02) January 5, 2016

Fraudulent schemes come in all shapes and sizes. To work, they typically wear a patina of respectability. That's the case with Advanced Placement courses, one of the great frauds currently perpetrated on American high-school students.

That's a pretty strong claim, right? You bet. But why not be straightforward when discussing a scam the scale and audacity of which would raise Bernie Madoff's eyebrows?

The miscellany of AP courses offered in U.S. high schools under the imprimatur of the College Board probably started with good intentions. The idea, going back to the 1950s, was to offer college-level courses and exams to high-school students. The courses allegedly provide students the kind of rigorous academic experience they will encounter in college as well as an opportunity to earn college credit for the work.

01) January 4, 2016

That's what we're struggling with this hour--do violence and cruelty lurk inside us all? Benjamen Walker helps us explore this question by way of one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. The year was 1961, the same year Adolf Eichman went on trial for Nazi war crimes. His defense boiled down to the assertion that he was just following orders. Enter Stanley Milgram. His now-notorious experiment at Yale found that 65% of participants were willing to administer the maximum electrical shock to a fellow citizen when prodded by a experimenter. But as Alex Haslam makes clear...the experiment isn't just about obedience. If you look closely, a more complicated--and more unsettling--picture emerges. One that forces us to ask ourselves, as Alex puts it: "what is greater, and what is good?