The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Vox
The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
Is ignorance truly bliss?
Are you ever happier not knowing something?As Aristotle famously claimed, “All human beings want to know.” But denial and avoidance are also human impulses. Sometimes they’re even more powerful than our curiosity.In this episode Sean speaks with professor Mark Lilla about when we’re better off searching for knowledge and when we’re better off living in the dark. Lilla’s new book is called Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know.Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)Guest: Mark Lilla, prof
Is America broken?
What do you think of America’s institutions?Alana Newhouse, founder and editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, says that may be the most important political question in America.In an essay published more than two years ago, Newhouse argued that there is a new political divide, one in which your place — and the place of your allies and adversaries — is determined by whether you believe that America’s institutions should be fixed or destroyed. Her argument feels eerily prescient in light of
Do Americans have too much 'me time?'
Americans are spending an historic amount of time alone, a phenomenon that is often referred to as an "epidemic of loneliness."But are we actually lonely? Or do we prefer being by ourselves? And if we do, what does that mean for us and our society?Today’s guest is journalist Derek Thompson, who, in a recent essay for the Atlantic, challenges the conventional wisdom around loneliness. He argues that Americans prefer solitude, and that preference presents a wholly different kind of challe
Attention pays (with Chris Hayes)
Where is your attention right now? Where was it a minute ago? A second ago? Where will it be a minute from now?One of the primary features of this age — the age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds — is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.This is no accident. Our devices and apps are engineered to constantly alert us to things that are important and to things that are not. That’s because holding our attention is valuable. The time we spend reading, watc
How to be happy
What does it take to be happy? Professor of psychology Laurie Santos just might have the answer.This week The Gray Area takes a break from its regular programming to bring you an episode of another podcast that we love.In this episode of Stay Tuned With Preet, host Preet Bharara interviews Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale University, about what we all can do to be happier. The two discuss how to maximize your happiness, how to bring meaning to your career, self-care vs. caring for o
The screens between us
What is the first thing that you touch in the morning? What about the last thing you touch before you go to sleep? For many of us, it’s our phone. Digital devices are with us constantly, often putting a digital layer between us and the world. The benefits of this are enormous: convenience, efficiency, and constant stimulation.But is there a personal cost to living in a mediated reality?Today’s guest is Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the ne
The importance of failure
At the beginning of the new year, many of us make pledges to change ourselves. We want to work out more. Or read more. Or cook more. Within a few months, some of us will have succeeded but many of us will have failed. When we do, we’ll probably tell ourselves to try again, that failure inevitably leads to success.But is that true? And is failure really such a bad thing?In this episode, which originally aired in March of 2023, Sean interviews professor Costica Bradatan about his book In Praise of
What to do with your sadness, pain, and grief
How can we find happiness? That's an old question. Since the beginning of philosophy people have been wondering what makes us happy and how to get more of it. But if you're a real person living in the real world, you know already that it's not possible to be happy all the time. So what do we do when we’re experiencing depression or grief or a dark mood?Philosopher Mariana Alessandri thinks that we should stop trying to repress these feelings.In this conversation, which originally aired
What do animals feel?
Can you ever really know what’s going on inside the mind of another creature?In some cases, like other humans, or dogs and cats, we might be able to guess with a bit of confidence. But what about octopuses? Or insects? What about AI systems — will they ever be able to feel anything? And if they do feel anything, what are our ethical obligations toward them?In today’s episode, Vox staff writer Oshan Jarow brings those questions to philosopher of science Jonathan Birch.Birch is the princi
Are men okay?
This week, host Sean Illing gets personal when he asks professor and podcast host Scott Galloway: What’s going on with men?There’s a growing body of evidence that men are falling behind in education, the labor market, and other areas. And when you look at the numbers on drug overdoses and deaths by suicide, it’s pretty bleak.Sean and Scott — both of whom are raising sons — talk about the struggles men are facing today, how parents can navigate the current moment, and the challenges they
How to feel alive
The sheer feeling of aliveness. We all know what that is, even though it comes in many different forms. Maybe it’s going for a long run at night. Or free-climbing a mountain. Or an intense meditation practice. Or that sensation you get when you’re on the floor at a great concert. Call it a flow state or a religious experience or whatever you want, but it’s a kind of ecstasy.People have been experiencing this for centuries, and in previous eras, they called it a mystical experience. In the modern
The antidote to climate anxiety
In this episode, host Sean Illing speaks with marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson about her book What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.Johnson approaches climate change with informed optimism, encouraging us to stop waiting for the worst to happen. She doesn’t reject the realities of a warming planet but reminds us that doomerism is paralyzing us into inaction. In short, having a better climate future begins with envisioning one and then mapping the road to get there.
America’s reactionary moment
What just happened?It’s been almost two weeks since the presidential election, and many Americans are still grappling with the result. The political reckoning will probably last for months, if not years, and we may never know exactly why voters made the choices they did. But one thing is clear: the roughly 75 million people who voted for Trump were saying “No” to something. So what were they rejecting?Today’s guest is Zack Beauchamp, Vox senior correspondent and author of The Reactionar
Well this is awkward
Philosopher Alexandra Plakias says there are no awkward people, only awkward situations. In her book, Awkwardness: A Theory, Plakias explains the difference between embarrassment and awkwardness, how awkwardness can be used by people in power as a way of breaking social norms, and what exactly is happening when people aren’t on the same social script.Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Alexandra Plakias, author, Awkwardness: A Theory Learn more about your ad choic
What just happened, and what comes next
This has been an unusual week. Sean and the TGA team are still sifting through it all and figuring out what to think about the presidential election. In the meantime, our colleague Jonquilyn Hill has leapt into action. She and her team from the Explain It to Me podcast collected lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump's victory, and took them to the Vox reporters who know the most about what happened and what it all means. We'll be back with a new episode on Monday. Until t
Does being "woke" do any good?
What does it mean to be "woke"? It's become a catchall term to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. As a result, anytime you venture into an argument about “wokeness,” it becomes hopelessly entangled in a broader cultural battle. Today’s guest, journalist and professor Musa al-Gharbi, helps us untangle "wokeness" from its fraught political context. The author of a new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Is America collapsing like Ancient Rome?
What can ancient Rome teach us about American democracy?The Roman Republic fell for a lot of reasons: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues. It sounds a lot like the problems America is facing today.This week's guest, historian Edward Watts, tells us wh
The world according to Werner Herzog
Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog.Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The two discuss "ecstatic truth," a term invented by Herzog to capture what he's really after in his work, why he's interested in Mars, and whether he thinks humanity is destroying itself.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Werner Herzog, author, Every Man for Himself and God Against AllThis episode was originally publish
Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth.
How important is complexity? At The Gray Area, we value understanding the details. We revel in complexity. But does our desire to understand that complexity sometimes over-complicate an issue?Journalist and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks so.This week on The Gray Area, Sean talks to Coates about his new book The Message, a collection of essays about storytelling, moral clarity, and the dangers of hiding behind complexity.The Message covers a lot of ground, but the largest section of t
Your mind needs chaos
In part three of our series on creativity, guest host Oshan Jarow speaks with philosopher of neuroscience Mark Miller about how our minds actually work. They discuss the brain as a predictive engine that builds our conscious experience for us. We’re not seeing what we see. We’re predicting what we should see. Miller says that depression, opioid use, and our love of horror movies can all be explained by this theory. And that injecting beneficial kinds of uncertainty into our experiences — embraci
Musician Laraaji on the origin of creativity
Sean revisits his interview with musician Laraaji, a pioneer of new age music who has recorded more than 50 albums since he was discovered busking in a park by Brian Eno. Laraaji and Sean discuss inspiration, flow states, and what moves us to create.This is the second conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Is AI creative?
What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? Creativity feels innately human, but is it? Can a machine be creative? Are we still being creative if we use machines to assist in our creative output?To help answer those questions, Sean speaks with Meghan O'Gieblyn, the author of the book "God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning." She and Sean discuss how the rise of AI is forcing us to reflect on what it means to be a creati
Happiness isn’t the goal
Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that?We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Me
A message from Sean
Sean Illing has a special message for all you listeners: Look at me!We’ve made our first-ever video episode. See Sean in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Watch it with your friends and family and your friend’s families and their family friends. It’s on YouTube right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhx1sdX2bow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What if we get climate change right?
Climate change has become synonymous with doomsday, as though everyone is waiting for the worst to happen. But what is this mindset doing to us? Is climate anxiety keeping us from confronting the challenge? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson thinks so. In part two of our “Reasons to Be Cheerful” series, she talks to Sean Illing about her new book, What If We Get It Right? and makes the case that our best chance for survival is acting as though the future is a place in which we want to live. Learn
Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence
Humans are good learners and teachers, constantly gathering information, archiving, and sharing knowledge. So why, after building the most sophisticated information technology in history, are we on the verge of destroying ourselves? We know more than ever before. But are we any wiser? Bestselling author of Sapiens and historian Yuval Noah Harari doesn’t think so.This week Sean Illing talks with Harari, author of a mind-bending new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks, about how t
Why cynicism is bad for you
There’s a certain glamor to cynicism. As a culture, we’ve turned cynicism into a symbol of hard-earned wisdom, assuming that those who are cynical are the only ones with the courage to tell us the truth and prepare us for an uncertain future. Psychologist Jamil Zaki challenges that assumption.In part one of The Gray Area’s new three-part series, “Reasons to be Cheerful,” Sean Illing asks Jamil Zaki about why cynicism is everywhere, especially if it makes no sense to be this way — and what we, as
Poetry as religion
Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose book The Wonder Paradox asks: If we don't have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion accesses meaning — through things like prayer, ceremony, and ritual — and Jennifer speaks on the ways that poetry can play similar roles in a secular way. They also discuss some of the "tricks" that poets use, share favorite poems, and explore what it would mean to "live the questions" — and even learn
The jazz musician’s guide to the universe
How is the origin of our universe like an improvised saxophone solo? This week, Sean Illing talks to Stephon Alexander, a theoretical physicist and world-class jazz musician. Alexander is the author of The Jazz of Physics and his most recent book, Fear of a Black Universe. This episode features music by Stephon Alexander throughout, from his latest 2024 album Spontaneous Fruit and his 2017 EP True to Self.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Stephon Alexander (@ste
Revisiting the "father of capitalism"
Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” but as Liu points out in her book, his legacy has been misappropriated — especially in America. They discuss his original intentions and what we can take away from his work today.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Glory Liu (@miss_glory), author; lecturer, Harvard UniversityRe
Breaking our family patterns
Sean Illing speaks with marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon, whose book 'The Origins of You' aims to help us identify and heal the wounds that originated from our family, which shape our patterns of behavior in relationships and throughout our lives. Sean and Vienna talk about how we can spot and name our "origin wounds," discuss practical wisdom to help break free from the ways these pains grip us, and Sean directly confronts some real issues from his upbringing and family lif
Why Orwell matters
In an Orwellian twist, the word “Orwellian” has been misused so much over the decades that it’s essentially lost its meaning. But George Orwell, author of the classics Animal Farm and 1984, was very clear in his beliefs. While he was progressive and prescient in many ways, he wasn’t without his flaws. This week, Sean Illing explores the real George Orwell with Laura Beers, the author of Orwell's Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), ho
The timebomb the founding fathers left us
The US Constitution is a brilliant political document, but it’s far from perfect. This week’s guest, Erwin Chemerinsky, argues that many of today’s threats to democracy are a direct result of compromises made by the Founding Fathers centuries ago. Those mistakes have come back to haunt us, and they might destroy our democracy.Erwin Chemerinsky’s latest book is No Democracy Lasts Forever.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Erwin ChemerinskyEnjoyed this episode? Rat
Swear like a philosopher
You can’t drop an f-bomb on the radio, but fortunately for our guest, you can say anything you want in a podcast. This week, host Sean Illing talks to philosopher Rebecca Roache, author of For F*ck’s Sake: Why Swearing Is Shocking, Rude, and Fun about the philosophy and linguistics of swearing, and why certain four-letter words hold the magical power to both offend and delight.Warning: In case it’s not obvious, this episode contains swearing.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gr
Taking Nietzsche seriously
Sean Illing talks with political science professor Matt McManus about the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher with a complicated legacy, despite his crossover into popular culture. They discuss how Nietzsche's work has been interpreted — and misinterpreted — since his death in 1900, how his radical political views emerge from his body of work, and how we can use Nietzsche's philosophy in order to interpret some key features of our contemporary politics.H
What India teaches us about liberalism — and its decline
Authoritarian tendencies have been on the rise globally and the liberal world order is on the decline. One hotspot of this tension lies in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi employs autocratic language and tactics to maintain power. But a recent election may indicate that voters are losing interest in this style of rule. Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta about the past of the Indian liberal tradition and what the current politics of the world’s large
1992: The year politics broke
We’re living in an era of extreme partisan politics, rising resentment, and fractured news media. Writer John Ganz believes that we can trace the dysfunction to the 1990s, when right-wing populists like Pat Buchanan and white supremacist David Duke transformed Republican politics. He joins Sean to talk about the 1990s and how it laid the groundwork for Trump. His book is When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), h
The existential struggle of being Black
Nathalie Etoke joins The Gray Area to talk about existentialism, the Black experience, and the legacy of dehumanization. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Nathalie Etoke. Her book is Black Existential Freedom.Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Be the first to hear new episodes of The Gray Area by following us in your favorite podcast app. Links here: https://www.vox.com/the-gray-areaSupport The Gray Area by making
The world after nuclear war
A mile of pure fire. A flash that melts everything — titanium, steel, lead, people. A blast that mows down every structure in its path, 3 miles out in every direction. Journalist Annie Jacobsen spent years interviewing scientists, high-ranking military officials, politicians, and other experts to find out how a nuclear attack would be triggered, the devastation it would cause, the ruptures it would create in the social fabric, and how likely it is to happen today. She wrote about all of
Gaza, Camus, and the logic of violence
Albert Camus was a Nobel-winning French writer and public intellectual. During Algeria’s bloody war for independence in the 1950s, Camus took a measured stance, calling for an end to the atrocities on each side. He was criticized widely for his so-called “moderation.” Philosophy professor Robert Zaretsky joins Sean to discuss Camus’s thoughts on that conflict and the parallels with the present moment.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Robert ZaretskyEnjoyed this episode?
This is your kid on smartphones
Old people have always worried about young people. But psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes something genuinely different and troubling is happening right now. He argues that smartphones and social media have had disastrous effects on the mental health of young people, and derailed childhood from real world play to touchscreens. He joins Sean to talk about his research and some of the criticisms of it.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Jonathan Haidt (@jonhaidt).
Life after death?
Sebastian Junger came as close as you possibly can to dying. While his doctors struggled to revive him, the veteran reporter and avowed rationalist experienced things that shocked and shook him, leaving him with profound questions and unexpected revelations. In his new book, In My Time of Dying, Junger explores the mysteries and commonalities of people’s near death experiences. He joins Sean to talk about what it’s like to die and what quantum physics can tell us about living that count
The world after Ozempic
Ozempic and other new weight loss drugs are being touted as potential miracle cures for diabetes and obesity. Journalist Johann Hari experimented with the drug and dropped 40 pounds. In his new book, Magic Pill, Hari discusses his experience with Ozempic and speaks to many of the leading scientists to better understand how the drug works. He joins Sean to talk about what he’s learned and the complicated trade-offs involved in the decision to take these drugs.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilli
UFOs, God, and the edge of understanding
Religious studies professor Diana Pasulka was a total nonbeliever in alien life, but she began to question this after speaking with many people who claim to have had otherworldly encounters. She also noticed how these accounts parallel the foundational texts of many religions. She has since written two books on the topic, the most recent of which is Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. She joins Sean to talk about extraterrestrial life, God, angels, and the renewed interest in UF
How to listen
Most of us don’t know how to truly listen, and it’s causing all sorts of problems. Sean Illing is joined by journalist Kate Murphy, the author of You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, to discuss what it means to be a good listener, the problems that are caused when we don’t listen to each other, and the positive impacts on our health when we do.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Kate Murphy, author of You’re Not Listening: What You’re Miss
Everything's a cult now
The internet has fractured our world into a million little subcultures catering to the specific identities and habits of everyone online. Writer Derek Thompson believes this has led to a widespread cult-like mentality that has crept into all facets of modern life — pop culture, media, politics, and religion itself. He joins Sean to explain this theory, and why it’s maybe not such a bad thing.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Derek Thompson (@dkthomp). His podcas
Fareed Zakaria on our revolutionary moment
Is it possible that we are living through one of the most revolutionary periods in human history? CNN’s Fareed Zakaria believes that we are and argues that the convergence of AI and the global backlash against liberal democracy are upending political orders around the world. He joins Sean to talk about how this period relates to history’s most impactful revolutions, both political and technological. Click here to take the Vox podcast surveyHost: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray
Life is hard. Can philosophy help?
Philosophy may seem like a theoretical or abstract discipline in which unanswerable questions are debated to the point of tedium. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes that philosophical inquiry has a very practical and applicable purpose outside of the classroom — to help guide us through life’s most challenging circumstances. He joins Sean to talk about self-help, FOMO, and midlife crises. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Kieran Setiya. His book is called
The American dream is a pyramid scheme
Jane Marie is an expert in American bullshit. Her podcast The Dream explores life coaching, wellness, marketing, and other fraudulent industries and exposes their exploitative practices. Her book, Selling the Dream, takes an even closer look at multilevel marketing schemes like Amway and Herbalife and gives historical context to this multibillion-dollar — and distinctly American — enterprise. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Jane Marie. Her podcast is The Dream
The chaplain who doesn't believe in God
As a non-believer, Devin Moss never thought he would become a chaplain or a spiritual adviser, much less one who counsels hospital patients with terminal illnesses and inmates on death row. Devin joins Sean to talk about his improbable journey, the death penalty, and the role of religion in an increasingly secular society.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Devin Moss. His podcast is The Adventures of Memento Mori. Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ an
Can a friend be our most significant other?
Journalist Rhaina Cohen believes that modern culture undervalues friendships and discusses the ways in which deep friendships are distinct from but no less meaningful than romantic partnerships. Guest host: Sigal Samuel (@sigalsamuel)Guest: Rhaina Cohen (@rhainacohen). Her book is The Other Significant Others. Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Be the first to hear new episodes of The Gray Area by following us in your favorite podcast app
The power of climate fiction
Stephen Markley’s novel, “The Deluge,” is an ambitious and terrifyingly realistic look at our collective future on a warming planet. He joins Sean to talk about the 10-year process of writing the book, the current political struggle over climate action, and how we can confront and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Stephen Markley. His book is “The Deluge.”Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a re
The denial of death
It’s been 50 years since Ernest Becker’s breakthrough book The Denial of Death was first published, and its thesis has become more relevant than ever. Filmmaker Jef Sewell is the co-creator of a new documentary about Becker called All Illusions Must Be Broken. It features never-before-heard audio of the enigmatic anthropologist and puts his theories in a modern context. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Jef Sewell. Find out more about the film at www.twobirdsfil
A brief history of extinction panics
Silicon Valley is in the middle of an AI frenzy, and many of its leaders believe this technology could eventually result in human extinction. Tyler Austin Harper breaks down the most outlandish predictions, some of the more plausible problems AI poses, and how this moment reminds him of earlier extinction panics.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper). Read his piece in the New York Times here. Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The new(ish) world order
America solidified its dominant posture in the international order following World War II and largely held that position for the following half-century. But as problems have accumulated at home and abroad, Americans are reconsidering their country’s role in the world, and so are its leaders. Alex Ward, author of The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump, joins us.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Alex Ward (@alexbward). His book
The free-market century is over
Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led
Music and mysticism
Musician Laraaji joins Sean to talk about improvisation as meditation, the transcendent nature of laughter, and lessons from a long life in sound and spirit. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Laraaji. His music can be found at https://laraajimusic.bandcamp.com/Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Be the first to hear new episodes of The Gray Area by following us in your favorite podcast app. Links here: https://www.vox.com/t
The case for banning...millionaires?
