The Political Orphanage

Donald Trump has renamed Lake Ontario "Lake America" for federal purposes—but can a president actually rename a place, or only change what the government calls it? Andrew Heaton traces the strange history of who gets to control language, from ancient river names that survived Romans and Normans, to Cardinal Richelieu's Académie française, to Noah Webster, John Adams, Thomas J...

The DSA recently released a policy platform establishing the goals of their political movement. In this episode we got through the main planks of that document, namely the bits about "socialism" and "democratic." We likewise go through a few articles and interviews of prominent DSA members to get an idea of what, in their own words, they're actually up to. (Spoiler: it's soci...

The Save Our Bacon Act, now repackaged into the Farm Bill, would upturn state rights in favor of federal prohibitions on animal cruelty laws. It's being pushed, in large part, by Chinese-owned conglomerates irritated by federalism.

Lewis Bollard is the Farm Animal Welfare Managing Director at Coefficient Giving on Substack. He joins to discuss the Save Our Bacon Act, a...

What is The Odyssey actually about beyond a clever guy trying to get home? Classicist Isabella Reinhardt joins to dig into the poem's deeper themes of civilization, hospitality, identity, belonging, and what it means for a warrior to return from war.

Then we turn to adaptation itself, and the choices involved in translating an ancient epic for a modern audienc...