The Fifth Column
The Fifth Column
Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch
When Everyone Stops Pretending w/ Steven Pinker (Episode #557)
1 hour 45 minutes Posted May 14, 2026 at 11:00 am.
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- Steven Pinker on why “common knowledge” is much stranger than it sounds

-The social machinery behind weddings, money, and power

-How a norm starts to die once someone breaks it and gets rewarded

-Trump as the great destroyer of polite restraints

-The institutions that lost the authority to enforce trust

-How new taboos appear without anyone admitting who created them

-T…