Political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns believes that there should be a maximum amount of money and resources that one person can have. She tells Sean how much is too much and why limiting personal wealth benefits everyone, including the super rich. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Ingrid Robeyns. Her book is Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Be the first to hear new e
The joy of uncertainty
Author Maggie Jackson always retreated from uncertainty in her life. But when she realized that it was the moments of uncertainty that gave her unexpected clarity, she explored the effects that feeling uncertain has on the brain and our personalities. She joins Sean to talk about what she learned and how being unsure can lead to a better, more hopeful life. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Maggie Jackson. You can find her books and more at https://www.maggie-jackson.com
A pro-worker work ethic
Americans have absorbed the “Protestant work ethic” — the idea that our value as human beings is determined by how hard we work and how much money we make. Elizabeth Anderson explains how this evolved, why it pervades everything, and why it sucks.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Elizabeth Anderson, professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan. Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.Be the first to hea
How psychedelics can reinvent learning
If you’ve felt that learning new information or developing a new skill seems harder as you get older, you are not wrong. Neuroscientist Gul Dolen has studied brain capability and joins us to talk about the times in human development when our brains are especially adept at learning and retaining new information, and how MDMA and other psychedelics can be used to induce these moments and unlock the brain’s potential.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Gul Dolen. Lea
Seeing ourselves through the darkness
When we find ourselves in a dark place, what if we didn't "lighten things up"? Sean Illing talks with philosopher Mariana Alessandri, whose new book Night Vision offers a new way of understanding our dark moods and experiences like depression, pain, and grief. Alessandri describes the deep influence of what she calls the "light metaphor" — the belief that light is good and darkness is bad — and the destructive emotional cycles it has produced. They discuss the influence of Stoic philoso
Living Mindfully
Jon Kabat-Zinn helped kick off the American mindfulness movement with his bestselling book Wherever You Go, There You Are. On its 30th anniversary, he joins Sean for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to be mindful in the attention economy, why mindfulness has skyrocketed in popularity, and how to think about the commercialization of an ancient practice.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness pioneer and author of Wherever You Go, There
Taking anarchism seriously
Most people think anarchists want to live in a lawless society devoid of any structure or order. But anarchism is actually a serious political philosophy that’s more focused on egalitarianism than it is on chaos. Philosopher Sophie Scott-Brown is an anarchist in this tradition, and she makes the convincing case that anarchism is the only political philosophy poised to deal with the uncertainty of the modern world.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Sophie Scott-Br
3,000 years of The Iliad
Constance Grady, a culture writer at Vox, is joined by Emily Wilson to discuss her bestselling translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey. They unpack the buzz surrounding them and the significance of The Iliad today.
Host: Constance Grady, (@constancegrady), culture writer, Vox
Guest: Emily Wilson, classics professor and translator of The Iliad and The Odyssey
References:
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2023)
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W.
Late-stage liberalism
Sean Illing is joined by John Gray, political philosopher and author of the new book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. They discuss Thomas Hobbes and the origins of liberalism, the current state of democracy, and the very uncertain future of the global liberal order.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: John Gray, author and political philosopherReferences: The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism by John Gray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)Levi
The case against free will
Sean Illing speaks with Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the author of a new book called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. They discuss the concept of free will, whether it actually exists in the way we think it does, and what it means for society if free will is indeed an illusion.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Robert Sapolsky, author, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free WillReferences: De
A Jew and a Muslim get honest about Israel and Gaza
Zack Beauchamp, a Vox senior correspondent who writes about democracy and Israel, speaks with Shadi Hamid, a columnist at The Washington Post, research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary, and author of The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. They discuss the October 7 attack, the subsequent war in Gaza, what it means for Israelis and Palestinians, and how Jews and Muslims in the United States can find common ground amidst their
How to keep panic from attacking
Sean Illing is joined by Matt Gutman, the chief national correspondent for ABC News, to talk about his new book, No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. They discuss their personal experiences with panic, the evolutionary roots of it, and how Matt has gained control over his feelings of panic and anxiety.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Matt Gutman (@mattgutmanABC), author, No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety a
We Are What We Watch
Guest host Alissa Wilkinson speaks with Walt Hickey about his new book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything. They discuss how entertainment affects the physical and mental states of viewers — from blood coagulation during horror movie screenings to an increase in Dalmatian adoptions after 101 Dalmatians was released in theaters — and why our responses to what we watch are worth celebrating.Host: Alissa Wilkinson (@alissamarie), senior culture writer, VoxGuest: Wa
Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth
Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog. Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the new memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. They discuss "ecstatic truth," a term invented by Herzog to capture what he's really after in his work. Illing also asks him a range of big questions, such as why he is interested in Mars and whether he thinks humanity is destroying itself.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Werner Herzog, author, Every Man
The lessons of Sam Bankman-Fried
Michael Lewis joins Sean Illing to discuss his new book about Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. They talk about the FTX crash, what Lewis learned while shadowing Bankman-Fried, and what SBF’s rise and fall says about us and our financial systems.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Michael Lewis, author, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New TycoonReferences: Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis
Is America getting meaner?
Sean Illing and David Brooks talk about Brooks’s recent essay, “How America Got Mean.” They discuss the country's moral history, how politics and culture have shifted our perception of connection and community, and what can be done to make things nicer.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks), author and op-ed columnistReferences:
“How America Got Mean” by David Brooks (The Atlantic, August 2023)
How to Know a Person by David Brooks (Penguin Ran
Naomi Klein on her doppelganger (and yours)
Every generation thinks they’re living through the strangest times, but is our generation right? Sean Illing speaks with writer and activist Naomi Klein about her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. They discuss how a much different Naomi — her doppelganger — scrambled her professional life and led to an unexpected plunge into the ironies and absurdities of our digital world.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein), author o
Should we press pause on AI?
How worried should we be about AI? Sean Illing is joined by Stuart J. Russell, a professor at the University of California Berkeley and director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Russell was among the signatories who wrote an open letter asking for a six-month pause on AI training. They discuss the dangers of losing control of AI and what the upsides of this rapidly developing technology could be. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Stuart J. Russell, profess
Democracy’s existential crisis
Why is democracy worth saving? Sean Illing is joined by Astra Taylor, the author of the new book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. They discuss the history and reality of insecurity and how we can fight for more sustainable and meaningful democratic politics.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Astra Taylor (@astradisastra), author, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart References:
The Age of Insecurity: Coming Tog
Conservative socialism?
What will American politics look like after Trump? Sean Illing is joined by Sohrab Ahmari to discuss his new book, Tyranny, Inc. Ahmari is one of the conservative intellectuals trying to map out a post-Trump future for the Republican Party, and his book is an attempt to justify a form of democratic socialism from the right. The two discuss whether his vision could ever be the basis for a broader coalition.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabA
The benefits of utopian thinking
Why don’t we spend more time imagining a better future? Sean Illing is joined by Kristen R. Ghodsee, the author of Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. They discuss why it’s hard to imagine better outcomes in life, what we can learn from experimental living communities, and what the pandemic proved about our adaptability.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Kristen R. Ghodsee, author, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Ye
What Clarence Thomas really thinks
In this episode, which was originally published in August 2022, Sean Illing talks with Corey Robin, author of a 2019 book about the life and thought of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Robin discusses how Thomas — whose concurring opinion in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade garnered recent attention — developed the ideological basis of his extremist judicial philosophy, how his views went from the hard-right fringe to more mainstream over the course of his 30 years on the Supr
The new crisis of masculinity
What does masculinity mean these days? Sean Illing speaks with Christine Emba, a columnist at The Washington Post who wrote the piece “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness.” Together they discuss the confusing state of manhood, why figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate hold appeal, and how masculinity could be redefined.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Christine Emba (@ChristineEmba), Washington Post columnist and author of Rethinking Sex: A
How we all became a brand
What does it mean to be “authentic” in the digital age? Sean Illing speaks with Tara Isabella Burton about her new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians. They discuss the history of self-creation, how it’s evolved into personal branding, and why a more collective mindset could benefit all of us.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Tara Isabella Burton (@NotoriousTIB), author of Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to
The therapeutic potential of MDMA
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, MDMA (also known as molly or ecstasy) was dismissed as a club drug and became the target of anti-drug propaganda. Today, it’s on the brink of being legalized for use in clinical therapy to treat conditions like PTSD. How did that happen? And what have we learned about the therapeutic potential of MDMA? Sean discusses all this with Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. They talk about why they’re excited by the
Is the journey to self-discovery pointless?
There are many ways people are trying to know themselves these days – from taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test to analyzing their astrological birth charts to identifying their attachment styles. But are any of these methods helpful? Allie Volpe, a senior reporter at Vox, discusses this with Mitch Green, a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut and author of the book Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge. Together they explore why there’s an increas
Parenting through the climate crisis
Does being a parent today necessarily mean also being a climate activist? Sean Illing speaks with moral philosopher and political theorist Elizabeth Cripps about her new book Parenting on Earth, in which she discusses the real-life moral obligations of raising children in our current ecological crisis. Drawing from her experience raising two daughters, Elizabeth and Sean talk about how both to want the best for your children and to build a better society, the conflicts that arise from p
Seeing ourselves through darkness
When we find ourselves in a dark place, what if we didn't "lighten things up"? Sean Illing talks with philosopher Mariana Alessandri, whose new book Night Vision offers a new way of understanding our dark moods and experiences like depression, pain, and grief. Alessandri describes the deep influence of what she calls the "light metaphor" — the belief that light is good and darkness is bad — and the destructive emotional cycles it has produced. They discuss the influence of Stoic philoso
Best of: A new philosophy of love
Sean Illing talks with Carrie Jenkins about her new book Sad Love, and her call to rethink the shape and boundaries of romantic love. In this far-ranging discussion about the meaning of romantic love, Sean and Carrie discuss the connection between love and happiness, what we should expect (and not expect) from our romantic partners, and whether or not loving a person must entail that we love only that person.This was originally released as an episode of Vox Conversations in September 20
The future of tribalism
Sean Illing talks with evolutionary anthropologist David Samson, whose new book Our Tribal Future delves into how tribalism has shaped the human story — and how we might be able to mitigate its negative effects in the future. Sean and David discuss how and when tribal organization came on the scene, what changed in human organization when it did, and how taking advantage of some positive aspects of tribal alignment could provide a path toward inoculating humanity against stubborn, regre
When you can't separate art from artist
What do we do when an artist we love does something monstrous? Constance Grady, a culture writer at Vox, talks with Claire Dederer, the author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. They discuss how to reckon with the facts and feelings of consuming art by someone who's done something bad, if it's possible to separate the art from the artist, and what responsibility — if any — comes with being a fan.Host: Constance Grady, (@constancegrady), culture and gender writerGuest: Claire Dederer, author of Monste
The case for not killing yourself
Sean Illing talks with Clancy Martin, professor of philosophy at University of Missouri Kansas City, about his powerful new book How Not to Kill Yourself, which combines personal memoir and philosophical analysis to explore what it means to pursue self-destruction. They discuss wisdom from the Buddha and Albert Camus, Clancy's view that he is a suicide "addict," and concrete strategies for escaping the grip of suicidal thoughts. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal tho
What comes after Black Lives Matter?
What is the future of the racial justice movement in America? Sean Illing talks with Cedric Johnson, professor and author of After Black Lives Matter, about building a protest movement that meaningfully recognizes the underlying economic causes of the social inequities highlighted by the BLM movement. They discuss the demonstrations of Summer 2020, the prospects of building a multiracial class-conscious coalition, and viewing urban policing as a symptom of larger systemic problems.Host:
Clickbait’s destructive legacy
Have clicks, likes, and shares driven media and democracy to the point of disrepair? Sean Illing is joined by Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor and the author of "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral." Together, they discuss how newsrooms were transformed by social media and the pursuit of traffic, and what the future of the industry might look like.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Ben Smith (@semaforben), editor
Simone Weil’s radical philosophy of love and attention
Sean Illing speaks with history professor Robert Zaretsky about Simone Weil, a 20th-century French writer and activist who dedicated her life to a radical philosophy of love and attention. They discuss how she inspired her contemporaries — like Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir — and how her revolutionary ideas have remained relevant and important.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Robert Zaretsky, history professor, The University of HoustonReferences:
The S
Peter Singer on his ethical legacy
Can we live a good life in a world where animals are factory farmed? Guest host Dylan Matthews talks with the world-famous ethicist Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation Now, the newly revised edition of his movement-founding 1975 work. They talk about the progress made by the animal rights movement — and the issues it still faces. Dylan also questions Singer on other aspects of his career as an outspoken popularizer of philosophy and ethics, including his positions on physician-assisted dyi
Why the poor in America stay poor
Are we responsible for keeping poor people poor? Sean Illing is joined by Matt Desmond, a sociology professor at Princeton University and the author of the books Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City and Poverty, by America. They discuss why most Americans are unaware of their privilege and how their choices perpetuate poverty. They also discuss the power and hope that can come from bringing awareness to these choices and why abolishing poverty is possible.Host: Sean Illing (
The spiritual roots of our strange relationship to work
The pandemic caused many to rethink our relationship to work. But how did that relationship develop in the first place? Sean Illing talks with George Blaustein, professor of American Studies, about the legacy and influence of Max Weber, the German theorist whose best-known work is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) — which, Blaustein says, is often misunderstood. In the summer of 2020, George wrote an essay interpreting Weber's ideas on the psychology of work, the
Mysteries of the mind
What do we know — and what don't we know — about how the human mind works? Sean Illing talks with Paul Bloom, professor of psychology and author of the new book Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. In this conversation, Sean and Paul talk about some of the most interesting and confounding questions in psychology. They discuss the problematic theories of some giants in the history of the field, the way that AI might change psychology, and whether or not the discipline is any closer to und
Why we can’t just blame capitalism for everything
There are many debates within the American left, but the fundamental dispute is over the viability of the current system. Part of the left wants a revolution, and part wants reform. Sean Illing is joined by Eric Levitz, a features writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer. They discuss the revolution versus reform divide and what can be done to navigate the US’s capitalist and constitutional systems in order to advance the left’s agenda.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGues
Being human in the age of AI
Will AI change what it means to be human? Sean Illing talks with essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine, a book about how the way we understand human nature has been interwoven with how we understand our own technology. They discuss the power of metaphor in describing fundamental aspects of being human, the "transhumanism" movement, and what we're after when we seek companionship in a chatbot.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Meghan O'G
A philosopher's psychedelic encounter with reality
Why don't more philosophers take psychedelic drugs seriously as a means of examining reality? Sean Illing talks with Justin Smith-Ruiu, professor of philosophy, whose recent essay "This Is a Philosopher on Drugs" tells of how experimenting with psilocybin and other substances led to a radical reevaluation of nearly everything in his life — including his views on the nature of reality. They discuss the roots of an alternative worldview in the thought of German polymath G.W. Leibniz, what it means
The project of Socratic love with Agnes Callard
What happens when you apply the Socratic method to personal relationships? Philosopher Agnes Callard joins Sean Illing to discuss how Socrates inspires her public philosophy project —including the decision to share the details of her love life and how these pursuits have created a more thoughtful and meaningful life.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Agnes Callard, (@agnescallard), philosopher, University of ChicagoReferences:
“Agnes Callard’s Marriage Of The M
The chemistry of connection
Could our brains make us less lonely? Sean Illing talks with psychiatrist and author Julie Holland, whose new book Good Chemistry takes on the crisis of disconnectedness we face today. They discuss the brain chemistry of attachment and human connection, how psychedelics can be used both in therapeutic contexts and to help us feel more connected to others, and the toll that this crisis of isolation can take on us — emotionally, physically, and spiritually.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling),
What a slow civil war looks like
Sean Illing is joined by reporter Jeff Sharlet, whose new book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War takes readers on the ground across America right now, as all kinds of people seem to be preparing for a violent fight with other Americans. They discuss the killing of Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6 and how the story of her death has evolved, the religious nature of some "fringe" political beliefs, and what life is like living in what Jeff calls "the Trumpocene."Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), hos
How to listen
Most of us don’t know how to truly listen, and it’s causing all sorts of problems. Sean Illing is joined by journalist Kate Murphy, the author of You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, to discuss what it means to be a good listener, the problems that are caused when we don’t listen to each other, and the positive impacts on our health when we do.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Kate Murphy, author,You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing
Why we can't give up on persuasion
Sean Illing is joined by Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Together they discuss how polarity is a threat to our democracy, the organizing efforts that are effective, and why there's hope for a less divisive future in America.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites), author References:
The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and D
Rep. Katie Porter's working-class politics
Rep. Katie Porter became well-known for using a whiteboard and asking tough questions during Congressional hearings. Her frank questions resonated with the public because they represented the concerns of so many Americans. In this episode, she joins Sean Illing to discuss her "brand" of authenticity, the problem with having so many millionaires in Congress, and her new book, I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Rep. Kati
The climate apocalypse will be televised
Guest host Alissa Wilkinson talks with Dorothy Fortenberry, a co-showrunner, executive producer, and writer on Extrapolations, the new star-studded anthology series on Apple TV+ that imagines the ravages of climate change deeper and deeper into the future. Alissa and Dorothy discuss the challenges of making film and television about the climate crisis, the role that religion plays on the show and in addressing the emotional responses to climate change in our lives, and how climate change can rob
A philosopher takes on religious life
What would drive someone to renounce all their possessions, relationships, and ambitions to join a religious community? Sean talks with Zena Hitz, whose new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life explores this question — drawing from her own experience. They discuss the occasionally perplexing relationship between faith and reason, why Hitz thinks the act of renunciation is the pinnacle of Christian belief, and why the radicalism at the heart of Christianity seems so absent from mainstre
Your brain isn't so private anymore
Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with professor of philosophy and law Nita Farahany about her new book The Battle for Your Brain. In it, Farahany details the new brain-scanning tech that has already arrived, and the risks this poses to our privacy and freedom of thought. Sigal and Nita discuss what this technology can currently do (and what it can't), how new devices might be used by corporations or governments to infringe on our rights, and the prospect of using new technologies to rid ou
Brian Stelter thinks the news has a reliability problem
Will the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News be a watershed moment? Is the media industry beyond repair? Sean Illing is joined by media reporter Brian Stelter, the former host of CNN’s Reliable Sources and the author of Hoax. Together, they reflect on the relationship of news, entertainment, and politics and what the consequences of the Dominion suit might be.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Brian Stelter, (@brianstelter) author; former TV news hos
How corporations got all your data
Sean Illing speaks with Matthew Jones, historian of science and technology, and co-author (with data scientist Chris Wiggins) of the new book How Data Happened. They discuss the surprisingly long history of data from the 18th century to today, in service of explaining how we wound up in a world where our personal information is mined by giant corporations for profit. They talk about how the allure of measurement and precision spread from astronomy to the social sciences, why advertising
The case for failure
Is our society's fixation with success hindering our ability to find humility? Sean Illing speaks with Costica Bradatan about his new book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, which explores failure through the lives of historical figures like Gandhi and the philosopher Simone Weil. They discuss the benefits of engaging with our limits and what we can learn from those who've embraced failure.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Costica Bradatan, Professo
Poetry as religion
Sean Illing speaks with poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, whose new book The Wonder Paradox asks: if we don't have God or religion, what — if anything — do we lose? They discuss how religion accesses meaning — through things like prayer, ceremony, and ritual — and Jennifer speaks on the ways that poetry can play similar roles in a secular way. They also discuss some of the "tricks" that poets use, share favorite poems, and explore what it would mean to "live the questions" — an
Revisiting the American Dream
In America, there's been an increase of available jobs, and there's also been a series of high-profile layoffs, strikes, and calls for unionization. The social safety net for workers is disappearing, so what can people do? Sean Illing speaks with Alissa Quart about her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, about why people need to rid themselves of the American Dream's individualistic ideals and embrace dependence in order to succeed.Host: Sean Illing (@s
The cost of saving pandas
The giant panda is no longer endangered. This, of course, is good news. But the model of conservation that worked to protect these iconic bears has failed to help the countless other threatened species on Earth, most of which are far less charismatic. Guest host Benji Jones talks with Jason Gilchrist, a wildlife ecologist. They discuss if there is another way we should approach conservation, what exactly we should be trying to save, and why.Host: Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones), Senior Envir
Breaking our family patterns
Sean Illing speaks with marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon, whose new book The Origins of You aims to help us identify and heal the wounds that originated from our family, which shape our patterns of behavior in relationships and throughout our lives. Sean and Vienna talk about how we can spot and name our "origin wounds," discuss practical wisdom to help break free from the ways these pains grip us, and Sean directly confronts some real issues from his upbringing and family l
For Black horror fans, fact is scarier than fiction
Guest host Alissa Wilkinson talks with Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman about her new book, The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar. Dr. Coleman is the Vice President & Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at Northwestern University, where she is a Professor of Communication Studies. Together, they discuss the tropes in Black horror, and how inequity in Hollywood has shaped the attitudes of a nation toward Black people.Host: Alissa Wilkin
Taking Nietzsche seriously
Sean Illing talks with political science professor Matt McManus about the political thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher with a complicated legacy, despite his crossover into popular culture. They discuss how Nietzsche's work has been interpreted — and misinterpreted — since his death in 1900, how his radical political views emerge from his body of work, and how we can use Nietzsche's philosophy in order to interpret some key features of our contemporary p
The dark history of Silicon Valley
Sean Illing speaks with Malcolm Harris, a journalist, critic, and author of the new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Together, they discuss the weird history of the city that's birthed Stanford University, Hewlett Packard, Theranos, and the model of capitalism that's made an impact across the globe.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet), journalist, critic and authorReferences:
Palo Alto: A History of Cali
The value of being a "hater"
Guest host Rebecca Jennings talks with Justin Charity, cultural critic and senior staff writer at The Ringer, about what it means to be dubbed a "hater" on the internet. Rebecca and Justin talk about the role of criticism and the evolving ways in which critics and fans clash online. They discuss how a bad review (or a review seen as bad) can spark a far-ranging backlash, how the meme-ified cry of "let people enjoy things" has been taken from its original context, and what — if anything
Behind the blue wall
Sean Illing speaks with Rosa Brooks, a former reserve police officer and current law professor at Georgetown University. Brooks wrote Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City about her experience going through the police academy and becoming a cop on the streets of Washington, DC. They discuss what she saw during her time on the force, some of the differences between how cops see their jobs and how things are, and what could be done differently to fix American policing.Host: Sean Illing (@
Best of: Imagine a future with no police
Guest host Fabiola Cineas talks with author, lawyer, and organizer Derecka Purnell about her recent book Becoming Abolitionists. They discuss Derecka's journey to defending the idea of police abolition, and what that position really entails. They explore questions about the historical and social role of policing in society, how to imagine a future where we radically rethink our system of criminal justice, and how we can acknowledge and incorporate current data about crime — while still
Is America broken?
