrad majors.”

I also think it’s simply true that the education system in countries with fewer resources than the U.S. will often not measure up to our own. But that doesn’t mean every doctor who comes from a poorer country should have to give up medicine or go through med school all over again.

There already exists an industry of credential evaluators who try to determine if someone’s credentials are similar to the U.S. equivalent. However, there are policy changes we can make to make this whole area easier.

Cecilia Esterline researches immigration at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank. She pointed to a program in the state of Washington in which immigrants who were doctors in their home country can work for two years under an American doctor.

However, to get fully licensed as a doctor, they still need to do a residency, which is hard to get since they’re not really at the beginning of their career.

Depending on the year, “for U.S. medical graduates, the residency match rate is about 90–95%,” Esterline said. “For international medical graduates, even if they have 15 years of experience or however much it is, that match rate is still only in the 50s.”

Esterline argued such a matching program could potentially fulfill the residency requirement if policy was changed. I think this is a good idea: these doctors will have proven they’re capable of working in a U.S. medical environment, and we need more doctors.

Another policy that could help is the Conrad waiver program. This program exempts for​​eign medical graduates with a specific type of visa from having to leave the country for two years once their visa runs out, so long as they spend three years working in a place that has a shortage of health workers.

Sam Myers is one of the country’s leading immigration lawyers and helped write the law for this program. The Conrad program currently has a cap of 30 doctors per state.

“I had suggested that they not have any cap or number, and the staffer said to me, well, that’s not gonna work,” Myers said. “The opponents are just gonna say, what do you want to do, fill up our country with a bunch of immigrants?”

If I were talking to that staffer, I would say, yes! That’s the point! We have a shortage of doctors, some places have a shortage of teachers. If we can fill those vital positions while also providing an opportunity for people from other countries to get paid way more than at home, I think that’s great. For instance, Willmar, Minnesota, has hired teachers from the Philippines and Nicaragua to address a shortage.

Another policy change that could help would b​​e to update Schedule A, a list of types of jobs that have a shortage of qualified candidates, and therefore get faster visa processing. According to Esterline, this list “hasn’t been updated in 30 years.”

She pointed out our economy has changed a lot since then. “There are jobs that didn’t even exist 30 years ago that we now have a national security interest in,” Esterline said. She gave the example of artificial intelligence.

Credential transfer can be especially hard for refugees and other forcibly displaced people.

Jessica Crist used to work in int​​ernational student services at George Washington University. For many refugees, she said, “it’s just impossible for them to get their hands on some of these documents, like transcripts, or even the diplomas, because universities have been destroyed physically or they’ve been exiled from their country.”

Crist pointed to the World Education Services Gateway Program as a positive step toward fairly evaluating refugees’ credentials. In addition, she said doing more skills tests could be helpful for migrants in gen​​eral.

“The university could offer that as, like, ‘OK, we understand that you’ve done three years of study, which in your country is equivalent to a bachelor’s degree,’” she said. “‘Take this skills test to determine if you have the knowledge base to come in and start a graduate degre​​e.’”

Credential evaluators might also want to rethink some notions of university prestige. Tran brought up Peking University, the most selective in mainland China.

“Given the size of the Chinese population, getting into Peking University is actually more selective than getting into Harvard or Stanford,” he said.

Recognizing migrants’ credentials is a matter of basic fairness. These are people who are smart, educated and accomplished, and they should be allowed to use their skills. But, it’s also a good idea from a selfish, nationalistic point of view. Americans would be foolish to turn down the opportunity to have more smart people working in important jobs.

What is religion?

There are certain entities that obviously seem like religions. Christianity or Islam, for example. But we don’t need to leave the pantheon of major world religions before things start getting controversial. Buddhism, for instance, is sometimes said to not be a religion at all.

And what about secular things that inspire quasi-religious devotion? Like college football teams or political candidates.

Maybe we’re stuck defining religion the same way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined hardcore pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

The difficulty of this task is belied by the sheer number of scholars who have attempted it. The quantity of definitions of religion is vast.

Jeanne Kilde, a professor of religious studies at the University of Minnesota, studies religious spaces like churches, mosques and synagogues. In her own work, she prefers to use a “constructivist” definition of religion.

“People construct religion. They create it,” she said. “In terms of space, your question is: Do they sacralize space? How do they sacralize their space? How do they make it sacred?”

Evan Stewart, a University alum, is a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts. He said sociologists often think about religion through the “three Bs”: belief, behavior and belonging.

However, this framework doesn’t always apply in the same way. “Some religions emphasize one of the Bs more than the other,” Stewart said. “From the outside perspective of somebody who’s just generally interested in religion, it can really appear like there’s not a consistent definition, where the field is really focusing on different parts of the religious experience.”

