Bipartisanship, Dominance, Shakespeare, Middle East

Bipartisanship in Congress (1:04) Guest: Jeff Flake, fifth-generation Arizonan and has served in the US Senate for the last two years. Prior to that, he served for 12 years in the US House of Representatives Politicians and pundits alike bemoan the death of bipartisanship in Washington. Cross-party collaboration on big issues is rare. It’s even rarer to see Republicans and Democrats spending quality time together, let alone breaking bread. But Republican Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona thinks the benefits of face-time with the opposition are worth the possibility of a little partisan indigestion.  He and fellow Senator Martin Heinrich -- a Democrat from New Mexico -- recently organized a rare bi-partisan lunch in the Senate. They hatched the idea while doing something even more hard-to-believe in this partisan political climate—they spent a week together on a deserted island proving that even opponents can work together when they want to. Cost of Dominance (17:15) Guest: Timothy W. Smith, professor of psychology at the University of Utah. His research looks at how personality and social style affect cardiovascular health There’s more than one way to climb the social ladder. You can do it aggressively—always in competition with the people you pass up. Or you can do it in what University of Utah psychologist Tim Smith calls the “warm-dominant style,” which leaves the people around you happy to see you passing them on your way up. Shakespeare and Text Analysis (30:48) Guests: James W. Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin Ryan Boyd, doctoral candidate UT Austin and principle investigator of the paper: “Did Shakespeare Write Double Falsehood?: Identifying Individuals by Creating Psychological Signatures With Text Analysis” The paper was published in the journal Psychological Science. Double Falsehood was first published in 1728 and purported by the publisher to be a “lost play” by William Shakespeare. Scholars have long debated whether it really is. Now two psychologists from the University of Texas at Austin claim to have solved the mystery with computer analysis of the text. The Middle East (51:25) Guests: John Macfarlane, adjunct Utah Valley University political science professor Josh Gubler, professor of political science at BYU Steven Lobell, from the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah, author of six books on International Relations and Middle Eastern studies President Barack Obama had probably hoped for a better turnout of Persian Gulf leaders at Camp David this week. The U.S. organized the summit with the goal of smoothing feathers and getting buy-in from Arab leaders unhappy that America is negotiating a nuclear deal with their sworn enemy—Iran. But of the six Gulf States, only the leaders of Qatar and Kuwait have come to Camp David. The King of Saudi Arabia notably cancelled at the last minute – which was widely viewed as a snub. Bahrain’s King is also a no-show. Motivation behind Collecting (1:29:14) Guest: YanLiu Huang, assistant marketing professor at Drexel University A woman named Anne Langton in the UK currently holds the world record for the largest collect of pig items. Over 40 years she’s amassed 16,779 pig figurines, stuffed toys, piggy banks and so on. Nancy Hoffman of Peaks Island Maine holds the Guinness record for the largest collection of umbrella sleeves—you know those fabric slip covers that usually get lost the first time you open a new umbrella? Nancy has 730 of them and has turned her house into the official Umbrella Cover Museum. Is there any rhyme or reason to the urge to collect stuff? Dr. YanLiu Huang thinks so. She’s a marketing professor at Drexel University and author of a study in the Journal of Marketing about the moment when someone decides to start a collection.