Sean Illing speaks with Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet magazine. They discuss her recent essay on "brokenism," a term she coined in an effort to redefine political divisions in America. Newhouse argues that the most salient divide right now is between those who want to fix the institutions we have and those who want to burn it all down and start fresh.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Alana Newhouse (@alananewhouse) editor-in-chief, TabletReferences:
“Br
The creator of Fargo is done with good guys vs. bad guys
Sean Illing talks with Noah Hawley, the creator and showrunner of the anthology drama Fargo on FX, as well as a celebrated novelist whose newest book is Anthem (2022). They discuss themes stemming from Hawley's recent piece in the Atlantic about myths, stories, and tropes from the Old West (and Hollywood) that are still powerful and active in shaping American society. Hawley also talks about why we're drawn to shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, what to expect on the forthc
Revisiting the "father of capitalism"
Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” but as Liu points out in her book, his legacy has been misappropriated — especially in America. They discuss his original intentions and what we can take away from his work today.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Glory Liu (@miss_glory), author; lecturer, Harvard UniversityRe
Can effective altruism be redeemed?
Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with Holden Karnofsky about effective altruism, a movement flung into public scrutiny with the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange, FTX. They discuss EA’s approach to charitable giving, the relationship between effective altruism and the moral philosophy of utilitarianism, and what reforms might be needed for the future of the movement.Note: In August 2022, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s F
The roots of homelessness
Sean Illing talks with writer and reporter Jerusalem Demsas about the causes of homelessness in America. They discuss our ideas of home ownership, and how our country’s cultural expectations and policies are working against us. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Jerusalem Demsas (@JerusalemDemsas) staff writer, The AtlanticReferences:
“The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake” by Jerusalem Demsas (The Atlantic; Dec. 20, 2022)
“The Obvious Answer to Homelessness
Can race be transcended?
Sean Illing talks with author Thomas Chatterton Williams about race and identity in America. Thomas has analyzed racial identity through the lens of his own upbringing, and the performativity and pressures he experienced. In conversation with Sean, Thomas speaks about how he sees these identities as restrictive connections to the racial oppressions of the past, whether it's possible to achieve liberation without sacrificing solidarity, and on the complex interplay between race and class.Host: Se
Is ethical AI possible?
Sean Illing talks with Timnit Gebru, the founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute. She studies the ethics of artificial intelligence and is an outspoken critic of companies developing new AI systems. Sean and Timnit discuss the power dynamics in the world of AI, the discriminatory outcomes that these technologies can cause, and the need for accountability and transparency in the field.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru), founder
What do we owe animals?
Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with philosopher and author Martha Nussbaum about her new book, Justice for Animals. Martha discusses several different ethical, legal, and metaphysical theories for how we humans should treat other non-human animals, and offers her own distinct new approach.Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, VoxGuest: Martha Nussbaum, author; Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, U. ChicagoReferences:
Justice for Animals: Our Collec
Best of: America's philosophy, with Cornel West
Sean Illing talks with Cornel West about the American philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. They talk about what makes pragmatism so distinctly American, how pragmatists understand the connection between knowledge and action, and how the pragmatist mindset can invigorate our understanding of democratic life and communal action today. Cornel West also talks about the ways in which pragmatism has influenced his work and life, alongside the blues, Chekhov, and his Christian faith.Th
Best of: The necessity — and danger — of free speech
Sean Illing talks with Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan about his new book The Paradox of Democracy, which he co-authored with media studies professor Zac Gershberg. Sean and Margaret discuss the relationship between free expression and democratic society, talk about whether or not the January 6th hearings are doing anything at all politically, and discuss some potential ways to bolster democratic values in the media ecology of the present.This was originally released a
The church of celebrity
Guest host Alissa Wilkinson talks with Katelyn Beaty, author of the new book Celebrities for Jesus, about how the dynamics of fame, influence, and new media are changing our experience of religious faith. They discuss how celebrities like Billy Graham set the tone for a lionization of celebrity in the Evangelical Church, why faith leaders cultivate distance from their congregations and build influencer-style social media presences, and share their thoughts on the future of the Church in
Men and boys are struggling. Should we care?
Sean Illing talks with author, researcher, and Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves about his new book Of Boys and Men, which documents the ways that males all over the industrialized world are struggling — and what to do about it. Sean and Richard talk about how this crisis among men has its roots in the progress societies have made toward gender equality, about what has been exposed as the playing field has become more level, and about how to challenge our traditional understa
The power of attention in a world of distraction
Sean Illing talks with Michael Sacasas, an author and teacher exploring the relationship between technology and society in his newsletter, The Convivial Society. This conversation is all about attention: what it exactly is, what its purpose is, and how it is under threat by the technology of modern society and its ubiquitous distractions. Michael calls upon venerated philosophers (like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch) as well as contemporary writers (like Nicholas Carr and Jenny Odell) to
A veteran reporter on how to fix the news
Sean Illing talks with James Fallows, veteran reporter and editor at The Atlantic, about the state of political journalism in America. Fallows has been covering the relationship between media and democracy since the mid-nineties, when his book Breaking the News presciently documented the roots of a growing mistrust in news media. Sean and James talk about the dangers facing the political press today, why national political news is not useful to most Americans, and what can be done to re
The end of social media
Sean Illing talks with technology writer and philosopher Ian Bogost about the state of social media — especially in the wake of Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter. They discuss the recent but surprising history of the platforms that have come to dominate the lives of so many, and note a crucial shift that made social media what is today. Sean and Ian also talk about how Silicon Valley views "scale," whether Twitter should be treated as a public utility, and how — as a society — we might b
If society is making us sick, how can we heal?
Sean Illing talks with Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician, speaker, and bestselling author who has written on subjects like addiction, stress, and attention deficit disorder. In Maté's new book, The Myth of Normal, he argues that the Western paradigm of health is fundamentally flawed in its attempt to separate inner, emotional well-being from bodily health. Sean and Dr. Maté discuss how our society and culture can contribute to illness. They also talk about the adverse effects of trauma, the therapeuti
The free-market century is over
Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New
Your identity is a story you tell yourself
Sean Illing talks with neuroscientist Gregory Berns, author of The Self Delusion. Berns claims that the idea of a unified, persistent self is a kind of illusion, and that we are better understood as multiple selves at different moments in time, tied together by a story — which is what we call our identity. Sean and Greg also talk about whether the brain is a computer, how perception works, the limits of thinking too much about thinking, and what psychedelics can do to disrupt and change
James Carville unpacks the midterms
Sean Illing talks with veteran political strategist James Carville about the U.S. midterm elections — and the surprising success for Democrats that was a far cry from the "red wave" of Republican victories widely predicted by pundits. They talk about why the results differed so vastly from these expectations, what lessons both parties should be drawing from the outcomes, and whether or not the Democratic party, despite their victories, still have a systematic problem with political messaging.Thi
Why are billionaires prepping for the apocalypse?
Sean Illing talks with technologist, media theorist, and author Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Survival of the Richest explains how the ultra-wealthy are obsessed with preparing for the end of the world — and the troubling mindset that leads many rich and powerful people down this road. They discuss the blend of tech utopianism and fatalism behind this doomsday prepping, how Silicon Valley and "tech bro" culture have incentivized a kind of misanthropy, and why the world's billionaire
Today's Republicans were made in the 1990s
Sean Illing talks with Nicole Hemmer, history professor and author of the new book Partisans. In it, she gives a reinterpretation of the Reagan presidency and what followed, and shows how the conservative political movement entangled with media figures and became what it is in the 1990s. They discuss the doomed but influential presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan, the rise to dominance of conservative talk radio, and the enduring dangers of political violence.Host: Sean Illing (@seani
Yuval Noah Harari thinks humans are unstoppable
Sean Illing talks with Yuval Noah Harari, historian and bestselling author, about how humanity came to be the dominant species on earth, and what our future might hold. Sean and Yuval discuss mankind's imaginative "superpower," the threats to democracy across the globe, the future of artificial intelligence — and plenty more.Yuval's new book Unstoppable Us adapts many of his macro-historical insights from Sapiens for younger readers, and is the first in a planned four-volume series.Host
Dying with dignity
Sean Illing talks with reporter Katie Engelhart, whose book The Inevitable is an up-close look at physician-assisted dying. This is the practice of receiving state-sanctioned medical aid to end one's life — a practice now legal in 10 U.S. states, Canada, and elsewhere around the world. They discuss the details of the procedure — including why people fight for this right and exercise it — as well as many of the moral and legal questions that it raises.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gr
Finding hope in a world on the brink
Sean Illing talks with Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, about his new book Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. How can we continue to live a good life in a world beset by catastrophe, crisis, and chaos? Sean and Jonathan discuss the role of imagination and culture in the ways we make meaning in the world, the idea of mourning as a confrontation with our uniquely human ability to love, and how to turn away from the path of despair, towards hope — and to what Lear
The new American Reconstruction
Sean Illing talks with historian and author Peniel Joseph about his new book The Third Reconstruction, which argues that the time we're currently living in can be understood as on a continuum with the civil rights era of the '50s and '60s. and the original American Reconstruction following the Civil War. Sean and Peniel discuss the Black Lives Matter movement, the Obama presidency — and important differences between the two — as well as the dangers of American exceptionalism and the importance o
Is America losing its religion?
Sean Illing talks with Reza Aslan, scholar of religions and author of multiple bestselling nonfiction works, to discuss the state of religion in America today. Sean and Reza discuss the relationship between politics and religion, why it can be hard to separate the emotional experiences of faith from the symbolic language of organized religion, and how new religious identities are being forged along principles of Christian nationalism.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray AreaGuest: Rez
How we got to January 6th
Sean Illing talks with war reporter and New Yorker contributing writer Luke Mogelson about his new book The Storm Is Here. In it, Luke shares his on-the-ground reporting across America — from anti-lockdown protests in Lansing, Michigan, to the uprising in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd — to explain how the forces that animated the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 came to gather strength. In this discussion, Sean and Luke talk about what happened, how it hap
Neil deGrasse Tyson gets political
On this first episode of The Gray Area, Sean Illing talks with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who takes on many of our most vexing societal problems in his new book Starry Messenger. According to Neil, if we all were to adopt a more scientific approach to politics, many of our social problems would be easier to identify, talk about, and solve. In this conversation, Sean challenges that claim, and they discuss what the limits of both politics and science might be, as tools to use in
Introducing The Gray Area
Resist certainty, embrace ambiguity. The Gray Area is a philosophical take on culture, politics, and everything in between with host Sean Illing. We don’t pretend to have the answers, but we do offer a space for real dialogue. Get some cool takes on a very hot world. New episodes drop every Monday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Best of: Why America's obsession with rights is wrong
In this episode originally recorded in July 2021, Vox's Zack Beauchamp talks with Columbia law professor Jamal Greene about his book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart. They discuss how the US obsession with rights and their protections gives too much power to judges and the courts, makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to find reasonable solutions to legitimate problems, and has made this country's legal system not only nonsensical but dang
A GOP insider on why the party went Trump
Sean Illing talks with former Republican strategist Tim Miller about his new book Why We Did It, which offers an inside look at Donald Trump's total capture of the Republican Party. Now a staff writer at The Bulwark, Miller shares detailed conversations he had with other party operators — who he criticizes as power- and fame-hungry enablers. He pulls back the curtain on a DC culture of identity and status, talks about the media's role in this transformation, and opens up honestly about
How do we fix the harm we cause?
Vox’s Marin Cogan talks with Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about her new book On Repentance And Repair, which is about how to make amends in the modern world. They talk about the difference between repentance and forgiveness, why making amends is so important, and how a "five step plan" for repairing harm drawn from the Jewish tradition can serve as a guide even for navigating repair in modern, complex issues. And, merely apologizing . . . is not enough.Host: Marin Cogan (@marincogan), Senior
A new philosophy of love
Sean Illing talks with Carrie Jenkins about her new book Sad Love, and her call to rethink the shape and boundaries of romantic love. In this far-ranging discussion about the meaning of romantic love, Sean and Carrie discuss the connection between love and happiness, what we should expect (and not expect) from our romantic partners, and whether or not loving a person must entail that we love only that person.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Carrie Jenkins (@
The politics of 'Yellowstone'
Into It is a new podcast from Vulture and New York Magazine hosted by Sam Sanders. Each week, Sam and his Vulture colleagues break down the pop culture they can't stop thinking about and help us all obsess . . . better.In this segment, Sam talks to New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom about the popular TV show Yellowstone and how it reflects our own identity politics.New episodes of Into It drop every Thursday.Listen on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/intoitListen on Spotify: https
How society sexualizes us
Vox’s Emily St. James talks with the celebrated author and trans activist Julia Serano about her new book, Sexed Up. They talk about what "sexualization" really means, and why sexualizing behaviors are so pervasive and widespread throughout society. They also discuss why we're so prone to classify and categorize people, how patterns of what Julia calls "enforced ignorance" are communicated to children, and how we might build a society with a healthier sexual ethic — one that better protects marg
The Parent Trap
Sean Illing talks with Nate Hilger, economist, data scientist, and author of the new book The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis. The book explores what is expected of parents, and how a larger public investment in families and children beyond K-12 education could address inequality in America. Sean and Nate discuss parenting, the difference between caring and skill building, the pressure on parents to do it all, and the economic consequences that arise wh
40 Acres: Reaching reconciliation
What good are piecemeal reparations? From Georgetown University, where school leadership once sold enslaved people, to Evanston, Illinois, where redlining kept Black residents out of homeownership, institutions and local governments are attempting to take reparations into their own hands. But do these small-scale efforts detract from the broader call for reparations from the federal government?Fabiola talks with Indigenous philanthropist Edgar Villanueva, founder of the Decolonizing Wea
40 Acres: The old Jim Crow
Why slavery? Marxist scholar Adolph Reed argues that Jim Crow — not enslavement — is the defining experience for Black Americans today. Reed recounts his childhood in the segregation-era South in his book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives. Fabiola speaks with Reed about his experience, his argument that reparations aren’t necessarily a healing balm, and what policies and resources are needed to create a more equitable society.This series was made possible with support from the Cano
40 Acres: $14 trillion and no mules
Paying the price. One of the typical questions asked during conversations about reparations is how to pay for them. Fabiola talks with economist William “Sandy” Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen about how reparations could be executed. The husband-and-wife team lays out a comprehensive framework in their book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, for who would qualify and how the federal government would afford the $14 trillion price tag
40 Acres: The original promise
Fabiola Cineas talks with Nkechi Taifa, the founder and director of the Reparation Education Project, about the history of the fight for reparations in America. Though they came to the forefront during the 2020 election in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, activists have been fighting for repayment for slavery since the practice was abolished. This is part of 40 Acres, a four-part series examining reparations in the United States.This series was made possible by a grant from the Canopy
What Clarence Thomas really thinks
Sean Illing talks with Corey Robin, author of a recent article — as well as a 2019 book — about the life and thought of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Robin discusses how Thomas, whose concurring opinion in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade garnered recent attention, developed the ideological basis of his extremist judicial philosophy, how his views went from the hard-right fringe to more mainstream over the course of his thirty years on the Supreme Court, and how the failure
Even Better: Don't call it a budget
Every Thursday in August, you'll hear Even Better on Vox Conversations, a special series focused on helping people live better lives individually and collectively.In the fourth and final episode, host Julia Furlan talks with financial planner Paco de Leon, author and illustrator of Finance for the People, an accessible, real-talk guide to taking control of your finances. They discuss why it can be emotional to talk about money, the difficult historical realities of financial planning us
The quest for authenticity
Sean Illing talks with Skye Cleary, philosopher and author of the new book How to Be Authentic. The book is an examination of how to live an authentic life through the lens of the life and thought of the great French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986). Sean and Skye discuss what authenticity really means — and how it's often a misused term today, why we should resist performing roles predetermined for us by society, and how to have a truly intimate relationship without surrender
Even Better: Setting your boundaries
Every Thursday in August, you'll hear Even Better on Vox Conversations, a special series focused on helping people live better lives individually and collectively.In the third episode, host Julia Furlan talks with Nedra Glover Tawwab, licensed therapist, relationship expert, and author of the NYT best-seller Set Boundaries, Find Peace. Nedra's focus is on the importance of setting boundaries in your relationships, and she talks about many strategies for doing this that are much more nua
Your gut instinct is usually wrong
Sean Illing talks with former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of Don't Trust Your Gut. Seth argues that the way we make decisions is wrong, outdated, and based on methods or conventional wisdom that lead us astray from getting what we want. Sean and Seth discuss the idea of using data in place of our own intuition and reason to help us through things like online dating, picking a place to live, and being a better parent. Plus, how can we trust "experience sampling
Even Better: Workplace equality 2.0
Every Thursday in August, you'll hear Even Better on Vox Conversations, a special series focused on helping people live better lives individually and collectively.In the second episode, host Julia Furlan talks with author and CEO Minda Harts about how to fight for equality in the workplace. Harts’s work has focused on empowering people, particularly women of color, to find their voice and secure a seat at the table. Julia and Minda discuss the failures of "Lean In" to meaningfully addre
Why we're still postmodern (whatever that means)
Sean Illing talks with Stuart Jeffries, journalist and author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, about why postmodernism is so hard to define, and why — as Jeffries argues — it's still a very active presence in our culture and politics today. They discuss whether our desire should be understood as subversive or as a tool of capitalism, how postmodernism is inextricably linked with neoliberalism, and how to navigate our current culture of ubiquitous consumption and entertainment. W
Even Better: Activism when you don't know where to start
Every Thursday in August, you'll hear Even Better on Vox Conversations, a special series focused on helping people live better lives individually and collectively.In this first episode, host Julia Furlan talks with activist, writer, and organizer Brea Baker. Brea's career has included student activism at Yale University, national organizing for the Women's March, and continues today through action-oriented work on behalf of progressive causes. Brea talks about how her work is informed b
The Supreme Court's power grab
Sean Illing talks with Harvard Law professor Nikolas Bowie about the U.S. Supreme Court's recently-concluded term, which produced landmark opinions restricting the power of the EPA, expanding gun rights, and overturning Roe v. Wade. They discuss how the conservative court's arguments are structured and why they are in fact quite radical, what "legal liberalism" is and whether it has just been decisively repudiated, and whether there are any reforms that could stop the conservative major
How middlemen took over the economy
Vox's Emily Stewart talks with Kathryn Judge, professor at Columbia Law School and author of the new book Direct: The Rise of Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source. They discuss how middlemen — which include real estate agents, stock brokers, but also Amazon and Walmart — came to assume such an outsized role in our economy, the pros and cons of middlemen in different market contexts, why Prof. Judge sees a fundamental difference between Etsy and Amazon, and how we consu
The necessity — and danger — of free speech
Sean Illing talks with Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan about his new book The Paradox of Democracy, which he co-authored with media studies professor Zac Gershberg. Sean and Margaret discuss the relationship between free expression and democratic society, talk about whether or not the January 6th hearings are doing anything at all politically, and discuss some potential ways to bolster democratic values in the media ecology of the present.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling
Hacking coral sex to save the reefs
Vox's Benji Jones talks with marine biologist Hanna Koch about her team's efforts to repopulate the planet's coral reefs through cutting-edge scientific intervention. They discuss what makes coral so unique as organisms, how scientists understand their reproductive behavior, and how they are working to respawn corals and repopulate reefs. Hanna explains why this work is so imperative — not just for the diverse array of marine life that coral reefs are home to, but for the sustainability
The price of keeping secrets
Sean Illing talks with professor Michael Slepian, author of The Secret Life of Secrets. This new book explores secret-keeping behavior and its consequences, as well as how secrecy relates to trust. Sean and Michael talk about what things we keep secret, why we're so worried about keeping them secret, and the toll that secret-keeping can have on us. They also talk about how the issue of secrecy relates to authenticity, and our fears of being judged by others.Host: Sean Illing (@seanillin
Does China control Hollywood?