Jacqui Frost, another University alum, is a sociologist at Purdue University. Among oth​​er things, she studies secular congregations like Sunday Assembly. She said some scholars think of religion as just one type of “existential cultures.”

“Religion and non-religion are both ways of making meaning in the world and answering existential questions,” Frost said.

Frost said she and Penny Edgell are “trying to bring the three Bs to bear on the non-religious. What practices are the non-religious doing?”

Sungha Yun is a professor of religion and Asian studies at St. Olaf College. She is also a Won Buddhist kyomu, or ordained priest. She pointed out that the concept of “religion” varies across cultures and is often tied up with politics. She said the idea of “religion” is often defined in a Western-centric way.

There are multiple faiths in Korea, including Won Buddhism, which are sometimes referred to as “new religions.”

“The concept of ‘new religion’ actually derived from the concept of ‘pseudo-religion’ that was coined by the Japanese colonial government,” Yun said. “The Japanese colonial government actually divided religion into two groups. Basically, the authorized, sanctioned group, and the oth​​er — it’s not authorized by the government.”

I asked Kilde whether it even matters if we have a single, consistent definition of religion. “No, not really,” she said. “It’s always defined, it’s always considered from the positionality of the person who’s using it.”

“The more folks study it,” Stewart said, “the more they understand the idea that religion happens in many different ways.”

“To say that Lyndon was slightly paranoid would be like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak.”

This is what disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker wrote about the man with whom he shared a cell in a Minnesota federal prison. Both Bakker and the conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche had been convicted of defrauding their followers. Bakker is somehow still broadcasting, but LaRouche died in 2019.

Before his death, LaRouche, who ran for president 8 times, earned an image as a consummate conspiracy-monger. He was referenced on the Simpsons, and fellow disgraced politician Al Franken played him on SNL.

While he never achieved real mainstream power, LaRouche did manage to gain mastery of a profitable — and abusive — subculture. He started off his political career as a follower of the early Soviet leader Leon Trotsky. His group split off from the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society, calling itself the Caucus of Labor Committees.

Over the decades, however, his politics became much more syncretic. In addition to adopting some right-wing views, LaRouche became infamous for his increasingly bizarre ideas. For instance, that Queen Elizabeth II was a drug trafficker or that opera singers are using the wrong pitch.

LaRouche’s ideology was also notable for its antisemitism. He was an aficionado of conspiracy theories about the Jewish Hungarian financier and philanthropist George Soros. He even denied the Holocaust. In 2004, a British Jewish student named Jeremiah Duggan died mysteriously after attending a LaRouche protest and conference in Germany.

That protest was ostensibly about opposing the Iraq War. Carl Beijer, who writes under a pen name, is a left-wing journalist who said he first encountered LaRouche’s followers around the same time, as a young anti-war protester in grad school.

At George Mason University during the Iraq War, “we had a large LaRouche presence on campus,” Beijer said. “They’re doing the same things that they’re doing now, where they would try to, sort of, infiltrate the anti-war movement.”

In a 2004 article about Duggan’s death, the Washington Post reported some of LaRouche’s followers had been with him since they were students protesting the war in Vietnam. And this pattern continues today. Beijer pointed to a recent D.C.-area rally called “Rage Against the War Machine,” at which Lyndon’s widow Helga Zepp LaRouche spoke on video.

That rally’s other listed speakers included names you’ve probably heard before, like Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and former members of Congress Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich. LaRouchite Senate candidate Diane Sare addressed the rally, as did the pugilistic influencer Jackson Hinkle, who has 140,000 Twitter followers and once appeared on Tucker Carlson. Hinkle is also an erstwhile proponent of “MAGA Communism,” a political slogan that may as well have been designed to alienate as many normal people as possible.

Far from being anti-war, Hinkle vehemently supports Russian imperialism. He has also expressed support for LaRouche on social media, and spoke at a LaRouche event last October.

That event, in typical LaRouchite gobbledegook, was billed as “Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism.” Beijer said he watched a six-hour livestream. “You have to read between the lines a little bit, but what’s going on is that they are very, very conscious of how the anti-war stuff is bringing in people into their movements,” he said.

Beijer pointed to comments that Helga Zepp LaRouche made at that ev​​ent about how publicity stunts were driving traffic to LaRouche media.

“She was talking about how their publicity stunts, where they show up at town halls and rail against AOC and stuff like that, how that was bringing eyes and clicks and web traffic,” Beijer said. “They were also very conscious of the social media actors who were promoting them.”

