Orson Scott Card Takes on TV

Guest: Engy Abdelkar, JD, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University  In just the last month, nearly half a million people have fled Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh. They’re known as the Rohingya and a UN official says the way they’re being violently targeted by Myanmar’s military amounts to “ethnic cleansing.” A visit by a UN team to observe the situation was abruptly cancelled by Myanmar’s government today. While the plight of this people is new to most of us in the West, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar goes back decades and has roots in the era of British colonial rule, when Myanmar was known as Burma.

Guest: Bing West, Vietnam War veteran, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense in Reagan Administration, author of “The Village” The exhaustive documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick about the Vietnam War is wrapping up on PBS. It’s difficult viewing. So many missteps and miscalculations. So much suffering and despair.  And as we near the end of the 18-hour film, we’re left wondering what it was all for?  Vietnam Veteran Bing West says the documentary gets the lessons of Vietnam wrong.

Guest: Daryl Koehn, PhD, Wicklander Chair in Professional Ethics at DePaul University, Recipient of 2017 Master Teacher in Ethics Award from BYU Wheatley Institution We learn in kindergarten to say we're sorry when we wrong someone. It's a basic tenet of good behavior. But only in the last decade or so has it become common for corporate CEOs to publicly apologize when their company makes a mistake. When it comes to corporate apologies, it turns out that saying sorry isn’t enough. Getting the apology just right really matters.

Guest: Lew Fulton, Co-Director at the Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways Program, UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies Driverless cars are the future, judging by the billions of dollars being invested in them, and electric cars are well on their way to American roads. It seems that combining the two movements would guarantee cleaner air and fewer traffic jams, but, according to an analysis by the Institute of Transportation Studies, the only way to get to that future is by adding a third piece to the puzzle—ride sharing.

Guest: Steve McDonald, PhD, Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate Program of Sociology at North Carolina State University When you post something to Facebook or Instagram, does it cross your mind how a future hiring manager might look it? What if you applied for a job and before you even got an interview, your social media posts were the first impression you made?  Hiring managers are turning to social media more and more as they evaluate job applicants. But without any clear guidelines on when and how such techniques are okay, there’s a lot of gray area.