Vox's Alissa Wilkinson talks with Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel about Red Carpet, his new book detailing the myriad ways that Hollywood movies are affected by China. They discuss how Chinese markets are essential for the budgetary math of big blockbusters, the role of the Chinese Communist Party's censors play in shaping the content of American films, and what this complicated global relationship might for Hollywood's future — and the future of movies in general.Host: Al
Steve Bannon is still at war
Sean Illing talks with Jennifer Senior, the Pulitzer-winning staff writer at the Atlantic, about her recent piece on Steve Bannon called "American Rasputin." Through incredible firsthand access and detailed reporting, Senior shows how Bannon is still an effective media manipulator through his popular "War Room" podcast. Sean and Jennifer discuss what Bannon's true political beliefs might be, the role he played in plotting the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and the role he might alre
The Fortress of Solitude saw it all coming
Vox's Constance Grady talks with writer Jonathan Lethem about his 2003 work The Fortress of Solitude in this recording from a live Vox Book Club event. They discuss the prescient and still-relevant themes of the novel — like the issues of appropriation in art, gentrification, and superheroes, how Lethem approaches "realism" in his writing, and the role of music and comics in both his own life and the lives of his characters.Vox Conversations will be on summer break the week of July 4th,
The Philosophers: Stoic revival
Sean Illing talks with author Ryan Holiday about Stoicism — a philosophy with roots in ancient Greece and which flourished in early imperial Rome — and how it can help us live fulfilling lives today. In addition to explaining what Stoicism is and how we can practice it, Holiday addresses the critical idea that Stoicism is a philosophy for elites, unpacks some of the parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, and explains how being in touch with our mortality can relieve some of our modern
Station Eleven's creator on the end of the world
Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos sits down with Patrick Somerville, the creator and showrunner of HBO's critically-acclaimed series Station Eleven, adapted from the novel by Emily St. John Mandel. They talk about the weirdness of making a show about a pandemic during a pandemic, what it was like to craft the show's intricate web of storylines, and why Patrick's body of work — which also includes Maniac, Made for Love, and co-writing The Leftovers — tends toward the dystopian. There's also a reflective dis
The racist origins of fat phobia
Vox’s Anna North talks with Da'Shaun Harrison, the activist, author, and 2022 Lambda Literary Award recipient for their book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness. Da'Shaun explains the ways in which society's anti-fatness is structural, and connected —historically and politically — to the structures of anti-Blackness that took root alongside slavery in America. Anna and Da'Shaun discuss common misunderstandings and myths about fatness, how these pathologies insidiou
The fight for Ukraine — and democracy
Sean Illing talks with historian and author Timothy Snyder about the war in Ukraine, the stakes for Europe and the rest of the world, and the battle between Putin's autocracy and democracy being waged. They also discuss the enduring importance of history — and of ideas — in shaping events in our world.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder), author; Levin professor of history, Yale UniversityReferences:
"The War in Ukraine Has Unl
The war on trans people
Vox’s Emily St. James talks with Chase Strangio of the ACLU about the assault on the rights of trans Americans taking place in many states across the country. They explain why laws that recently passed through state houses in Florida, Texas, and Alabama imperil trans people — or, in some cases, even criminalize their very existence. Chase and Emily discuss the ongoing legal battles to challenge these laws, the political and social obstacles facing the trans community, and how all Americ
Michael Ian Black on being a better man
Sean Illing talks with comedian and author Michael Ian Black about his book A Better Man, in which Black writes a letter to his son about masculinity, vulnerability, and the importance of empathy, among other things. They open the conversation discussing the tragic mass murder that took place at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Black was inspired to write this book in the wake of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and America's mass shootings are a subject throughout h
Carmen Maria Machado's haunted feminine
Vox's Constance Grady talks with writer Carmen Maria Machado, whose 2017 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties was a National Book Award finalist. In this episode, which is a recording of a live Vox Book Club event, they discuss how this haunting genre-straddling collection conveys the underlying horrors of being an embodied woman, how the nation's shifting cultural mores around sexual violence are reflected in Law & Order: SVU, and how Machado's writing expresses what s
The rise and fall of America's monuments
Jamil Smith talks with Erin Thompson, professor of art crime and author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments. They discuss why we honor horrible people from the past in metal and stone, what effects these objects have on our present, and what's keeping so many of these monuments in place throughout America.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Erin Thompson (@artcrimeprof), author; associate professor of art crime, John Jay Coll
The Philosophers: America's philosophy, with Cornel West
Sean Illing talks with Cornel West about the American philosophical tradition known as pragmatism. They talk about what makes pragmatism so distinctly American, how pragmatists understand the connection between knowledge and action, and how the pragmatist mindset can invigorate our understanding of democratic life and communal action today. Cornel West also talks about the ways in which pragmatism has influenced his work and life, alongside the blues, Chekhov, and his Christian faith.This is the
Why accidents aren't accidental
Vox’s Marin Cogan talks with author and journalist Jessie Singer, whose book There Are No Accidents asks us to completely rethink our understanding of accidents as seemingly random, blameless, harm-inducing events. Marin and Jessie discuss what drug overdoses, car crashes, and apartment building fires have in common, the systemic structural vulnerabilities that lead to accidents, and how we can press for greater accountability.Host: Marin Cogan (@marincogan), Senior Features Corresponde
Rethinking the "end of history"
Sean Illing talks with political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama, whose ideas about the "end of history" and the ideological supremacy of liberal democracy became well-known through his 1989 essay "The End of History?". They discuss Fukuyama's new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, as well as some of the modern challenges facing liberalism today, what Fukuyama thinks of the radically redistributive politics of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and whether he thinks it's still the case that l
Anita Hill finally gets even
Vox's Fabiola Cineas talks with Anita Hill, whose testimony during the 1991 confirmation hearings for now-Justice Clarence Thomas highlighted the prominence of sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances in the workplace. Hill discusses how those hearings changed her, whether or not she has respect for the Supreme Court as an institution, and how her fight to stop gender violence continues today.Host: Fabiola Cineas (@FabiolaCineas), Reporter, VoxGuest: Anita Hill (@AnitaHill), professor, Bra
Elites have captured identity politics
Sean Illing talks with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, whose new book Elite Capture is about how the wealthy and powerful co-opt political movements, and use the language of progressive activism to further their ends. They discuss the history and meaning of "identity politics," the notion of "woke capitalism," and how to arrive at a more constructive politics — one that actually engages directly in redistributing social resources and power, rather than achieving merely symbolic gains.Host: Sean Illing
The moral dangers of dirty work
Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with journalist and author Eyal Press about "dirty work" — the jobs Americans do that, as Press explains, can lead workers to perform morally compromising activities unwittingly. They discuss examples of this kind of work (drone pilots, meat packers, prison aides), talk about its relation to the term "essential workers" that gained prominence during the pandemic, and explain how certain jobs highlight the disparities of class, race, and gender in American society
Did the sexual revolution go wrong?
Sean Illing talks with author and Washington Post columnist Christine Emba about whether or not we need to rethink sex. They discuss why, according to the research and reporting in Emba's new book Rethinking Sex, many Americans are unhappy with the sex they're having, and don't fully understand what they want. They also talk about how her Catholic faith informs her views on sex, why it's necessary to expand on the framework of "consent," and what kind of sexual culture Emba hopes to see
Who decides how to conserve nature?
Vox's Benji Jones talks with Indigenous leader Kimaren ole Riamit about the role of Indigenous peoples in the conservation movement. Bringing the perspective of his upbringing in the Kenyan Maasai pastoral community as well as advanced degrees earned at Western institutions, Kimaren discusses with Benji the power and potential of Indigenous knowledge in combating the climate crisis, and the challenges in bridging that knowledge with the global conservation effort.Host: Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones)
The Philosophers: Loneliness and totalitarianism
Sean Illing talks with professor Lyndsey Stonebridge about the philosopher Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt might be best known for coining the phrase “the banality of evil” in her reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, but in this episode Sean and Lyndsey discuss Arendt's insights into the roots of mass movements, how her flight from Nazi occupation shaped her worldview, and how loneliness and isolation — which abound in our world today — can prepare a
The War in Ukraine, Explained — Part 4: The future of Europe
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the biggest and most confusing political events of our lifetimes. We aim to bring some clarity in this special four-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp, The War in Ukraine, Explained.In part four, Zack speaks with author, political scientist, and scholar of European politics Ivan Krastev. They discuss the reverberations of Russia's invasion of Ukraine across Europe, from a sudden change of course in Germany and elections in F
Michael Lewis on why Americans distrust experts
Sean Illing talks with writer Michael Lewis about why it is that Americans are so good at producing knowledge, but so bad at identifying and utilizing that knowledge — the central issue of the new season of his podcast "Against the Rules." They discuss who counts as an expert, some fundamental impediments to disseminating knowledge, and whether or not there is a possible future where Americans regain their trust in experts, institutions, and each other.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), I
The War in Ukraine, Explained — Part 3: The nuclear threat
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the biggest and most confusing political events of our lifetimes. We aim to bring some clarity in this special four-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp, The War in Ukraine, Explained.In part three, Zack speaks with professor, blogger, and nuclear arms expert Jeff Lewis about the looming nuclear threat of the conflict in Ukraine. They discuss the probability of escalation by both Russia and the U.S., what "tactical" nuclear we
The case for regret
Sean Illing talks with writer Daniel Pink about his book The Power of Regret. They discuss why regret can be not only useful, but potentially the most valuable emotion we have. Daniel and Sean talk about the difference between regret and "wallowing," how to anticipate regrets and act accordingly, and Daniel shares his findings on the regrets that Americans most have in common.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Daniel Pink (@DanielPink), authorReferences:
The
The War in Ukraine, Explained — Part 2: Sanctions
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the biggest and most confusing political events of our lifetimes. We aim to bring some clarity in this special four-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp, The War in Ukraine, Explained.In part two, Zack speaks with Dan Drezner, international relations professor and columnist for the Washington Post, about the massive slate of sanctions imposed upon Russia by the United States and other Western countries in the aftermath of Russ
The spirituality of parenting
Sean Illing talks with the author and self-described mystic David Spangler about parenting as a spiritual enterprise, where the parent communes in a radical way with the spirit of another and expands the limits of the self. They discuss what it means to adopt the "beginner's mindset" in parenting, relating to children as full individuals, and how to cope with obstacles that all parents experience — from misbegotten family dinners, to the perils of getting dressed in the morning.Host: Se
The War in Ukraine, Explained — Part 1: Why did Putin go to war?
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one of the biggest and most confusing political events of our lifetimes. We aim to bring some clarity in this special four-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp, The War in Ukraine, Explained.In part one, Zack speaks with political scientist Yoshiko Herrera about the country responsible for the war: Russia. They explore why Vladimir Putin decided to launch the invasion, what Russians think about the war, and how this conflict might ch
The Philosophers: Resisting despair
Sean Illing talks with author and professor Robert Zaretsky about the French philosopher, novelist, and journalist Albert Camus (1913–1960). Though Camus might be best known for his novel The Stranger, Sean and Prof. Zaretsky explore the ideas contained in his philosophical essays "The Myth of Sisyphus," The Rebel, and in the allegorical novel The Plague, which saw a resurgence in interest over the past two years. They discuss the meaning of "the absurd," why one must imagine Sisyphus h
What happened to American conservatism?
Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with Charlie Sykes — journalist, author, stalwart "never Trumper," and a founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark. They talk about the Republican response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the attraction of some self-professed conservatives to Vladimir Putin, the efforts by Republican lawmakers to ban books and topics from schools, and the devolution of conservative values within the post-Trump GOP.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Charlie
The limits of forgiveness
Sean Illing talks with philosopher Lucy Allais about the nature, power, and limits of forgiveness. They talk about the role of forgiveness in the dissolution of apartheid in Allais's native South Africa, the distinction between forgiveness and punishment, and the prospect of using forgiveness as a political tool in order to move forward as a polarized democracy.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Lucy Allais, professor of philosophy, University of Witwatersrand
The madness behind The Method
Vox's Alissa Wilkinson talks with cultural critic and author Isaac Butler about his new book, The Method. They discuss the transformation that the craft of acting underwent, tracing its origins from Konstantin Stanislavski in post-revolution Russia, through Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century, up to today. They talk about some of the lesser-known influences and practices associated with The Method, evaluate some touchstone performances in the history of cinema, and speculate about wh
David Cross is disappointed in you guys
Sean Illing talks with comedian David Cross, well-known for his decades-long stand-up career, as well as for his role on the cult hit TV show Arrested Development. They talk about the relationship between comedy and politics, whether comedy audiences are different than they used to be, what social media has done to us, and about his new special, I'm From the Future, which is available for streaming on David's website.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: David Cr
Author Kiley Reid on why we read novels
Vox's Constance Grady talks with Kiley Reid, author of the critically-acclaimed novel Such a Fun Age. In this episode, which is a recording of a live Vox Book Club event, they discuss what novels are really for, the ways that we all craft stories in our relationships and personal lives, and the nuanced ways in which Reid takes on race, class, and friendship in her engaging, fast-paced literary debut.Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, VoxGuests: Kiley Reid (@kileyreid), author
The conversation about guns we're not having
Sean Illing talks with firearms journalist Stephen Gutowski, founder of TheReload.com. They discuss the major barriers, principles, and blind spots on both sides of the largely stagnant national conversation on guns and gun control in the United States. The conversation touches on political, legal, and emotional arguments motivating both gun enthusiasts and gun opponents; the Dickey Amendment, and its effective twenty-year ban on federally-funded gun violence research, and whether or no
Why does middle school suck?
Hillary Frank, the creator of the podcasts The Longest Shortest Time and Here Lies Me, talks with journalist and author Judith Warner about middle school. They discuss the history of middle school in America and abroad, some of the formative social forces at play for middle schoolers, why the journey through middle school is akin to a kind of death, and why it is that children of this age — on the verge of adolescence — often act like such... jerks.Host: Hillary Frank (@hillaryfrank), p
Russia's war with Ukraine — and reality
Sean Illing talks with journalist, author, and Russian disinformation scholar Peter Pomerantsev about the invasion of Ukraine. Recorded on Friday, Feb. 25th, they discuss the current state of the conflict, whether or not the warped rationales for Putin's invasion are actually convincing to the Russian people, and what sanctions might possibly make a lasting difference for the future of both Russia and Ukraine.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Peter Pomerantse
Robert Glasper on why Black Radio is back
Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with musician Robert Glasper, four-time Grammy-winner, about the release of his new album Black Radio III. They discuss Glasper's distinctive genre-defying sound, his unique gift for musical collaboration, and how he blends elements of R&B, gospel, and rock to create music that might irk some members of the "jazz police." Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Robert Glasper (@robertglasper), musicianReferences:
Robert Glasper's Black Radio III
Could we lose delicious foods forever?
