ZadekpediaDefining Ideas is an online publication of the Hoover Institution, described on The Bob Zadek Show as a venue where guests of the program publish columns and articles. Across the excerpts it appears not as a subject of discussion in its own right but as a recurring point of reference: a place listeners are told to read, and a publication to which two of the show’s guests contribute.
Richard Epstein and Defining Ideas
In the March 9, 2018 episode on sexual harassment law, Bob Zadek introduces Richard Epstein as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of law at New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. In the same introduction Zadek notes that Epstein hosts The Libertarian, a Hoover Institution podcast, and that he often publishes the blog Defining Ideas An Intellectual Discussion of Sexual Harassment with Richard Epstein (2018).
The description is repeated in later episodes. In the March 12, 2020 episode on the administrative state, Zadek closes the segment by telling the audience to listen to Epstein’s podcast, The Libertarian, which he says drops every Thursday night, and to read Epstein’s column “Defining Ideas” at Hoover The Dubious Morality of the Modern Administrative State (2020).
In the April 25, 2022 episode on California’s pork regulations, Zadek again welcomes Epstein back, describing him as a Hoover Senior Fellow and host of the Defining Ideas podcast, which Zadek says he listens to within minutes of it becoming accessible. Epstein is also described there as teaching law at New York University School of Law California’s Food Fight (2022).
David Henderson and Defining Ideas
The publication also appears in the March 31, 2019 episode featuring David Henderson, identified by Zadek as Professor Emeritus David Henderson, who taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and blogs at EconLog. Asked where else people can find his work, Henderson says he is affiliated with the Hoover Institution and that it has an online publication called Defining Ideas, for which he writes a piece fortnightly, every two weeks, beginning in December. He tells listeners they can always look up Defining Ideas at Hoover, and says that after the call he will begin working on his article for that week David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019).
Henderson also describes writing a piece when the Nobel Prize is announced, typically on Columbus Day, published the following day, and names the Wall Street Journal as the place that day and a couple of times during the year besides that. He lists the blog and those outlets as his main venues.
Across episodes
Three episodes touch on Defining Ideas — 2018-03-09, 2019-03-31 and 2020-03-12, with a further mention in 2022-04-25 — and the episodes show no development in how the publication is treated. In each case it is named only in passing: as a blog Epstein often publishes, as a column to read at Hoover, as a podcast Epstein hosts, and as the online publication where Henderson writes fortnightly.