Hard Knox with Amanda Knox

Amanda woke up to good news and bad news arriving at the exact same moment — again. In true Hard Knocks fashion, that personal experience sends Chris and Amanda down a rabbit hole exploring one of life's most disorienting puzzles: is there really such a thing as good news or bad news at all?

From the Buddhist parable of the farmer to Stoic amor fati to Mel Brooks playing ball with the universe, they dig into what Zen, Taoism, and a lifetime of very public verdicts can teach us about staying sane when fate won't stop flipping the script.
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The death penalty is often sold as justice. But what if it's just a very expensive decades-long process, doesn't deter crime, and gets it wrong often enough that 190 people have been exonerated from death row?

Amanda sits down with Laura Porter, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty and former public defender of 12 years, for a conversation that refuses to stay on the surface. They get into the historical roots of America's cultural attachment to capital punishment, why the deterrence argument has been largely debunked, and what evidence-based violence prevention actually looks like in practice.

They also ask the harder question underneath all of it: if the goal is a safer society and genuine healing for victims, is the death penalty even aimed at the right target?
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Amanda Knox is a multi-linguist and self-described word nerd. In this essay she explores the fascinating world of untranslatable words, the ones that exist in some languages but not others, and what they reveal about the cultures that invented them. And at the end of it all, Amanda makes one of her own.
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Greg Lukianoff is one of our nation's foremost defenders of free speech, co-author of "The Canceling of the American Mind," and president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His journey to this place wasn’t easy, on a personal level, but the depressive spiral Greg eventually transcended gave him insight into the problems plaguing our public discourse.
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What happens when your creative partner is also your spouse? Amanda and Chris dive into the messy, rewarding world of creative collaboration,from co-writing a book of love poems to navigating the high-stakes pressure of building a one-woman comedy show headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

They get real about the tension between structure and spontaneity, brutal feedback vs. the compliment sandwich, and what it actually means to support someone's creative vision when you don't always agree on what's funny.
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