Using one fringe belief — in this case, opposition to U.S. military aid to Ukraine, or opposition to the Iraq and Vietnam wars — to bring people into a broader conspiratorial worldview is a common phenomenon.

Javier Granados Samayoa is a social psychologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues have found belief in conspiracy theories related to COVID-19 was associated with adopting other conspiracy theories later.

“What you saw was belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories at the earlier time point led to an increase in these generic conspiracy ideas over a six-month period, suggesting that it’s sort of migrating them down that conspiracy theory rabbit hole,” he said.

I’m not trying to suggest being anti-war is the same as being a conspiracy theorist. While I do support arming Ukraine against Russian aggression, I generally consider myself to be very anti-war. The danger is the LaRouche movement is trying to use anti-war sentiment as a way to bring people into a broadly conspiratorial and dangerous worldview.

The danger of LaRouchism is not just ideological. LaRouche wrote that recruiters should try to strip people of their egos, and ex-members have accused the group of psychological abuse. In 1973 and 1974, LaRouche carried out a violent campaign called Operation Mop-Up in which his followers physically attacked members of rival left-wing groups. A LaRouche newspaper accused the Communist Party of being allied with Richard Nixon.

It’s this violent history that makes Beijer reluctant to attend LaRouche events. “You don’t actually want to go to their meetings,” Beijer said. “They can be dangerous.”

Karl Marx famously said, in history, great people and events show up twice: first as tragedy, and then as farce. Lyndon LaRouche’s life and influence managed to be farcical and tragic all at once. I don’t know if his followers’ current activities are the last gasps of a dying movement, or a sign that they’re here to stay. We can only hope it’s the former.

Free market competition has many benefits. In a competitive economy, businesses compete for customers, employees and partners. The firm that sells the best product at the best price, or offers the best working conditions and wages, will win out.

At least in theory.

What happens when competition is subverted? It’s possible for the free market to eat itself. When companies grow extremely large, it can undermine competition. This can also happen if companies that are supposed to compete instead collude with one another.

This collusion is where antitrust got its name.

“There was an intermediate legal mechanism where we could combine not our assets, but our price and output decisions, and that was called a trust,” said Michael Munger, an economist at Duke University and a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market think tank.

Things have changed a lot since those early days. Today, many scholars claim large companies have too much power, in part due to inadequate action by the government. This can lead to monopoly or oligopoly, in which one or a few large sellers distort the market, or monopsony or oligopsony, in which one or a few large buyers distort the market.

When one firm has excessive market power, it can raise prices and will have more money while customers have less, according to a 2017 paper by Lina Khan and Sandeep Vaheesan. Khan, a leading advocate for more stringent antitrust, is now Chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Vaheesan is legal director at the Open Markets Institute, a group that advocates for stricter antitrust enforcement.

Khan and Vaheesan argue the distortions created by market power intensify economic inequality by giving company owners more money at the expense of consumers. Disproportionate market power also reduces economic efficiency.

Another harm of “bigness” happens at the other end — employment.

“That labor markets have important elements of monopsony power is becoming clear beyond any reasonable doubt,” wrote Alan Manning, a professor at the London School of Economics, in a 2020 paper.

Historically, Manning wrote, there have been far fewer antitrust cases about employees than consumers in the U.S. However, in recent years, anti-competitive labor practices like non-compete agreements have come under increasing scrutiny.

Not everyone is so sure. For instance, a 2022 paper published by the libertarian Cato Institute argued the evidence for labor market monopsony is not as strong as some scholars have claimed.

Jeffrey Miron, a co-author of that report, is an economist at Harvard and Cato. “Depending on how you define the market, you can conclude that there was a huge amount of market power, or hardly any,” he said.

In addition, there could be costs to increasing antitrust regulation. First of all, bigness can actually benefit people, in the form of lower prices, for example.

But, even if bigness is bad, legislating against it still has costs.

“My argument is that, when you outlaw something, you create all sorts of unintended consequences,” Miron said. “Maybe competition is better than monopoly. But, if we try to accomplish that with policy, then we’re going to have to decide exactly which companies to break up and which not. That might get determined more by crony capitalism than by a benevolent social planner.”

Some experts also cautioned against trying to solve too many social problems using antitrust.

“If you try to use antitrust to do too many different things, you’ve got to start balancing incommensurate values,” Leon Greenfield of the law firm WilmerHale said. “What happens if you’ve got a deal that is gonna lead to lower prices to consumers, but it may result in some shutting down of plants?”

“There really isn’t, to my mind, any particular reason to think the antitrust laws are a good tool to address a number of the other harms that have been raised,” said Perry Lange, also of WilmerHale, who co-wrote a paper with Greenfield.

