Month: October 2026

It’s another P&C Five for Five: five topics, five minutes each.

Pigweed and Crowhill start with a Festbier and then race through …

• Personalized pricing,
• The mania for renaming things,
• What the most common words in rap and country music say about the cultures behind them,
• The controversy over maps that make Africa look too small, and
• The growing effort to separate the T from the LGB.

Then, after the timer runs out, they stick around for a little more on pronouns, the role of comedians as modern court jesters, and an unlikely candidate for Man of the Week: King Charles.

Pour yourself a beer and join the conversation.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Pigweed and Crowhill look back at the attacks, where they were when they happened, and what America did in response.

They revisit the confusion and fear of that day, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, expanded government surveillance, immigration, and America’s complicated relationship with Islam. They also ask why, a quarter-century later, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still hasn’t been tried.

What did America get right after 9/11? What did it get disastrously wrong? And after 25 years, have we actually learned anything?

Plus, an Oktoberfest beer and the important distinction between Märzen and Festbier.

For the first time in decades, rap has disappeared from the top of the charts while country music is surging. Has rap simply exhausted itself—or is something bigger going on?

Pigweed and Crowhill trace rap’s evolution from the relatively harmless early days of hip-hop to gangster rap and increasingly explicit music, and compare its treatment of sex, crime, rebellion, and regret with rock and outlaw country. Why does Johnny Cash shoot a man in Reno and end up regretting his life, while gangster rap so often turns the outlaw himself into the hero?

Then we enter Conspiracy Corner. Record companies, private prisons, USAID, the CIA, cultural manipulation, fake digital popularity—could powerful institutions have helped push rap culture in a particular direction? There are enough strange historical precedents to make the theory interesting. But there’s a larger question underneath it all: Are cultural movements actually orchestrated from above, or do institutions merely amplify movements that are already happening?

Plus, we review a suspiciously inconsistent six-pack of Baykeeper IPA and ponder the enormous cultural distance between “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and Cardi B.

We tend to think of democracy as the natural state of a modern society. But what if it’s actually a historical anomaly that depends on a surprisingly fragile set of conditions?

In this episode, Pigweed and Crowhill discuss what makes democratic government possible in the first place: trust, civic virtue, respect for the rule of law, acceptance of political defeat, shared cultural assumptions, and responsible government. From the American founders’ warnings about democracy to tribalism, immigration, institutional distrust, government fraud, and a national debt approaching $40 trillion, they ask whether we’re undermining the conditions that allow a free society to function.

Plus, they review Goatman, a malty Bock from Baltimore’s Guilford Hall Brewery.

As Benjamin Franklin supposedly put it: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The question is whether we still can.