Vox's Benji Jones talks with food journalist and author Dan Saladino, whose new book Eating to Extinction documents rare foods and food cultures from around the world, showing how they are being affected by climate change, globalization, and industrial agricultural practices. Dan shares many incredible stories from his travels and reporting, including the last known garden growing a unique soybean, a 16-foot high corn that produces its own fertilizer, and a complex symbiosis between man
What Don't Look Up is really about
Sean Illing talks with David Sirota, the journalist turned Oscar-nominated co-writer (with director Adam McKay) of the film Don't Look Up. They talk about the movie and how it was originally received, who the truest targets of the film's critique were, and what the movie has to say about how we can actually solve the monumental problems that we face as a society.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: David Sirota (@davidsirota), co-writer (with Adam McKay), Don't
Democracy in crisis, part 2: The two-party problem
Just how worried should we be about the future of American democracy? This is the question at the center of a two-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp.For part two, Zack talks with political scientist Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. They discuss the history of the two-party system in American politics, and examine a number of possible structural reforms that could work to get the U.S. out of the morass it's in, looking to several other countries' de
Why we can't pay attention anymore
Sean Illing talks with the author Johann Hari about his new book Stolen Focus, which explores what's happening — and what's already happened — to our attention. They discuss how exactly Big Tech "stole" our ability to focus, what many leading scientists say about how we are psychologically and physiologically changed by the powerful new draws on our attention, and whether or not we need an "attention rebellion" to fight back against the tech giants, whose business models depend on us ge
Democracy in crisis, part 1: Ross Douthat isn't too worried
Just how worried should we be about the future of American democracy? This is the question at the center of a two-part series from Vox Conversations and host Zack Beauchamp.For part one, Zack talks with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat about whether or not we'll soon see an increase in violent political conflict in the United States. They discuss the role of bellicose fringe groups in politics today, whether or not a recent spate of restrictive voting laws constitute creeping authoritariani
Pod Save the Democrats
Sean Illing talks with Dan Pfeiffer, former senior advisor to President Obama and co-host of the Pod Save America podcast, about what is wrong with the Democratic Party's brand right now. They discuss what Dan calls the "Democratic messaging deficit," as well as whether the Democrats' stated values are in line with their efforts while in control of the Congress and White House, and what the Dems are really in store for in the midterm elections later this year — and beyond.Host: Sean Ill
A Yellowjackets creator spills his guts
Vox's Constance Grady talks with Bart Nickerson, the co-creator of new TV show Yellowjackets, which airs on Showtime. Yellowjackets follows a girls' soccer team, stranded in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 as teenagers — and also the present-day middle-aged women that some of the survivors become. Bart and Constance discuss the role of trauma on television, the process of crafting characters across two timelines, and why the struggle for survival (and cannibalism) fits a story about ado
A scientist's case for "woo-woo"
Sean Illing talks with David Hamilton, a scientist and former research chemist turned author, about his new book Why Woo-Woo Works, in which he offers a scientifically-grounded defense of alternative practices like meditation, crystals, and the law of attraction. They discuss the placebo effect and its far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the mind-body connection, the therapeutic potential of positive thinking, and why so much of what is called "woo-woo" still lies mostly outside t
Imagine a future with no police
Vox's Fabiola Cineas talks with author, lawyer, and organizer Derecka Purnell about her recent book Becoming Abolitionists. They discuss Derecka's journey to defending the idea of police abolition, and what that position really entails. They explore questions about the historical and social role of policing in society, how to imagine a future where we radically rethink our system of criminal justice, and how we can acknowledge and incorporate current data about crime—while still rethink
Novelist Lauren Groff on the other Matrix
Vox's Constance Grady talks with novelist Lauren Groff about her latest book, the National Book Award finalist Matrix, before a virtual audience for the Vox Book Club. They discuss the enigmatic historical figure at the center of the novel, the politics of women-led power structures, and the pros and cons of writing a good sex scene.Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, VoxGuests: Lauren Groff (@legroff), authorReferences:
Matrix by Lauren Groff (2021; Riverhead)
"In Lauren G
Are we living in a simulation?
Sean Illing talks with philosopher David Chalmers about virtual worlds and the nature of reality, and other topics that stem from Chalmers's new book Reality+. In this far-reaching discussion, Sean and Prof. Chalmers get into the makeup of human consciousness, the question of whether we're living in a computer simulation, and — of course — The Matrix. Are digital worlds genuine realities, or will their proliferation lead to a troublesome turning away from the physical world?Host: Sean Illing (@s
Rep. Jamie Raskin on living through the unthinkable, twice
Vox's Dylan Matthews talks with Congressman Jamie Raskin about the tragic loss of his son Tommy, who was twenty-five years old when he died at the end of 2020. Rep. Raskin also speaks about the insurrection on January 6th, 2021, and his role as floor manager for Trump's second impeachment trial. They discuss the passions that Tommy cultivated and shared with the world, the experience of being in the Capitol as it was stormed by rioters, and the ongoing work of the House Select Committee
Best of: Why fascism in America isn't going away
Vox's Sean Illing talks to Yale professor and author Jason Stanley about why American democracy provides such fertile soil for fascism, how Donald Trump demonstrated how easy it was for our country to flirt with a fascist future and what we can do about it.Correction (2/1/21): Professor Stanley suggested in this conversation that West Virginia declined to expand the Medicaid option in 2013. In fact, the state did expand the program and has gradually added enrollment since 2013.Host: Sean Illing
Best of: Clint Smith III on confronting the legacy of slavery
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with author Clint Smith III about his book How the Word Is Passed, which documents the writer's personal journey visiting sites that embody the legacy of American slavery. They discuss the power of this re-confrontation, how to bridge the gaps in education and awareness of America's past, and the experience of Black writers in a nation that is "a web of contradictions."Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Clint Smith III (@ClintSmithIII), Staff
Best of: We need to talk about UFOs. Seriously.
Vox's Sean Illing talks with international politics professor and amateur ufologist Alex Wendt about why it's time to start thinking more seriously about the earth-shattering implications of discovering extraterrestrial life. They discuss the taboos against serious scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial existence, the US military's official UFO report and the inexplicable videos released by the Pentagon, and what the possible explanations might be for what's been seen.Host: Sean Illing (@seani
Chris Bosh on winning (and losing everything)
Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with NBA legend Chris Bosh about his basketball career, his youth, and his legacy. They discuss Bosh’s transition to the NBA, his role on the controversial Miami Heat teams that won two championships (and lost two), and the psychological toll of the injuries that later sidelined him, leading to his retirement. Bosh reflects candidly on his hopes for post-basketball life, and his new book, Letters to a Young Athlete.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspo
The cult of toughness
Sean Illing talks with political commentator and author David French about modern conservatism and masculinity. They discuss the divergence between the Right's view of masculinity and what they fear the Left's view is, how Trump and politicians in his image have changed the conception of manliness within the GOP, and what the continued glorification of these revised ideals will mean for our political future in America.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: David F
Is ethical investing a scam?
Vox's Emily Stewart talks with Tariq Fancy about whether or not "socially responsible investment" is a scam. Fancy is a former executive who led sustainable investing at BlackRock, one of the world's largest asset management firms. The two discuss why these investment vehicles were developed and promoted, the failure of corporations to voluntarily self-regulate, and the need for government action to actually address the issues that ESG funds claim to be taking on.Host: Emily Stewart (@E
The good life is painful
Sean Illing talks with psychologist Paul Bloom about his new book The Sweet Spot, and whether it's necessary to experience suffering in order to live a fulfilling, meaningful life. They discuss the rich philosophical history of the question: what does it mean to be happy? They also talk about why some people are drawn to scary movies, whether or not to plug in to the Matrix, and why a good paradigm for a well-lived life might be found in the example of... a stand-up comedian.Host: Sean Illing (@
The father of environmental justice
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with Dr, Robert Bullard, a pioneer in the crusade for environmental justice, about his more than four decades in the fight. They discuss how the movement to recognize environmental civil rights began, overcame some of its early opposition, and the landmark legal case that established a constitutional protection against racist environmental policies and practices. Bullard, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, also discusses how the B
Jill Lepore on Elon Musk's imaginary world
Sean Illing talks with historian Jill Lepore about her new podcast: The Evening Rocket explores Elon Musk and the new form of extravagant, extreme capitalism — which Lepore dubs "Muskism" — that he has ushered in. They discuss the formative role played by science fiction stories, why the super-wealthy are drawn to space travel, and why, according to Lepore, Elon Musk is not much of a futurist after all.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Jill Lepore, podcast ho
E.O. Wilson's plan to save the world
Vox's Benji Jones talks with the celebrated entomologist, biologist, and naturalist E.O. Wilson. They talk about Wilson's sixty-plus years as a leading thinker in his field, how his expeditions studying ant species around the world informed his understanding of human beings, and how his discoveries and ideas have mainstreamed the idea of biodiversity and inspired bold new conservation movements.Host: Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones), Environmental reporter, VoxGuest: E.O. Wilson, author; professor eme
Workers of the world, stay home!
Sean Illing talks with Anne Helen Petersen and her partner Charlie Warzel about their new book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. They talk about a new model of remote work, why Americans have a problematic relationship with work, and how to move toward a rational future (as opposed to a national emergency) of working from home.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuests: Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) & Charlie Warzel (@cwar
How progressives get back in the game
Sean Illing talks with Briahna Joy Gray, the former national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 Presidential campaign, and current host of the Bad Faith podcast. They discuss the practical challenges facing the Left in the Biden era, untangle the ways in which race and class affect electoral outcomes and should influence messaging strategies, and assess the state of the ongoing effort for a platform of robust, material economic changes.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer,
The highs and lows of the "creator economy"
Vox's Rebecca Jennings talks with Taylor Lorenz, tech culture reporter for the New York Times, about the creator economy: what it is, who's in it, and why more people are paying attention to it. They also talk about the hidden toll of running your own individual media company, the elusive term "cheugy," and the perils of reporting on internet culture and becoming (as Taylor occasionally has) part of the story.Host: Rebecca Jennings (@rebexxxxa), senior correspondent, VoxGuest: Taylor Lo
Why Chris Hayes thinks we're all famous now
Sean Illing talks with Chris Hayes, author, commentator, and host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC. They discuss his recent essay in the New Yorker about fame and the internet, why we seek attention from strangers online, and how some German philosophers might offer guidance for our predicament.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes), host, All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBCReferences:
"On the Internet, We're Always Famous" by Chris Ha
The stories soul food tells
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with Caroline Randall Williams, academic, poet, and co-author (with her mother, Alice Randall) of Soul Food Love. They discuss the ways in which the African American culinary tradition is interpreted, how to tell stories through cooking, and why what we cook and eat is inextricably bound up with who we are.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill), author; writer-in-residence of Medicine, Health, and Society,
The paradox of American freedom
Sean Illing talks with Sebastian Junger, journalist, filmmaker, and author of the recent book Freedom. Informed by his experience hiking (and trespassing) along America's rail lines, Junger discusses the paradoxes of a "free" society, his recent near-death experience, and how the definition of freedom can change over the course of a life.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Sebastian Junger (@sebastianjunger), author & filmmakerReferences:
Freedom by Sebastian Junger (
Nonbinary parenthood
Anna North talks with Krys Malcolm Belc, nonbinary transmasculine parent, essayist, and author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child. They talk about what it means to be a parent, our gendered assumptions about parenthood, and the dynamics of gender identity in having and raising children.Host: Anna North (@annanorthtweets), Senior Reporter, VoxGuest: Krys Malcolm Belc (@krysmalcolmbelc), authorReferences:
The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood by Kr
John McWhorter, the anti-antiracist
Sean Illing talks with John McWhorter, linguist, New York Times columnist, and author of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. They talk about the effects of modern antiracism, why McWhorter compares it to a religion, and the societal implications of the way we talk — and don't talk — about racism.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter), authorReferences:
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by J
The overwhelming, invisible work of elder care
Vox culture contributor Anne Helen Petersen talks with Liz O'Donnell, an advocate for working caregivers and the author of Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Making a Living. They talk about the emotional and financial costs of elder care in America, how the burden disproportionately falls on women, and what everyone should know before taking on a caregiving role.Host: Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen), culture contributor, VoxGuest: Liz O'Donnell (@LizODTwe
How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic
Sean Illing talks with Joe Bernstein of BuzzFeed News about online disinformation and what — if anything — can be done about it. They discuss the role of tech giants in the spread of propaganda, why it's been impossible for researchers to agree on what disinformation even is, and how the nature of both mass media and democracy means that disinformation is here to stay.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein), Senior Reporter, BuzzFeed News
Fannie Lou Hamer and the meaning of freedom
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with Keisha Blain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America. They discuss the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper-turned-civil-rights-activist, whose speech about voting rights at the 1964 Democratic National Convention changed how the Democratic Party viewed Black activism. They talk about how Hamer's ideas influence movements for human rights and racial eq
What the internet took from us
Sean Illing talks with writer and New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul about her book 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet and the ways, big and small, that the internet has changed our lives. They talk about the complicated relationship between change, innovation and loss, and how to understand who we are and who we've become in a world where we're never truly offline.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Pamela Paul (@PamelaPaulNYT), author and editor
Trapped inside with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
Vox's Constance Grady talks with novelist Susanna Clarke about her latest book, Piranesi, before a virtual audience for the Vox Book Club. They discuss how Clarke's novel engages with themes that have come to characterize the pandemic experience, such as solitude, confinement, and isolation from society. They explore the idea of being forced to step away from the world. and what we lose — and gain — when we do.Host: Constance Grady (@constancegrady), staff writer, VoxGuests: Susanna Cla
Bryan Stevenson on the legacy of enslavement
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with attorney, author, and activist Bryan Stevenson about the newly expanded Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. They discuss the museum's project to connect America's history of enslavement with the contemporary realities of voter suppression, police brutality, and mass incarceration. They also talk about the museum's relationship to Stevenson's work with the Equal Justice Initiative, and legal advocacy on behalf of the wrongfully convicted.Host: Jamil Smith (
What's your status?
Sean Illing talks with writer Will Storr about his new book The Status Game, and its central idea: all human beings are constantly competing for status. They discuss how certain aspects of society "supercharge" our innate drive for status, how social media has hijacked these impulses, and the risks posed by the status game's most dangerous players.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Will Storr (@wstorr), author and journalistReferences:
The Status Game: On Social Posi
Is there a hack for enlightenment?
Vox's Sigal Samuel talks with scholars and authors Wesley Wildman and Kate Stockly about their book, Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering. They discuss high-tech tools like brain stimulation and neurofeedback-guided meditation that purport to enrich our spiritual lives, what possible risks they may pose to our psyches, and the ethical implications of technology-induced shortcuts to transformative meditative states. They also talk about
Fighting a world on fire with fire
Sean Illing talks with climate scholar Andreas Malm about his book How to Blow Up A Pipeline. They discuss the failure of decades of protests and appeals to curb the actions of the fossil fuel industry. And they explore why, despite dire evidence like the increasingly common scourge of wildfires and disastrous weather events, the climate change movement hasn't moved beyond peaceful protest — and why Malm argues the time for escalation is now.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, Vo
Revolutionary Love
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with author, activist, and filmmaker Valarie Kaur about her memoir See No Stranger and the Revolutionary Love Project. They discuss Kaur's personal experiences of the racism that followed 9/11, the idea of responding to violence and hatred with love, and why, two decades after 9/11, her project is more relevant than ever.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Valarie Kaur (@valariekaur), author, activist, and filmmakerReferences:
See N
How to make meaning out of suffering
Vox’s Sean Illing talks with David Wolpe, senior rabbi of the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, about the role and nature of God, how religion and spirituality can address our modern problems, and how to make sense and meaning out of the suffering and pain we experience. This episode was recorded in the summer of 2020 and first appeared as part of the Future Perfect series The Way Through.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe), senior rabbi at
Ken Burns's latest on The Greatest
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with acclaimed documentary filmmakers Ken and Sarah Burns. The father-daughter team discuss their latest documentary about The Greatest, Muhammad Ali, trying to say something new about a famous and already well-documented figure, how to tell the best story from 500 hours of raw footage, and what it's like when filmmaking centered around American history is the family business.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuests: Ken Burns (@KenBurns)
The road from 9/11 to Donald Trump
Sean Illing talks with national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of the new book Reign of Terror. They discuss the staggering changes to our country in the 20 years since 9/11; the flaws, misdeeds, and injustices of the “war on terror” and the regimes that have executed it; and how America was led by the worst act of domestic terror on its own soil down a vicious, bellicose, and anti-democratic path to an authoritarian president like Trump.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Wr
Rep. Pramila Jayapal on immigrants and America after 9/11
Aarti Shahani, host of the WBEZ Chicago podcast Art of Power and author of the memoir Here We Are, talks with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) about how 9/11 changed the relationship between immigrants and America. They discuss Jayapal's experience on 9/11 as a first-generation Indian migrant, as well as how her reaction to the attacks and their aftermath shaped her political trajectory and professional career as an activist — and, eventually, a member of Congress.Host: Aarti Shahani (@aarti
Why America's obsession with rights is wrong
Vox's Zack Beauchamp talks with Columbia law professor Jamal Greene about his book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart. They discuss how the US obsession with rights and their protections gives too much power to judges and the courts, makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to find reasonable solutions to legitimate problems, and has made this country's legal system not only nonsensical but dangerous.Host: Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp), Senio
The news is by — and for — rich, white liberals
Vox’s Sean Illing talks with professor and media researcher Nikki Usher about her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue, which documents systemic problems in the ways journalists and institutions decide what counts as news and whom the news is for. They discuss racial, gender, and class biases in the industry, developing a “post-newspaper consciousness,” and the role of place in shaping our civic life.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Nikki Usher (@nikk
Clint Smith III on confronting the legacy of slavery
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with author Clint Smith III about his book How the Word Is Passed, which documents the writer's personal journey visiting sites that embody the legacy of American slavery. They discuss the power of this re-confrontation, how to bridge the gaps in education and awareness of America's past, and the experience of Black writers in a nation that is "a web of contradictions."Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Clint Smith III (@ClintSmithII
Was the cruelty the point?
Vox's Sean Illing talks with Adam Serwer, whose new book The Cruelty Is the Point documents the role of cruelty in American politics, the way it was weaponized by the GOP during the Trump administration, and how these tactics could continue to shape the future of America.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer), staff writer, The AtlanticReferences:
The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump's America by Adam Serwer (One Worl
How seashells shaped the world — and predict our future
Vox's Benji Jones talks with author and environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett about seashells and her new book, The Sound of the Sea. They discuss the evolutionary function and human appeal of seashells, the surprising role shells played in ancient trade and commerce, and how climate change threatens the creatures that call them home.Host: Benji Jones (@BenjiSJones), Environmental reporter, VoxGuest: Cynthia Barnett (@cynthiabarnett), authorReferences:
“Seashells changed the world.
Bill Maher on free speech, comedy, and his haters
Vox's Sean Illing talks with comedian Bill Maher about the risks and challenges of political comedy today, free speech, and whether ideology undermines humor. They discuss how Maher — who's been out front on issues like animal rights and climate change — has become such a lightning rod for a certain species of progressive.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Bill Maher (@billmaher), comedian; host of Real Time with Bill MaherReferences:
Real Time with Bill Mah
Robert Reich wants you to take on the system
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with former labor secretary, author, and social media gadfly Robert Reich about how our elected officials have fallen victim to the interests of the wealthy, what the pandemic exposed about our political and economic systems, and his vision of healthy civic education.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Robert Reich (@RBReich), Professor of Public Policy, UC Berkeley; co-founder, Inequality MediaReferences:
The System: Who Rigged It,
Marty Baron on the future of news
Vox's Sean Illing talks with former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron about the state of journalism. They discuss Baron's post-retirement reflections on both the Post and the profession at large, what's gone wrong with the way news gets made in this country, and how deep the problems we're facing really are.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Marty Baron (@PostBaron), former Executive Editor, Washington PostReferences:
"Marty Baron, executive editor who ove
The death of cool
Vox culture contributor Anne Helen Petersen talks with writer Safy-Hallan Farah about the concept of 'cool.' They discuss different generations' approaches to determining what's cool, how the concept of 'cool' gets tangled up with class, capital, and consumption, and the ineffable process of cultivating taste in a digital world, where nothing's obscure and everything's available.Host: Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen), culture contributor, VoxGuest: Safy-Hallan Farah (@SafyHallanFarah), writer an
We need to talk about UFOs. Seriously.