Lange brought up the environment, privacy and money in politics as examples.

“Most of the work we do will tend to be taking a non-interventionist approach on behalf of our clients,” Greenfield said. “But [in the paper] we were not trying to say there shouldn’t be any reform.”

Another issue with antitrust law is the clarity of the rules. Unclear antitrust rules mean it costs more money and time for companies to figure out if something they want to do is legal, Munger said. This puts a damper on innovation.

“I was surprised at how vague the law was,” said Munger, who used to work at the FTC. This gives the FTC wide latitude to decide how to interpret the law.

This lack of clarity can also lead to political manipulation.

“Even if you believe that the current set of bureaucrats are capable of taking that enormous power, why do you think the upcoming Trump or DeSantis administration will,” Munger said.

However, Munger did acknowledge it would be possible to have both clear rules and stricter enforcement.

“There’s a bunch of very smart people who believe that,” he said. “I happen to disagree, but it’s very plausible.”

To me, this sounds like the way forward. I think that antitrust regulation needs to be clear, but it also needs to be more strict.

As an example, in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email that several smaller competitors “could be very disruptive to” Facebook and suggested acquiring them to neutralize the threat. Facebook would later purchase Instagram, one of those competitors.

These sorts of anti-competitive deals should not be allowed.

Fundamentally, I believe the free market can be a powerful thing. But to keep the market free, we’re going to have to regulate it clearly and thoughtfully.

Think about all of the people you know. Which of them might be the most likely to help you get a job?

You might be tempted to think of a close friend or family member who knows you well and cares about you deeply. In the study of social networks, these relationships are called “strong ties.”

However, according to consistent findings in the social sciences, it is actually your “weak ties,” the people you know less well, who are more likely to help you get a job. Hence the title of a famous paper on the subject, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

That paper, by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, has become immensely influential since it was published in 1973. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 68,000 times.

“As a source of new ideas, new information that’s not in an echo chamber, that weak tie argument has a lot to go for it,” said David Knoke, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. “Because if you think about how you discover something new, you want to find out more about it, and so on. You don’t talk to people you already know, ’cause you probably heard everything they had to say of importance.”

Therefore, weak ties can be a better source of new information.

This phenomenon has only accelerated in the internet age. On social media “you have so many weak ties,” Knoke said.

People can use social media to solicit information from their weak ties, he said.

“Now, those weak sources don’t have your best interests at heart. They barely know you. You’ve gotta be somewhat skeptical about it, but it gives you a lead to look into,” he said.

One recent online study has supported Granovetter’s thesis. A large study of 20 million LinkedIn users, published in 2022 in the journal Science, found that stronger ties were less likely to lead to a job opportunity than weaker ones.

But this isn’t an unalloyed good, said Jessie Daniels, a digital sociologist at Hunter College.

“The strength of those weak ties is tied to other forms of social power,” she said. “There’s, classically, literature about how cis, white, heterosexual men in business use the strength of weak ties to go play golf together and, therefore, trade informal information and opportunities on the golf course – in places that traditionally exclude women of all races and people of color.”

But not all research agrees that weak ties are always better. For example, a 2017 paper published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization looked at social ties across 55 countries. The researchers found most jobs came from weak ties.

However, a single strong tie was more valuable than a single weak tie, according to the paper. The authors argued more jobs came from weak ties because they are more numerous — not more helpful. Additionally, an individual strong tie matters more in countries with higher income inequality.

University sociologist Yanjie Bian has published research on strong and weak ties in China. In a 1997 paper, Bian wrote the use of strong ties in China complicates Granovetter’s thesis.

“The existence of these strong-tie bridges challenges the strength-of-weak-ties hypothesis, but does not totally disqualify it,” according to Bian.

Knoke pointed to Bian’s 2019 book “Guanxi: How China Works” as an example of work that challenges Granovetter’s thesis. In that book, Bian writes that guanxi, or close personal relationships, continue to play a major role in how people in China find jobs.

“I’m not aware of any Western-based, European or North American analysis that really just slays it,” Knoke said about the “strength of weak ties” thesis. “I still teach it. I literally did it last week in the graduate seminar. And so it’s been passed on from generation to generation. But maybe somebody needs to take a close look and see, maybe it doesn’t apply everywhere.”

While subsequent scholars have complicated Granovetter’s original thesis, the strength of weak ties remains a powerful idea for understanding our social world.

Think about the last time you went to the DMV. You know you’re eligible for an ID or driver’s license, but you may have put it off because let’s be honest — it’s a hassle. Even though you’re eligible, you still have to prove you’re eligible by bringing relevant documents, standing in line, filling out forms and so on. This is similar to what public policy scholars refer to as “administrative burden.”

