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Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: episode 156 was recorded in June of 2024. For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise. Click here to download Episode 156 of Elucidations. What does it mean to be an expert in something? Our guest opens by noting that we use the term expert in two different ways: in the normal sense, a person is an expert in something if they know a lot about it, but in the social sense, a person is an expert in something if they have the social status of knowing a lot about it—like maybe they have a lot of degrees and credentials....

Greetings, earthlings. This is a blog post explaining how to run Emacs, GPG Agent, and SSH Agent as user-level daemons, mostly using systemd. I do so on Arch Linux, but in principle, this setup should work fine on any Linux distribution that uses systemd. Prerequisites This post assumes an “I run Linux on my computer” level of tech-savviness. The portions of this post that pertain to Emacs also assume that you are an Emacs user....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: episode 155 was recorded in October of 2025. Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Click here to download Episode 155 of Elucidations. Speaking freely: the thing you feel entitled to do when a superior says to you: “you may speak freely....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with us today is Luca Gattoni-Celli, founder of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and author of the Cornerstone Substack about housing, urbanism, and the world we build for each other. He is here to discuss the housing crisis and how to fix it....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Farjan Halim. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today (once again) is Greg Salmieri, Senior Philosophy Scholar at the Salem Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s here to discuss free speech, “cancel culture,” and “academic freedom....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: this was recorded in November of 2022. Full transcript here. In the latest episode of Elucidations, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas) joins us once again, this time to discuss freedom of speech. Click here to download Episode 154 of Elucidations. Free speech talk has been in the air, on the internet, for the past decade....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Witold Więcek, Consulting Director for Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, and he’s here to discuss statistics and academic research. Witold Więcek, welcome....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Gavin Leech. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Sam Enright, editor-in-chief of The Fitzwilliam, which is an online publication about Ireland, policy, philosophy, and literature. He is also a non-resident fellow at the policy think tank Progress Ireland and an Emergent Ventures fellow....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2025. Full transcript here. In the latest episode of Elucidations, Sam Enright (Progress Ireland, The Fitzwilliam) instructs us in the delicate art of learning forever. Click here to download Episode 153 of Elucidations. If you’re one of those people who responds well to formal education, chances are you’ve spent 10-20 years of your life as a student....

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2024. Full transcript here. This time around, Matt talks to Luca Gattoni-Celli about why it’s so expensive to buy a house. Click here to download episode 152 of Elucidations. In the 80s, people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds were able to afford apartments and houses in places like New York City, San Francisco, or London....