Vox's Sean Illing talks with international politics professor and amateur ufologist Alex Wendt about why it's time to start thinking more seriously about the earth-shattering implications of discovering extraterrestrial life. They discuss the taboos against serious scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial existence, the US military's official UFO report and the inexplicable videos released by the Pentagon, and what the possible explanations might be for what's been seen.Host: Sean Illing (@seani
Philadelphia's progressive prosecutor
Vox's Jamil Smith talks with Larry Krasner, the former civil rights attorney who's been district attorney of Philadelphia since 2018. They talk about the bold agenda of criminal justice reform that Krasner's office has been trying to implement, the recent upturn in violent crime across the country, and how to stare down the seemingly unshakable system and make real change happen.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Larry Krasner (@DA_LarryKrasner), District A
Fareed Zakaria on the fate of democracy
Vox's Sean Illing talks with CNN's Fareed Zakaria about the global trend in democratic decline, and whether we should worry about America. They discuss why the Republican Party has become an existential threat to our constitutional system, whether he thinks Democrats are capable of rising to the challenge, and what reasons we have for optimism.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria), Host of CNN's GPS, Washington Post columnistRefere
Jane Goodall on the power of hope
Vox's Sigal Samuel talks with world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall about what six decades of studying chimpanzees has taught her about humans. They discuss the work people can do to protect animals and the environment, and the immense power of hope.Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, VoxGuest: Jane Goodall (@JaneGoodallInst), primatologist and authorReferences:
Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965)
Jane (dir. Brett Morgen; 2018)
The Mentality of Apes by W
Why we love drugs
Vox's Sean Illing talks with author Michael Pollan about his new book This Is Your Mind on Plants, why some societies condemn drugs that other societies condone, what will happen as the war on drugs draws to a close, and whether or not taking psychedelic drugs can improve humankind.We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes about five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: vox.com/surveyHost: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews
The rugged majesty of revision
Vox's Jamil Smith speaks with novelist and author Kiese Laymon in a far-ranging conversation about Laymon's reacquiring the rights to his own books, the struggle of retelling our own stories, and the challenges of articulating American narratives that include all Americans accurately.Host: Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Kiese Laymon (@KieseLaymon), authorReferences:
"What we owe and are owed" by Kiese Laymon (Vox; May 17)
Long Division by Kiese Laymon (Scribner; 20
How to forgive
Vox's Sean Illing talks with Elizabeth Bruenig about how hard it is to forgive, how to balance our desire for justice with our humanity, and about how the age-old moral framework of forgiveness has met new challenges in the modern forum of social media.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig), staff writer, The AtlanticReferences:
“Not that Innocent” by Elizabeth Bruenig (The Atlantic; June 9)
“The Man I Saw Them Kill” by Elizabeth B
What makes a great conversation?
Here's a look ahead at what's to come for Vox Conversations. Vox's Sean Illing welcomes colleague Jamil Smith to the podcast as an additional regular host. They talk about what drew each of them into journalism, their shared craft of interviewing, and about what qualities make for great conversations. Plus, they share some of the ideas and upcoming guests they're looking forward to in the coming weeks.Look for new episodes of Vox Conversations twice a week, starting Monday, July 12th.Ho
Introducing: Now & Then
Now & Then is a new podcast from CAFE hosted by award-winning historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman. Every Tuesday, Heather and Joanne use their encyclopedic knowledge of US history to bring the past to life. Together, they make sense of the week in news by discussing the people, ideas, and events that got us here today.Learn more: https://cafe.com/now-and-then/Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6wDS3Y2t0RyQ3ncCUxiNs6?si=nx7w7exNRZ-AWHLv9T1qZg&dl_bra
The science of dating
Relationships journalist and podcast host Andrea Silenzi talks with Logan Ury, behavioral scientist-turned-dating coach, and author of How to Not Die Alone. They discuss the decision-making that gets in the way of our dating lives, the case for finding a life partner, and what dating looks like in a post-pandemic, app-driven world.Host: Andrea Silenzi (@andreasilenzi), podcast host Guest: Logan Ury (@loganury), author; director of relationship science, HingeReferences:
How to Not Die
Honoring Juneteenth with Ibram X. Kendi
In this special edition of Vox Conversations in honor of the Juneteenth holiday, Vox race reporter Fabiola Cineas spoke with author and podcast host Ibram X. Kendi before a virtual audience about the big ideas around being antiracist. They discussed where we are after a year protesting racism and police brutality, Kendi's approach to defining and fighting racism, and how we all can work to enact change.Host: Fabiola Cineas (@FabiolaCineas), Reporter, Vox Guest: Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram)
Digital dictatorship
The internet was first conceived as a tool to promote free expression, to foster and enliven debate, and to strengthen democratic ideals. But it didn’t quite work out that way. In this episode, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp talks with Steven Feldstein, author of The Rise of Digital Repression, about how governing regimes use digital technology to repress their citizens; the threats posed by surveillance, disinformation, and censorship; and how democracies can backslide into authoritarianism.Host
The man who proposed reparations in the 1860s
Vox’s Dylan Matthews talks with historian Bruce Levine about his book Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary and Fighter for Racial Justice. They discuss how Stevens — a person with anti-racist ideals so far outside the mainstream of his time — managed to be so effective, how he developed those ideals in the first place, and how to continue his fight today.Host: Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), Senior Correspondent, VoxGuest: Bruce Levine, Author; Professor (emeritus) of History, University of Il
What pandemic recovery should look like
Vox's Emily Stewart talks with Janelle Jones, chief economist at the Labor Department, about what's actually going on with the US economy — and who are the workers most dramatically affected by the pandemic. They discuss the tasks ahead in an economic recovery, who should receive the most help, and how to put policies in place that do more than just return to the status quo.Host: Emily Stewart (@EmilyStewartM), Senior Reporter, VoxGuest: Janelle Jones (@janellecj), Chief Economist, Depa
The gift of getting old
Vox’s Sean Illing talks with Max Linsky, host of the new podcast 70 Over 70, which features intimate conversations with people over 70 years old. They discuss Max’s relationship with his aging father, the sometimes desperate search for wisdom, and the contradictions inherent in embracing life, while accepting the inevitable reality of death.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, Vox Guest: Max Linsky (@maxlinsky), Host, 70 Over 70 podcast; co-founder, Pineapple Street Studios Refere
Freedom, and what it means to have a body
Vox's Anna North talks with author Olivia Laing about her book Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Through the surprisingly connected lives of artists, activists, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, they discuss the different ways our bodies are persecuted, imprisoned, and policed — and the ways our physical selves can be liberated.Host: Anna North (@annanorthtweets), Senior Reporter, VoxGuest: Olivia Laing, AuthorReferences:
Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador, 2021)
The Lonely City
Why are we so worried about Satan?
Vox's Sean Illing talks with Sarah Marshall, co-host of the You're Wrong About podcast, about the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s. They discuss America's penchant for moral panics, why the country latches onto outlandish stories, and what the Satanic panic and its echoes today say about America's collective psyche.Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling) Interviews Writer, VoxGuest: Sarah Marshall (@Remember_Sarah) Author; host of the You're Wrong About podcastReferences:
You’re Wrong About, “
How to be wrong less often
Vox's Dylan Matthews talks with Julia Galef, host of the podcast Rationally Speaking, and author of The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. They discuss how we can overcome the ways our own minds deceive us and change the way we think to make more rational decisions.Host: Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt), Senior Correspondent, Vox Guest: Julia Galef (@juliagalef), Author; host of Rationally Speaking podcastReferences:
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Th
The complicated history of wildlife conservation
Vox environmental reporter Benji Jones talks with journalist and author Michelle Nijhuis about her book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. They talk about the history of the conservation movement and its many characters, the standout successes and ugly truths, and why, even with millions of species under threat, there's still reason to hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How to replace everything in the industrialized world
Climate writer and Vox contributor David Roberts talks with Jessika Trancik, Associate Professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at M.I.T. They discuss many aspects of the vast undertaking to remake our world in response to the realities of climate change. They survey the technologies and innovations that are being deployed in this effort, and talk about what sorts of policy initiatives would be best-suited for the road ahead. While we might feel like our future will be
Patricia Lockwood's big, beautiful internet brain
Writer and Vox contributor Anne Helen Petersen talks with poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood about the experience of being extremely online. They discuss Lockwood's book No One Is Talking About This, writing and religious upbringing, the parts of life perfectly suited to the internet, and the human experiences that glitch the system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Who is the real George Soros?
Vox's Worldly host Zack Beauchamp talks with author and New Statesman editor Emily Tamkin about the life and legacy of George Soros. How did a Hungarian billionaire philanthropist become the No. 1 boogeyman of right-wing nationalist movements on both sides of the Atlantic? They unpack the meaning of the smear campaign against him, and the inherent contradictions of a wealthy man trying to use his influence to make societies more democratic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas
Introducing Unexplainable
Unexplainable is a new podcast from Vox about everything we don’t know. Each week, the team look at the most fascinating unanswered questions in science and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Learn more: vox.com/unexplainable Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unexplainable/id1554578197Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0PhoePNItwrXBnmAEZgYmt?si=Y3-2TFfDT8qHkfxMjrJL2g Learn more about
The border, explained by someone who knows it intimately
Aarti Shahani, NPR journalist and host of WBEZ podcast Art of Power, talks with investigative journalist and author Alfredo Corchado about the US-Mexico border. Trump's actions created a new urgency for the political establishment to better understand the border, and Biden's challenges there continue to grow. Corchado, a former child farmworker and a Mexican-American with identities on both sides of the border wall, discusses the reality, politics, history, and future of the border. Lea
"Wintering," wisdom, and weathering life's darkest times
Vox's Sigal Samuel talks with the author of Wintering, Katherine May, about the lessons we can learn during life's darkest seasons. They talk about our long collective pandemic winter, about how times of retreat can allow for personal and political transformation, and about how we might carry new wisdom with us as we emerge into spring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Reframing America's race problem
Vox's Sean Illing talks with the author of The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee, about the costs of racism in America — for everyone. They discuss what we all lose by buying into the zero-sum paradigm that progress for some has to come at the expense of others, and why the left needs to reframe the country's race problem and persuade the other side with a more compelling story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Who owns the Western?
Vox book critic Constance Grady talks with Vox gender identities reporter and novelist Anna North about Anna's new book Outlawed. They discuss creating an alternative history, reimagining the Western, and having fun with the usually fraught topics of gender and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
A Watchmen writer on race, TV, and tech giants
The Undefeated's culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald talks with Emmy Award-winning television writer and producer Cord Jefferson. They discuss the transition from journalism to TV, delving into Jefferson's move from Gawker to writing for hit shows like Succession, The Good Place, and Watchmen. They also touch on what needs to change about TV writer's rooms, and what our current era of streaming giants and tech barons means for news and pop culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis
Uncovering the history of psychedelics in Christianity
Vox's Sean Illing talks about the the little-known history of psychedelics and spirituality in the Western world with Brian Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key. What role did psychedelic drugs play in the rise and spread of Christianity — and could they save the church today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Biden's immigration architect on racism, reform, and the Obama legacy
NPR journalist, memoirist, and host of the upcoming WBEZ podcast The Art of Power Aarti Shahani talks with Cecilia Muñoz, a former aide to Obama and part of Biden's transition team. It's a conversation about immigration policy reform and the challenges ahead for President Biden — and for a country wrestling with changing demographics, racism, and its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Capitol Siege and American Revolution
Vox's Dylan Matthews talks with author and Revolutions podcaster Mike Duncan about what history can tell us about the insurrection at the US Capitol. Is America experiencing a true moment of revolution? So many republics throughout history have crumbled - could this one be next? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why fascism in Post-Trump America isn't going away
Vox's Sean Illing talks to Yale professor and author Jason Stanley about why American democracy provides such fertile soil for fascism, how Donald Trump demonstrated how easy it was for our country to flirt with a fascist future and what we can do about it.Correction 2/1: Professor Stanley suggested in this conversation that West Virginia declined to expand the Medicaid option in 2013. In fact, the state did expand the program and has gradually added enrollment since 2013. Learn more ab
The Joe Biden experience
Ezra Klein is joined by Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now to discuss our new president.President Biden has been in national politics for almost five decades. And so, people tend to understand the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the centrist Senate dealmaker, or the overconfident foreign policy hand, or the meme-able vice president, or the grieving, grave father. But Biden, more so than most politic
What it means to be a "good" rich person
Vox columnist Anne Helen Petersen talks with sociologist Rachel Sherman about her research into the anxieties of wealthy people and their desire to be seen as "middle class." Sherman's work exposes the flawed stories we tell ourselves about who qualifies as middle class and who qualifies as "good" in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Peter Kafka and Kevin Roose on big tech's power and responsibility
Recode’s Peter Kafka speaks with New York Times’s Tech columnist Kevin Roose about big tech’s power and responsibility - and whether it is going to have accountability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sam Sanders and Olivia Nuzzi on President Trump’s last days
New York magazine's Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi spent the past four years covering the Trump White House. In this inaugural episode of Vox Conversations, Nuzzi talks to guest host Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It’s Been a Minute, about the perils of anonymous sourcing, some unexpected job hazards (self-loathing), and why Trump didn’t ultimately create, but instead activated, the crowd of insurgents that breached the Capitol last week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podca
Best of: We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.
How do you feel right now? Excited to listen to your favorite podcast? Anxious about the state of American politics? Annoyed by my use of rhetorical questions?These questions seem pretty straightforward. But as my guest today, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, points out there is a lot more to emotion than meets the mind.Barrett is a superstar in her field. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General
Best of: Ending the age of animal cruelty, with Bruce Friedrich
You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it.The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on e
Best of: The moral philosophy of The Good Place
After creating and running Parks and Recreation and writing for The Office, Michael Schur decided he wanted to create a sitcom about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What does it mean to be a good person? That’s how NBC's The Good Place was born.Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he
Best of: Michael Lewis reads my mind
Michael Lewis needs little introduction. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, The Fifth Risk. He’s the host of the new podcast “Against the Rules.” He’s a master at making seemingly boring topics — baseball statistics, government bureaucrats, collateralized debt obligations — riveting. So how does he do it?What I wanted to do in this conversation was understand Lewis’s process. How does he choose his topics? How does he find his characters? How does
Best of: Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry
It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this conversation with Tracy K. Smith was that kind of episode.Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning
What I’ve learned, and what comes next.
As strange as it is to write, this is my last podcast here at Vox.In January, I'll be starting at the New York Times as a columnist on the opinion page, doing a reported column on policy and launching an interview podcast. Meanwhile, Vox will be building something new and better atop this show's DNA in this feed.In this episode, I wanted to reflect on the almost five years I’ve spent doing this show. This project has changed my work, and my life, in unexpected ways. So here are the four
Best of: An inspiring conversation about democracy with Danielle Allen
This conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen in fall 2019 is one of my all-time favorites. Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, a philosopher, the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project, and the co-chair of a two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which just this year released “Our Common Purpose,” a report with more than 30 recommendations on how to reform
Michael Pollan on the psychedelic society
On November 3, as the country fixated on the incoming presidential election results, voters in Oregon approved a seemingly innocuous ballot measure with revolutionary potential. Proposition 109, which passed with 56 percent of the vote (the same margin by which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the state), legalizes the use of psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, in supervised therapeutic settings. Multiple studies have found that use of psilocybin in a medical
Best of: Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress
Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior, including most recently Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky works through how a stress response that evolved for fast, fight-or-flight situations on the savannah continuously wears on our bodies and brains in modern l
Joe Biden and "the new progressivism"
It’s often said that Joe Biden has an instinct for finding the political center — that of his party, and that of the country. To understand how Biden has changed, and how he might govern, we need to understand how the ideological context of American politics is changing, and why. Felicia Wong is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank that has done some of the best work on the way the ideological firmament of politics is shifting. Wong believes that the set of
Best of: Frances Lee on why bipartisanship is irrational
There are few conversations I’ve had on this show that are quite as relevant to our current political moment as this one with Princeton political scientist Frances Lee.Joe Biden will occupy the White House come January, but pending the results of two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats either won’t control the Senate at all or will face a 50-50 split. In either case, an important question looms large over the incoming administration: Will Republican senators negotiate with Biden in goo
The most important book I've read this year
If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Best known for the Mars trilogy, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he's become the greatest writers of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likel
Best of: Alison Gopnik changed how I think about love
Happy Thanksgiving! We will be back next week with brand new episodes, but on a day when so many of us are thinking about love and relationships I wanted to share an episode that has changed the way I think about those topics in a profound way. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She’s published more than 100 journal articles and half a dozen books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Chil
Best of: Vivek Murthy on America’s loneliness epidemic
At the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you (we’ll be back next week with brand new episodes). My conversation with Vivek Murthy tops that list, and it has particular force this Thanksgiving, when so many are alone on a day when connection means so much.As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans want
What Democrats got wrong about Hispanic voters
Donald Trump has built his presidency on top of racial dog whistles, xenophobic rhetoric, and anti-immigrant policies. A core belief among liberals was that this strategy would help Trump with whites but almost certainly hurt him with Latinos, and people of color more broadly. Then the opposite happened: In 2020, Trump gained considerable support among voters of color, particularly Latinos, relative to the 2016 election.What happened?Ian Haney López is a legal scholar at UC Berkeley and
Antitrust, censorship, misinformation, and the 2020 election
I’ve been fascinated by the sharp change in how the tech platforms — particularly the big social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and to some degree, YouTube — are acting since the 2020 election. It’s become routine to see President Donald Trump’s posts tagged as misinformation or worse. Facebook is limiting the reach of hyper-viral stories it can’t verify, Twitter is trying to guard against becoming a dumping ground for foreign actors trying to launder stolen secrets, and conser
The crisis isn’t Trump. It’s the Republican Party.
If the past week — and past four years — have proven anything, it’s that we are not as different as we believed. No longer is the question, "Can it happen here?" It’s happening already. As this podcast goes to air, the current president of the United States is attempting what — if it occurred in any other country — we would call an anti-democratic coup.This coup attempt will probably not work. But the fact that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively does not mean
The Joe Biden experience
Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States. And — counting the votes of people, not just land — it won’t be close. If current trends hold, Biden will see a larger popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, or George W. Bush in 2004. Commentary over the past few days has focused on the man he beat, and the incompetent coup being attempted in plain sight. But I want to focus on Biden, who is one of the more misunderstood figures in American poli
Chris Hayes and I process this wild election
This is not the post-election breakdown I expected to have today, but it's definitely the one that I needed.Chris Hayes is the host of the MSNBC primetime show, “All In," and the podcast "Why is this Happening? With Chris Hayes." He's also one of the most insightful political analysts I know. We discuss the purpose of polling, the problems of polling-driven coverage, the epistemic fog of the results, the strategy behind Trump's inroads with Latino voters, how Democrats might have won th
Stacey Abrams on minority rule, voting rights, and the future of democracy
We’re one day away from the election, though who-knows-how-many days from finding out who won it. But there’s more at stake than whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be our next president. There is a fight behind the fight, a battle that will decide all the others. America is not a democracy, and Republicans want to keep it that way. America is not a democracy, and Democrats — at least some Democrats — want to make it more of one. Democracy has, in particular, become Stacey Abrams’ an
Nate Silver on why 2020 isn't 2016
As you may have heard, there's a pretty important election coming up. That means it's time to bring back the one and only Nate Silver. Silver, the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, boasts one of the best election forecasting records of any analyst in the last 15 years. His forecasting models successfully predicted the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 US presidential election and all 50 states in 2012. And in 2016, Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 28
Sarah Kliff grades Biden and Trump's health care plans
There are few issues on which the stakes in this election are quite as stark as on health care. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden plans to pass (and Democrats largely support) a massive health care expansion that could result in 25 million additional individuals gaining health insurance. The Trump administration, as we speak, is pushing to get the Supreme Court to kill the Affordable Care Act, which would strip at least 20 million Americans of health care coverage. There's no one I'd ra
Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.
In 2016, Julius Krein was one of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. In Trump’s critiques of the existing Republican and Democratic establishments, Krein saw the contours of a heterodox ideology he believed could reshape American politics for the better. So he established a pro-Trump blog and, later, a policy journal called American Affairs, which his critics claimed was an attempt to “understand Trump better than he understands himself.”Today Krein finds himself in an unusual positi
What should Democrats do about the Supreme Court?