Administrative burden is “the costs that people encounter when they experience policy implementation,” said Don Moynihan, a Georgetown public policy professor who co-wrote a seminal book on the topic with Pamela Herd.

There are three main types of costs associated with administrative burden. First, people have to learn that programs exist and figure out if they’re eligible — these are learning costs. Second, people may encounter psychological costs such as the stress of navigating bureaucracy and the stigma associated with some programs. Third, compliance costs are the burdens associated with filling out forms, collecting documentation, waiting to speak with someone and so on.

Moynihan said many of our most contentious political debates, like those over voting and abortion, have to do with administrative burden. “A lot of the debates we have on voting center on how easy or hard it should be, so how burdensome it should be,” he said.

An important policy area where people encounter a lot of administrative burden is programs that seek to alleviate poverty and provide health care, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Medicaid.

“Once you start to get into the reasons why people aren’t able to access these benefits, oftentimes, it’s not because they’re ineligible. It’s because they can’t find the information they need; they’re not sure if they’re eligible and they’re afraid of some sort of negative consequence if they apply and are rejected,” said Juliana Zhou, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a liberal research and advocacy group. “That’s often the case with immigrant communities, so they just won’t chance it.”

Iris Arbogast is a researcher who co-wrote a recent study that looked at why children’s enrollment in public health insurance declined from 2016–19. She and her co-authors found administrative burden played a role in this decline.

“If you can imagine it being difficult to fill out taxes if you’re a college-educated student, imagine doing something more difficult than this to get health care if you barely speak English, or you didn’t go to high school. It’s very confusing and stressful,” Arbogast said.

One example of a policy change that increased administrative burden is when Mississippi started requiring Medicaid recipients to report every change in income of $100 or more.

Previously, they only had to report if their income went above 130% of the poverty line.

And Missouri implemented an auto-checking process that sent some people a letter in the mail stating they had 10 days to respond or they would lose coverage. A survey of 37 Missouri health care providers found 87% of the people who lost coverage still met income requirements, but they had trouble with the renewal process.

Administrative burden hits immigrants and people of color particularly hard, according to experts.

“A lot of Hispanic families or Asian families are mixed-status families, and the vast majority of children in immigrant families are U.S. citizens, but they do not have access or they are not even eligible for benefits,” said Yiyu Chen, a research scientist at Child Trends.

Chen brought up the example of the Earned Income Tax Credit, a powerful poverty-fighting program.

“In order to qualify for the EITC, everyone on the tax return must have a work-authorizing Social Security number,” Chen said. This means even if their children are U.S. citizens and they pay taxes on their income, undocumented parents cannot apply for the EITC.

But these eligibility requirements aren’t the same for all programs. According to Chen, undocumented parents of citizen children are allowed to apply for SNAP on their children’s behalf.

“If you look across programs, if you look at TANF, SNAP and EITC, you will see that the eligibility restrictions are very different,” she said.

This creates a lot of confusion for immigrant families. Since different programs have different immigration status requirements, it might be too confusing, or parents will mistakenly think they can’t apply for any benefits for their children.

There are some ways to reduce administrative burden.

“You can simplify processes, or you can invest more in capacity and probably do a little bit of both,” Moynihan said.

He gave the example of Social Security as a program that has complicated requirements but has shifted the burden onto the government.

“We built an infrastructure to make it feel simple for people,” he said. For instance, many people don’t have to track their income across their careers because the government and their employers do that for them.

Soon, we may see an increase in administrative burden due to the end of the COVID-19 federal public health emergency. Multiple experts said this period has seen some temporary changes that reduced administrative burden. “There’s a lot of innovation,” Chen said. “In SNAP, there was extended certification periods.”

Arbogast said during the emergency period, states weren’t allowed to kick people off of certain programs. But now, they’re going to be sending lots of people letters asking to verify their eligibility, which may pose a problem as it’s been a long time and people may have moved. Administrative burden “hasn’t been a problem for the last couple of years, and it’s likely to come back in full force,” she said.

“Administrative burdens aren’t just a set of policies,” Zhou said. “I would define them more as examples of this overarching mindset of suspicion with which our public benefits programs treat enrollees or applicants.”

Some ways of reducing this suspicion, she said, would be to give people more time to appeal rejection decisions or automatically enroll them in other programs they’re eligible for once they’re in one program.

“That basically makes it possible for people to have access to all of the benefits for which they are entitled, and not asking them to go through nine different processes with, like, three different agencies in order to access the support that they need to live,” Zhou said.