Happy new year from your friendly neighborhood producer. With John and Ken taking a well-deserved break, I thought I’d offer a look behind the scenes at some of what it takes – radio-wise – to examine the year that was.

今年的节目在10月下旬开始了前期制作，开始了一些头脑风暴，讨论哪些有新闻价值的事件(在这一点上)可能有哲学角度值得探索——如他们所说，这些事件让我们挑战自己的假设，以新的方式思考。For the first segment (which we generally pitch as “The Year in Philosophy and/or Academia”), we decided to focus on the wave of student protests on college campuses around the country – particularly since two philosophers, Kate Manne and Jason Stanley, had written awidely-circulated responseto some of the criticism levelled at the protesters (Kate had also written anearlier op-ed about trigger warningsin the New York Times). Here’s the complete conversation that John and Ken recorded with Kate, which touched on a whole range of issues that didn’t make it to air:

We usually think of the second segment of the show as something like "The Year in Politics," which means it’s often inspired by some of the most widely talked about headlines. For better or worse the issue of refugees and migration, which had already been making headlines in the US and Europe earlier in the year, took on renewed prominence after the attacks in Paris and San Bernadino. Once again John and Ken recorded a wide-ranging conversation, in this case with political scientist Beverly Crawford, of which only a portion appeared on the air. Check out the complete interview:

For the third segment, "The Year in Science," we had thought about taking a deeper look at what this year’s (and the seemingly constant) revision of nutrition guidelines might tell us about the status of scientific claims. But when it turned out that Paris Climate Summit was shaping up to be a very big happening (following a year of big happenings in the climate itself), we gave in to the recency bias and decided to focus on the global response to climate change. John and Ken spoke to Allen Thompson from Oregon State University, who'd previously joined them live in Corvallis for an episode onThe Moral Costs of Climate Change. Here's the unedited conversation: