World Events, Empathy Hurts, China Consumers

Guest: Quinn Mecham, PhD, Professor of Political Science, BYU Three world events we should be paying attention to: an election outcome that was disastrous for Britain’s Conservative Party, Qatar's alleged role in sponsoring terrorism, and an ISIS attack that was carried out last week in Iran, killing seventeen people.

Guest: Jeffrey Towson, Professor of Business, Peking University, Co-author of “The One Hour China Book” If you’ve been to any major tourist attraction in the US recently, be it the Empire State Building, the Las Vegas strip or Zion National Park, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself standing amid tourists from mainland China. This surge in Chinese tourists represents a wave of new consumers who have recently joined the middle class and are eager to enjoy the same things middle-class families all over the world have long taken for granted. The question now is whether the world is ready for the changes that will inevitably come with half a billion middle class Chinese consumers.

Guest: Michael Poulin, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology, University at Buffalo To really understand another’s suffering, we’re often advised to “walk a mile in their shoes,” put ourselves in their position, and ask, “How would you feel?” But there comes a point where that level of empathy can wear you down and even cause burnout, if you’re in a job that encounters a lot of suffering. So is having empathy unhealthy? Michael Poulin says it depends—there are two routes to empathy, and learning how to master one of them can help us be compassionate without the negative side-effects.

Guest: Clayborne Carson, PhD, Professor of History at Stanford University, Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute Martin Luther King, Jr. is arguably the most influential advocate of American civil liberties. But, he himself did not consider his movement to be a uniquely American struggle. He had his sights set on global human rights, and as a leader he was impacted by global movements outside of his own. When he visited the BYU campus earlier this year, Professor Carson sat down with Marcus Smith of BYUradio’s “Thinking Aloud.”

Guest: Rod Gustafson and Donna Gustafson, Film Reviewers at Parent Previews  The Un-dead made a visit to theaters over the weekend in the form of a vengeful Mummy who comes back to life. Megan Leavey finds herself when she is assigned to canine duty in the Marines.

Guest: Jessica Hammer, PhD, Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Mellon University, Co-creator of Rosenstrasse; Moyra Turkingon, Co-creator of Rosenstrasse, leader of War Birds game design collective, Unruly Designs If you’ve ever watched a film about Nazi Germany and thought, “I would have resisted. I’d have stood up to injustice, no matter how dangerous it got,” a new board game called Rosenstrasse will test your resolve. It’s a role-playing game that puts you in the shoes of people who participated in a historic protest on Rosenstrasse Street in 1943 Berlin.  Hundreds of Aryan women turned out day after day in the spring of that year to protest the incarceration of their Jewish husbands by the Nazis.