If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact, and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings; or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican party.Ganesh Sitaraman is a former senior advisor to Elizabeth Warren and a law professor at Vanderbilt. He’s also the author of one of the most hotly deba
Marilynne Robinson on writing, metaphysics, and the Donald Trump dilemma
Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest American novelists alive today. She’s the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Gilead — one of my favorite books, ever — as well as Housekeeping, Home, Lila, and her latest, Jack. She’s also produced four brilliant collections of nonfiction essays. But Robinson is not simply a beautiful writer; her work is inextricably bound up with the most important issues of our times: race, religion, education, geography, and democracy — so much so that in 2015, Bara
The case for Trump’s foreign policy
As we approach the 2020 election, I want to make sure the conversation on this show reflects the actual choice the country is facing. So we are going to be doing a few episodes, including this one, with guests who believe Donald Trump is the better candidate this November. I wanted to start with foreign policy because that’s where Trump has been most influential. Trump has successfully broken the previous bipartisan consensus on key foreign policy issues. The way Republicans — and now e
Fareed Zakaria on how Biden and Trump see the world
Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, a columnist for the Washington Post, and one of the most astute foreign policy thinkers of our time. So much of this conversation is focused on just that: How Biden and Trump respectively see the world and want to shape it. In particular, the ways Biden’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s and has changed over the years, whether Trump has a coherent foreign policy at all, and why the most important US foreign policy question is “What is an
How a climate bill becomes a reality
Helluva week in politics, huh? And yet, in the background, the world is still warming, the fires still burning, the future still dimming. There will be plenty of episodes to come on the election. But I wanted to take a step back and talk about a part of policymaking that is often ignored, but which our world may, literally, depend on.In campaign season, candidates make extravagant promises about all the bills they will pass. The implicit promise is the passage of those bills will solve
The meat we eat affects us all
In this special episode of the Future Perfect podcast, neuroscientist Lori Marino helps us understand how arbitrarily we draw the lines between animals as pets and animals as food, and how we might redraw those lines.Subscribe to Future Perfect on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.Further listening and reading:
Lori Marino has done in-depth round-ups of all the research on chicken cognition and pig cog
A dark, dangerous debate
In a special, post-debate episode, I'm joined by Matt Yglesias to discuss the most unnerving presidential debate I've ever seen.Hosts:Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), Senior correspondent, VoxEzra Klein (@ezraklein), Editor-at-large, VoxCredits:Producer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge KarmaPlease consider making a contribution to Vox to support this show: bit.ly/givepodcasts Your support will help us keep having ambitious conversations about big ideas.New to the show? Want to check
A radical — or obvious? — plan to save American democracy
We talk a lot on this show about the problems with American political institutions. But what if all those problems are actually just one problem: the two-party system.Lee Drutman is a political scientist, senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, co-host of the podcast Politics in Question, and most recently the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, which makes the best case against America’s two-party system that I
RBG, minority rule, and our looming legitimacy crisis
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just weeks before a presidential election, leaves us in dangerous waters. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which the election outcome is contested by one side and is ultimately determined by a Supreme Court with the deciding vote cast by Trump's recent appointee. Indeed, both Sen. Ted Cruz and President Donald Trump have named this scenario as driving their urgency to replace Ginsburg. At that point, a legitimacy crisis looms.Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Sen
David French and I debate polarization, secession, and the filibuster
David French is a senior editor at the Dispatch, a columnist at Time, and one of the conservative commentators I read most closely. French and I have rather different politics — he's a Christian conservative from Tennessee and I’m a secular liberal from California — but his upcoming book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, tracks some of the same problems that I’ve been obsessing over for years: political polarization and the way it's cracking Ame
The Matt Yglesias Show
Matt Yglesias is a co-founder and senior correspondent at Vox, my co-host on The Weeds podcast, and my oldest friend in journalism. Matt’s college blog was an inspiration for my own, and since then we’ve worked together, podcasted together, and even started Vox together. I've learned an enormous amount from him, both when we agree and when we disagree.A lot has changed since Matt and I started blogging in the early 2000s — and we’ve changed, too. So we start this conversation by discuss
Race, policing, and the universal yearning for safety
Our conversation over race and policing — like our conversations over virtually everything in America — is shot through with a crude individualism. Talking in terms of systems and contexts comes less naturally to us, but that means we often miss the true story.Phillip Atiba Goff is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, as well as a professor of African-American studies and psychology at Yale University. At CPE, Goff sits atop the world’s largest collection of police
How to think about coronavirus risk in your life
Coronavirus has turned life into an endless series of risk calculations. Can I take my child to see his grandparents, even if it means getting on a plane? Is it okay to begin seeing friends or dating? Should I attend religious services even if they are held inside? Do I have to wear a mask around my roommates? The profusion of these questions reflects public health failures, but we live in the wreckage of those failures. So how are we best to live?Julia Marcus is an epidemiologist at Harvard Med
Black Republicans, Donald Trump, and America's "George Floyd moment"
The Republican Party began losing the Black vote around 1936. Since then, Republicans have commissioned reports, hired consultants, and spent huge sums of campaign dollars trying to win back Black voters. The project continues today: This year’s Republican National Convention presented a lineup of speakers far more diverse than the Republican Party itself, making the case for the “Party of Lincoln.” A third of African Americans, after all, self-identify as “conservative.” And yet, no Re
Andrew Yang on UBI, coronavirus, and his next job in politics
The last time Andrew Yang was on the podcast, he was just beginning his long shot campaign for the presidency. Now, he’s fresh off a speaking slot at the Democratic convention, and, as he reveals here, talking to Joe Biden about a very specific role in a Biden administration. Which is all to say: A lot has changed for Andrew Yang in the past few years. And even more has changed in the world. So I asked Yang back on the show to talk through this new world, and his possible role in it. Among our t
Why the hell did America invade Iraq?
In 2003, America invaded Iraq. The war cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and destabilized the both the US and the Middle East. And for what? Iraq had no WMDs. Even if they had, they posed no threat to us. Why did we do it? What do we need to learn from it?That’s the question Robert Draper has spent years trying to answer. In 2007, Draper wrote Dead Certain, a study of the Bush administration with access to the President himself
How to decarbonize America — and create 25 million jobs
Saul Griffith knows the US energy system better than just about anyone on this planet. He’s an inventor, a MacArthur genius fellow, and the founder and CEO of Otherlab where his team was contracted by the Department of Energy to track and visualize the entirety of America’s energy flows. I had Griffith on the show last year for our climate series to lay out what it would look like for America to decarbonize. It was an awesome episode, but it was just a start. Last month, Griffith formed an orga
Isabel Wilkerson wants to change how we understand race in America
Isabel Wilkerson is an intimidating guest. She’s a former New York Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize recipient, Guggenheim fellow, and hands-down one of the best writers of our time. Her 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, a beautiful narrative history of the Great Migration, was a landmark achievement, and remains one of the all-time most recommended books on this show. Wilkerson worked for years on her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which grapples with a question that has becom
What it would take to end child poverty in America
In 2019, about one in six children in America — 12 million kids nationwide — lived in poverty. That’s a rate about two or three times higher than in peer countries. And that was before the worst economic and public health crisis in modern history. The scale of child poverty in America is a disgrace, not only because of the suffering it creates and the potential it drains from our society, but because it’s easily avoidable. Child poverty is not an inevitability; it’s a policy choice. An
Hannah Gadsby on comedy, free speech, and living with autism
Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby became a global star with her Netflix special Nanette. It’s a remarkable piece of work, and it does what great art is supposed to do: Give you a sense, however fleeting, of what it is like to live inside another human’s experience. Gadsby’s new special, Douglas, takes that a step further: It explores her autism diagnosis and gives you a sense of what it is like to experience the world through another person’s mind. The first half of my episode with Gadsby is abo
What would Keynes do?
The novel coronavirus — and America’s disastrously inept response — has shuttered the economy, leaving factories quiet, businesses closed, workers unable to do their jobs. Pulling out of this hole will require an economic effort unlike anything in recent history. We don’t just need a bit of stimulus. We will need a remobilization. But towards what end?This is the first episode in a four-part series exploring how to rebuild the economy after COVID. Future episodes will look at a Green Ne
A devastating indictment of the Republican Party
For 30 years, Stuart Stevens was one of the most influential operatives in Republican politics. He was Mitt Romney’s top strategist in 2012, served in key roles on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, and worked on dozens of congressional and gubernatorial campaigns — building one of the best winning records in politics. Then Stevens watched his party throw its support behind a man who stood against everything he believed in, or thought he believed in. Most dissidents from T
How inequality and white identity politics feed each other
Conservative parties operating in modern democracies face a dilemma: How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win mass support? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens — the more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who want to tax them.In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that three paths are possible: Moderate on economics, activate social divisions
Best of: Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance
The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with five intersecting problems: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our under
Dadding out with Mike Birbiglia
Mike Birbiglia is one of my favorite comedians. He’s behind the specials. “Thank God for Jokes” and “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend,” the movies “Sleepwalk With Me” and “Don’t Think Twice,” and now the book The New One.The New One is on a subject close to my heart: Fatherhood. Birbiglia didn’t intend to be a father. He didn’t want to be a father. But he became one. And it was hard — on him, on his wife, on his marriage. The New One is a memoir of that time — funny, but brutally honest, and touching o
A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering
In this special crossover episode of Vox's Future Perfect series, The Way Through, Co-host Sean Illing talks to David Wolpe, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, about God and how to make sense of suffering in human life.Relevant resources: Making Loss Matter : Creating Meaning in Difficult Times by Rabbi David WolpeReligion without God: Alain de Botton on "atheism 2.0." by Sean IlingFeaturing:David Wolpe (@RabbiWolpe), senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los AngelesHost:Sean Illing
The crisis in the news
There’s been a lot of discussion lately — including on this show — of the problems facing national news. Cries of fake news, illiberalism in the administration, fractured audiences, the cancel culture debate, shaky business models, and more. But the truest crisis in news isn’t in national news. It’s in local news. American newspapers cut 45 percent of newsroom staff between 2008 and 2017. From 2004 to 2015, the U.S. newspaper industry lost over 1,800 print outlets to closures and merger
Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal
What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be?This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur genius, and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film, where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan. I admire Stevenson tremendously. He has lived
What a post-Trump Republican Party might look like
Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency. Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed w
Free speech, safety, and ‘the letter’
Last week, Harper’s published an open letter arguing that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” The letter had a long list of signatories, and triggered an instant controversy, not so much for what it said as a text as for how it was being used as a political document. This is a hot debate on both sides because it traces the issue most central not just to journalists’ hearts, but to our jobs: Can we speak th
The frightening fragility of America's political institutions
Masha Gessen grew up in the Soviet Union and spent two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, before being driven from the country by policies targeting LGBT people. Watching Donald Trump win in 2016, Gessen felt like they had seen this movie before. Within forty-eight hours of Trump’s victory, Gessen’s essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival” had gone viral, including lessons that in hindsight read as prophetic: Believe the autocrat. Do not be taken in by small sign
Can artificial intelligence be emotionally intelligent?
When we talk about AI, we’re often talking about a very particular, narrow form of intelligence — the sort of analytical competence that can win you games of GO or solve complex math equations. That type of intelligence is important, but it’s incomplete. Human affairs don’t operate on reason and logic alone. They sometimes don't operate on reason and logic at all.In 1995, computer scientist Rosalind Picard wrote a paper and subsequent book making the case that the fields of computer sci
Danielle Allen on the radicalism of the American revolution — and its lessons for today
My first conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen in fall 2019 was one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t expect to have Allen on again so soon, but her work is unusually relevant to our current moment.She’s written an entire book about the deeper argument of the Declaration of Independence and the way our superficial reading and folk history of the document obscures its radicalism. (It’ll make you look at July Fourth in a whole new way). Her most recent book, Cuz, is a searin
Land of the Giants: The Netflix Effect
Land of the Giants is a podcast from our friends at Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network that examines the most powerful tech companies of our time. The second season is called The Netflix Effect, and it’s hosted by Recode editors Rani Molla and Peter Kafka. The Netflix Effect explores how a company that began as a small DVD-by-mail service ultimately upended Hollywood and completely changed the way we watch TV. It’s a fascinating look at what really goes on behind the scenes at Net
Nicholas Carr on deep reading and digital thinking
In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote his opus Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it, he writes, “In the long run, a medium's content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act." Or, put more simply: "Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system itself."This idea — that the media technologies we rely on reshape us on a fundamental, cognitive level — sits at the center of Nicholas Carr's 2010 book The Shallows: What t
Your questions, answered
Believe it or not, we’re already halfway through 2020. What a great year so far, huh? Just a delight. That means it’s time for an AMA. Among the questions you asked:If Joe Biden is elected president, what should his administration's first legislative priority be? What were the best critiques of Why We’re Polarized? How much of today's political conflict comes down to the Boomer/Millennial divide?What’s your reading process?What does preparation for EK Show episodes look like?If you were
Which country has the world's best healthcare system?
I got my start as a blogger. But more specifically, I got my start as a health policy blogger. My first piece of writing I remember people really caring about was a series called “The Health of Nations,” in which I checked out books from college library, downloaded international reports, and profiled the world’s leading health systems. It was crude stuff, but it taught me a lot. The way we do health care isn’t the only way to do health care. It’s not the best way, or the second best, o
The transformative power of restorative justice
The criminal justice system asks three questions: What law was broken? Who broke it? And what should the punishment be? Upon that edifice — and channeled through old bigotries and fears — we have built the largest system of human incarceration on earth. America accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its imprisoned population. Restorative justice asks different questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? And whose obligation is it to meet those needs? It is
Ross Douthat and I debate American decadence
In his new book, The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat diagnoses America’s core problems as decadence: “a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institution and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected.”Douthat argues that there is a kind of ideologic
A serious conversation about UFOs
You may have been following — I hope you are following — the New York Times's recent UFO reporting. Videos that the Navy confirms are real show pilots seeing and marveling over craft they can't explain. And as former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, those videos “only scratch the surface” of the Pentagon's UFO research.UFOs are one of those topics that it’s hard to take seriously because they’re covered in kitsch and conspiracy. But there are those who take them seriously, whic
A former prosecutor's case for prison abolition
In 2017, Paul Butler published the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men. For Butler the chokehold is much more than a barbaric police tactic; it is also a powerful powerful metaphor for understanding how racial oppression functions in the US criminal justice system. Butler describes a chokehold as “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because a body does not come into compliance, but a body cannot come into compli
Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful
The first question I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates, in this episode, was broad: What does he see right now, as he looks out at the country? “I can't believe I'm gonna say this,” he replied, “but I see hope. I see progress right now.”Coates is the author of the National Book Award-winner Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, among others. We discuss how this moment differs from 1968, the tension between “law” and “order,” the contested legacy of MLK, Trump's view of the presidency, pol
Are humans fundamentally good? (with Rutger Bregman)
Dutch historian and De Correspondent writer Rutger Bregman got famous for the lashings he gave Tucker Carlson and the assembled plutocrats of Davos. But his work is far more utopian than polemical. The conversation we had on this show almost a year ago on his previous book Utopia for Realists is still one of my favorites.Bregman's new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History, is even more ambitious: it's an effort to establish that human beings, human nature, is kinder, friendlier, more decen
From politician to priest
I first met Cyrus Habib at a conference a few years ago. You don't forget him. He's a Rhodes scholar. Iranian-America. As lieutenant governor of Washington state, he was the youngest Democrat elected to statewide office in the country. And he's blind.Then, a couple of weeks ago, I read a piece in the New York Times that I didn't expect: Habib, who had a clear shot to be the next governor of Washington, is leaving politics to become a Jesuit. He is going to take a vow of obedience, of po
Robert Frank's radical idea
I’ve known Cornell economist Robert Frank for almost 15 years. And for as long as I’ve known him, Frank has been trying to convince his fellow economists of an idea that’s simple to state, but radical in its implications: social pressure is a fundamental economic force. We are not rational, individual economic agents; we are social animals trying to mimic, and best each other — oftentimes without even knowing it. The failure of the economics profession to see this is, in Frank's view, a
Why “essential” workers are treated as disposable
Grocery store clerks. Fast food cashiers. Hospice care workers. Bus drivers. Farm workers. Along with doctors and nurses, these are the people who are putting their own lives at risk to keep our society functioning day in and out amid the worst crisis of our lifetimes. We call them heroes, we label them “essential,” and we clap for their brave efforts -- even though none of them signed up for this monumental task, and many of them lack basic healthcare, paid sick leave, a living wage, c
"The world’s scariest economist” on coronavirus, innovation, and purpose
The Times of London called Mariana Mazzucato “the world’s scariest economist.” Quartz describes her as “on a mission to save capitalism from itself.” Wired says she has “a plan to fix capitalism,” and warns that “it’s time we all listened.”Mazuccato is an economist at University College London and Founder and Director of UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She’s the author of The Entrepreneurial State and The Value of Everything — two books that, together, critique some o
A mind-bending conversation about quantum mechanics and parallel worlds
While you read these words, the universe is splitting into countless copies. New realities, all with a version of you, exactly like you are now, but journeying off into their own branch of the multiverse.Maybe.Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at CalTech, the host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of, among other books, Something Deeply Hidden, which blew my mind a bit. He is also a believer in, and defender of, the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has t
Why the coronavirus is so deadly for black America
In Michigan, African Americans represent 14 percent of the population, 33 percent of infections, and 40 percent of deaths. In Mississippi they represent 38 percent of the population, 56 percent of infections, and 66 percent of deaths. In Georgia they represent 16 percent of the population, 31 percent of infections, and just over 50 percent of deaths. The list goes on and on: Across the board, African Americans are more likely to be infected by Covid-19 and far more likely to die from it
Jenny Odell on nature, art, and burnout in quarantine
One of my favorite episodes of this show was my conversation with Jenny Odell, just under a year ago. Odell, a visual artist, writer, and Stanford lecturer, had just released her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and we had a fascinating conversation about the importance of maintenance work, the problem with ceaseless productivity, the forces vying for our attention, the comforts of nature, and so much more. A lot has changed since then. Odell’s book became a sensa
An unusually honest conversation about wielding political power
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is the co-chair of the 95-member House Progressive Caucus. That means, in the aftermath of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, she leads the most influential bloc of progressive power in the federal government. And one thing that separates Jayapal from other elected officials: She’s actually willing to talk about it.I know some of you skip over episodes with politicians because they’re interviews, not conversations. This one is a conversation, and it
What should the media learn from coronavirus?
The coronavirus is “a nightmare scenario” for media, wrote New York Times columnist Charlie Warzel. “It is stealthy, resilient and confounding to experts. It moves far faster than scientists can study it. What seems to be true today may be wrong tomorrow.”Warzel is right. We’ve talked a lot in recent years about fake news. But combatting information we know is false is a straightforward problem compared to covering a story where we don’t know what’s true, and where yesterday’s expert consensus b
Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond coronavirus
In 2015, I asked Bill Gates a simple question: What are you most afraid of? He replied by telling me about the death chart of the 20th century. There’s the spike for World War I. The spike for World War II. But between them sat a spike as big as World War II. That, he said, was the Spanish Flu, which killed an estimated 65 million people. Gates’s greatest fear was a flu like that, ripping through our hyperglobalized world. Gates saw this coming, and he tried to warn the world. But the v
An epic conversation with Madeline Miller
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to introduce a conversation on this show as fun. But this one was. I needed it. Maybe you do, too.Madeline Miller has written some of my favorite novels of the past few years. Her books — the Orange Prize-winning The Song of Achilles and the New York Times No. 1 bestseller Circe, soon to be an HBO series — are brilliant reimaginings of some of the most revered texts in the Western canon. Miller’s also a trained classicist, a Shakespeare director, a
The loneliness pandemic/Betraying “essential workers”
We have something a bit different today. Two episodes from our extraordinary colleagues at Today, Explained, both of them close to my heart. The first is an episode that I worked with them on, and appear in: The Loneliness Pandemic. It’s about the social consequences of social distancing, and the toll that isolation and loneliness takes on our health. It's about how the people most vulnerable to isolation are being told to quarantine, and what that will do to their lives. And it's about
Why Bernie Sanders lost and how progressives can still win
The Democratic presidential primary is over. Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee heading into the fall. And this week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed their former competitor.On the left, the question is: What went wrong? How did Sanders lose to Biden? Why didn’t Warren catch fire? But too few of these postmortems have had sufficient data to build out their theories. And too many of them explain away strategic and tactical failures as media or establishment conspiracies.Se
Scott Gottlieb on how, and when, to end social distancing
When will social distancing end? When will life return to “normal”? And what will it take to get there? Scott Gottlieb is a physician and public health expert who served as Donald Trump’s first FDA commissioner, where he was the rare Trump appointee to win plaudits from both the left and the right. Now he’s a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he’s emerged as a leading voice on the coronavirus response. Gottlieb is one of the lead authors of a comprehensive roadmap for wh
Toby Ord on existential risk, Donald Trump, and thinking in probabilities
Oxford philosopher Toby Ord spent the early part of his career spearheading the effective altruism movement, founding Giving What We Can, and focusing his attention primarily on issue areas like global public health and extreme poverty. Ord’s new book The Precipice is about something entirely different: the biggest existential risks to the future of humanity. In it, he predicts that humanity has approximately a 1 in 6 chance of going completely extinct by the end of the 21st century.Wai
Elizabeth Warren has a plan for this, too
In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the first presidential candidate to release a plan for combatting coronavirus. In March, she released a second plan. Days later, with the scale of economic damage increasing, she released a third. Warren’s proposals track the spread of the virus: from a problem happening elsewhere and demanding a surge in global health resources to a pandemic happening here, demanding not just a public health response, but an all-out effort to save the US economy.Warren’s pe
What social solidarity demands of us in a pandemic
There is no doubt that social distancing is the best way to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But the efficacy of social distancing (or really any other public health measure) relies on something much deeper and harder to measure: social solidarity. “Solidarity,” writes Eric Klinenberg, “motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security. It keeps us from hoarding medicine, toughing out a cold in the workplace or sending a sick child to school. It compels us to
Coronavirus has pushed US-China relations to their worst point since Mao
The COVID-19 pandemic is a grim reminder that the worst really can happen. Tail risk is real risk. Political leaders fumble, miscalculate, and bluster into avoidable disaster. And even as we try to deal with this catastrophe, the seeds of another are sprouting.The US-China relationship will define geopolitics in the 21st century. If we collapse into rivalry, conflict, and politically opportunistic nationalism, the results could be hellish. And we are, right now, collapsing into rivalry,
Is the cure worse than the disease?
"We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself!"That was President Donald Trump, this week, explaining why he was thinking about lifting coronavirus guidelines earlier than public-health experts recommended. The "cure," in this case, is social distancing, and the mass economic stoppage it forces. The problem, of course, is COVID-19, and the millions of deaths it could cause. This is a debate that needs to be taken seriously. Slowing coronavirus will impose real costs, and imme
An economic crisis like we’ve never seen
“What is happening,” writes Annie Lowrey, “is a shock to the American economy more sudden and severe than anyone alive has ever experienced.” It’s also different from what anyone alive has ever experienced. For many of us, the Great Recession is the closest analogue — but it’s not analogous at all. There, the economy’s potential was unchanged, but financial markets were in crisis. Here, we are purposefully freezing economic activity in order to slow a public health crisis. Early data s
"The virus is more patient than people are"
Ron Klain served as the chief of staff to vice presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden. In 2014, President Barack Obama tapped him to lead the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He successfully oversaw a hellishly complex effort preparing domestically for an outbreak and surging health resources onto another continent to contain the disease. But Klain is quick to say that the coronavirus is a harder challenge even than Ebola. The economy is in free fall. Entire cit
A master class in organizing
The Bernie Sanders campaign is an organizing tour-de-force relative to the Joe Biden campaign; yet the latter has won primary after primary — with even higher turnouts than 2016. So does organizing even work? And, if so, what went wrong?Jane McAlevey has organized hundreds of thousands of workers on the frontlines of America’s labor movement. She is also a Senior Policy Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center and the author of three books on organizing, including, most recently, A Collecti
Weeds 2020: The coronavirus election
This week, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential contenders Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders each gave separate speeches in response to a rapidly escalating coronavirus outbreak in the United States. What did they say? How do their responses differ? And what do those speeches tell us about how their future (or current) administrations? Vox’s Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias discuss on this week’s 2020 election edition of The Weeds.Then, how will coronavirus impact the general elect
Dan Pfeiffer on Joe Biden, beating Trump, and saving democracy
Before becoming the co-host of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer spent most of his adult life in Democratic Party politics, which included serving as White House communications director for President Barack Obama. But in his new book Un-Trumping America, the former operative levels some sharp criticism toward the party he came of political age in.
Contrary to the rhetoric of the leading Democratic presidential candidate, Pfeiffer doesn’t think of Donald Trump as the source of our current social an
Are you a "political hobbyist?" If so, you're the problem.
Obsessively following the daily political news feels like an act of politics, or at least an act of civics. But what if, for many of us, it’s a replacement for politics — and one that’s actually hurting the country?That is the argument made by Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh. In his incisive new book Politics is for Power, Hersh draws a sharp distinction between what he calls “political hobbyism” — following politics as a kind of entertainment and expression of self-ide
What would a Sanders or Biden presidency look like?
Super Tuesday winnowed the 2020 Democratic primary race down to two candidates: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. So how would their presidencies actually differ? Who would staff their administrations? How would they handle Congress? How would they handle key foreign policy decisions? What are their likely points of failure? How would they change the Democratic Party?I asked my friend, colleague, and Weeds co-host Matt Yglesias to join me for this conversation, and it was a good one. We’ve both cove
Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein, feminism, and social change
Rebecca Solnit is one of the great activist-essayists of our age. Her books and writing cover a vast amount of human existence, but a common thread in her work — and a focus of her upcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence — is what it means to be voiceless, ignored, and treated as a unreliable witness to the events of your own life. “We always say nobody knows, and that means that everyone who knows was nobody,” Solnit says. “Everyone who was nobody knew about Harvey Weinstein.”This con
Weeds 2020: The Bernie electability debate
Welcome to Weeds 2020! Every other Saturday Ezra and Matt will be exploring a wide range of topics related to the 2020 race. Since the Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders has become the clear frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary, spurring lots of debate over whether he could win in the general election. We discuss where the electability conversation often goes off-the-rails, why discussing electability in 2020 is so different than 1964 or 1972, the case for and against Bernie’s electa
Tracy K. Smith changed how I read poetry
It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this is that kind of episode.Tracy K. Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning for it to simply tell me
Barbara Ehrenreich on UBI, class conflict, and collective joy
In the late 90s Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a waitress to discover how people with minimum wage full-time jobs were making ends meet. It turned out, they weren’t. Ehrenreich’s book Nickled and Dimed revealed just how dire the economic conditions of everyday working people were at a time when the economy was supposedly booming. It was a wake up call for many Americans at the time, including me who picked up the book as a curious college student. Since then Ehrenreich, a journal
What Donald Trump got right about white America
Hello! I’m Jane Coaston, filling in for Ezra. My guest today is Tim Carney, a commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In the wake of the 2016 election, Carney began traveling across the country and poring through county-level data in an attempt to understand the forces that led to Donald Trump’s victory. The culprit, he argues, is not racism or economic anxiety, it's the breakdown of social institutions.In his new book Alienated Am
Ta-Nehisi Coates on my “cold, atheist book”
This one was a pleasure. Ta-Nehisi Coates joined me in Brooklyn for part of the “Why We’re Polarized” tour. His description of the book may be my favorite yet. It is, he says, “a cold, atheist book.” We talk about what that means, and from there, go into some of the harder questions raised not so much by the book, but by American history itself. Then Coates asked me a question I never expected to hear from him: Is there anything I could say to leave him with some hope? Don’t miss this o
If God is dead, then … socialism?
Hello! I’m Sean Illing, Vox’s interviews writer filling in for Ezra while he’s on book tour. My guest today is Martin Hägglund, a philosopher at Yale and the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which I consider to be one of the most ambitious and important books in the last several years.We begin by discussing what it means to live a free and purposeful life without regret or illusion. For Hägglund, this life is all we have. There is no heaven, no afterlife, no ete
Tim Urban on humanity’s wild future
I’ve been a fan of Tim Urban and his site Wait But Why for a long time. Urban uses whimsical illustrations, infographics, and friendly, nontechnical language to explain everything from AI to space exploration to the Fermi Paradox. Urban's most recent project is an explainer series called “The Story of Us." It began as an attempt to understand what is going on in American politics today, and quickly turned into a deep exploration into humanity's past: how we evolved, the history of civi
Jill Lepore on what I get wrong
Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, the author of These Truths, and one of my favorite past guests on this show. But in this episode, the tables are turned: I’m in the hot seat, and Lepore has some questions. Hard ones.This is, easily, the toughest interview on my book so far. Lepore isn’t quibbling over my solutions or pointing out a contrary study — what she challenges are the premises, epistemology, and meta-structure that form the foundation of my book, and much of
Is Tom Steyer the solution to our dysfunctional politics?
Tom Steyer has worked for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He made his billions running a hedge fund for decades before moving into progressive activism on causes like democratization, climate change, and impeaching Donald Trump. Now, he is running for president of the United States. Steyer’s primary message on the campaign trial is that we need to get money, lobbyists and corporate influence out of politics. At the same time, he is the living embodiment of much of what he thinks is br
Why We're Polarized, with Jamelle Bouie (live!)
The Why We’re Polarized book tour kicked off this week with a wonderful event at Sixth and I in Washington, DC. My conversation partner for this one was New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Our interview was great, and then the audience questions were so good we had to keep them in as well. We discuss: • Why things were far worse in the “golden age” of the 1950s and ’60s than they are today• Why the key question isn’t so much “why are we polarized?” as “why weren’t we polarized?”• Why “mode
Antisemitism now, antisemitism then
“The bad days are back” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon in the Forward in December, “Orthodox Jews are living through a new age of pogroms. This week, as we celebrated the Festival of Lights, there were no fewer than 10 anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area alone.” Antisemitism is occasionally called “the oldest hatred.” It thrums across continents and eras, finding new targets for old prejudices. But where, exactly, does it come from? Why is it such a hardy weed? And why does this era fee
Book excerpt: A better theory of identity politics
This is a podcast episode literally years in the making. It’s an excerpt — the first anywhere — from my book Why We’re Polarized.A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves.If you’re a longtime listener, th
The war on Muslims (with Mehdi Hasan)
With “reeducation" camps in China, religious disenfranchisement in India, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, street violence in Sri Lanka, mass shootings in New Zealand, the flourishing of far-right parties across Europe, and the mainstreaming of Islamophobia in America, there’s been a global surge in anti-Muslim bigotry — often supported by the full power and might of the state. It’s one of the most frightening and undercovered political stories of our time.Mehdi Hasan is a senior writer for
Post-debate special!
Vox's Matt Yglesias and I unpack the debate that did, and didn't, happen.Related reading:"Joe Biden will never give up on the system" by Ezra Klein"4 winners and 3 losers from the January Democratic debate" Vox Staff"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias"Joe Biden skates by again" by Matt Yglesias"Elizabeth Warren’s new plan to reform bankruptcy law, explained" by Matt Yglesias"The Third Rail of Calling ‘Sexism
An “uncomfortable” conversation with Cory Booker
There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed. But beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.I think there’s a reason for that. When Booker turns his politics turn outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double ba
The conservative mind of Yuval Levin
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the way we often conflate two very distinct things when we assign political labels. The first is ideology, which describes our vision of a just society. The second is something less discussed but equally important: temperament. It describes how we approach social problems, how fast we think society can change, and how we understand the constraints upon us. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at
How an epidemic begins and ends
Introducing season 3 of The Impact!The 2020 candidates have some bold ideas to tackle some of our country's biggest problems, like climate change, the opioid crisis, and unaffordable health care. A lot of their proposals have been tried before, so, in a sense, the results are in. This season, The Impact has those stories: how the big ideas from 2020 candidates succeeded — or failed — in other places, or at other times. What can Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposal to fight the opioid crisis
Nathan Robinson’s case for socialism
“Socialism” is simultaneously one of the most commonly used and most confusing terms in American politics. Does being a socialist mean advocating for the complete abolition of capitalism, markets, and private property? Does it mean supporting a higher tax rate, Medicare-for-all, and Sen. Bernie Sanders? Or does it simply mean a deep hatred of systemic injustice and the institutions that perpetuate it? In his new book Why You Should be a Socialist Nathan J Robinson, the founder and edito
How to topple dictators and transform society (with Erica Chenoweth)
The 2010s witnessed a sharp uptick in nonviolent resistance movements all across the globe. Over the course of the last decade we’ve seen record numbers of popular protests, grassroots campaigns, and civic demonstrations advancing causes that range from toppling dictatorial regimes to ending factory farming to advancing a Green New Deal. So, I thought it would be fitting to kick off 2020 by bringing on Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard specializing in nonviolent resista
Ask Ezra Anything
It’s here. The final AMA of 2019. Among the questions you asked:- If you believe that changing someone's mind about a topic, any topic is difficult, how do you function as a journalist?- What’s your opinion on capitalism?- What have you learned about yourself since being a dad that has surprised you the most?- You talk a lot about polarization. But it seems your audience leans liberal. So how do you reconcile that?- Do you believe in free will?- What’s your take on the left/liberal divide?- Red
Best of: Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle
Here, at the end of the year, I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes of 2019 with you.Earlier this year, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” The second was Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article on “workism.”The two pieces speak to each other in interesting ways, and to some questions I had been reflecting on as my own relationship to work changes.
Republicans vs. the planet
Dave Roberts is an energy and climate writer at Vox and a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He started as his career covering climate science and clean energy technology, but -- for reasons we discuss here -- he now writes just as much about political psychology, media ecosystems, political institutions, and how they intersect with climate change. We cover a lot in this conversation, including:
“Tribal epistemology,” and why it’s c
The geoengineering question
Most analyses of how to “solve” climate change start from a single, crucial assumption: that carbon emissions and global warming are inextricably linked. Geoengineering is a set of technologies and ideas with the potential to shatter that link. Can we use them? Should we? Could they be used in concert with other solutions, or would simply opening the door drain support from those ideas? Even if we did want to deploy geoengineering, who would govern its use? And is mucking with the earth
How to solve climate change and make life more awesome
The climate series is back! The reason for the delay is that I wanted to make sure that this episode was next up in the series. Once you start listening, you’ll understand why. So far, we’ve spent the series talking about the problem we're facing and what the world will ultimately look like if we fail. Today’s conversation is different: It is about what it will take to solve climate change and what kind of world we can build if we succeed. Saul Griffith is an inventor, a MacArthur genius fellow,
Paul Krugman on climate, robots, single-payer, and so much more
It’s cliché to call podcasts wide-ranging. But this conversation, with Nobel-prize winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, really is. A sample of what we discuss:- How economists mucked up the climate debate- What a Democratic president should pass first- The politics and policy of Medicare-for-all- Krugman’s three-part test to determine whether a program needs to be paid for (don’t miss this!)- Why Pete Buttigieg is wrong on tuition-free college - Why Andrew Yang is wron
The moral philosophy of The Good Place (with Mike Schur and Pamela Hieronymi)
After creating and running Parks and Recreation and writing for The Office, Michael Schur decided he wanted to create a sitcom about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What does it mean to be a good person? That’s how The Good Place was born.Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he recrui
When doing the right thing makes you a criminal
For most of his life, Wayne Hsiung was a typical overachiever. He attended the University of Chicago, started his PhD in Economics, became a law professor at Northwestern, was mentored by Cass Sunstein. But then, something snapped. In the midst of a deep, overwhelming depression, Hsiung visited a slaughterhouse and was radicalized by the immense suffering he saw. He now faces decades in prison for rescuing sick, injured animals from slaughterhouses.Hsiung is the founder of Direct Action
Peter Singer on the lives you can save
Imagine you’re walking to work. You see a child drowning in a lake. You’re about to jump in and save her when you realize you’re wearing your best suit, and the rescue will end up costing hundreds in dry cleaning bills. Should you still save the child?Of course you should. But this simple thought experiment, taken seriously, has radical implications for how you live your life.It comes from Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, one of the most influential modern works of ethical philosophy. Singe
Best of: The age of "mega-identity" politics
Happy Thanksgiving! Please enjoy a re-air episode from April 2018 with Lilliana Mason.Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 yea
Because podcast
Gretchen McCulloch is a self-described “internet linguist,” host of the podcast Lingthusiasm, and author of the recent book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. In it, she demonstrates that the way we've come to speak on the internet -- from emojis to exclamation points -- is not random or arbitrary, but part of a broader attempt to make our written communication more vibrant, meaningful, and, genuinely human. Far from ‘ruining’ the written English language, intern
There’s more to life than profit
Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and he’s just released a new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. In Strickler’s telling, our society has been so thoroughly captured by the value-system of financial maximization, that we don’t even view it as such. Kickstarter was an affront to that value-system, a way that groups could fund ideas outside of the realm of profit. And this new book is trying to dig deeper into that worldv
Having a bad day? Dave Eggers can help.
I’ve wanted to have Dave Eggers on the show for a while now. Eggers has not only written a vast range of books (a deeply ironic personal memoir, a heartwarming novel about a Sudanese refugee, a futuristic story about a tech dystopia) but he's also founded the national tutoring nonprofit 826 Valencia, started the literary magazine McSweeney’s, co-authored the screenplay of Where the Wild Things Are, and much more. I’m fascinated by people who are able to do a variety of wildly different things, a
How Whole Foods, yoga, and NPR became the hallmarks of the elite
If you're anything like me, this episode will make you think about the way you shop, learn, eat, parent, and exercise in a whole new way.My guest today is Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California whose most recent book The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class documents the rise of a new, unprecedented elite class in the United States. Previously, the elite classes differentiated themselves from the rest by purchas
How social media makes us antisocial
Andrew Marantz is a writer at the New Yorker who, for years, has been deeply immersed in the world of conservative trolls, alt-right social media personalities, and online conspiracy theorists. His most recent book Antisocial has been viewed as a brilliant ethnography of the bizarre universe that is the alt-right. But I’m interested in it for a different reason: Somehow, these folks have figured out how to manipulate the social media ecosystem that frames our political discourse. Thus,
ICYMI: Edward Norton’s theory of mind, movies, and power
Due to a technical glitch this interview with Edward Norton did not find it’s way into most people’s feeds. If you were able to download the first one this is indeed the exact same interview, but if you missed it please give a listen and enjoy - we had a lot of fun with this one.You’ve heard of Edward Norton. He’s starred in critically acclaimed films like American History X, Fight Club, and Birdman, been nominated for multiple Academy Awards, and, most recently, wrote, directed, and s
Introducing Reset
Thanks for listening to Reset from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episodes were Can A.I. Tech You To Write Better and Quantum Supremacy, WTF.If you enjoyed these episodes, subscribe to Reset for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app to get new episodes every week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What a smarter Trumpism would sound like
Michael Lind is a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the co-founder of the New America Foundation, and an important contributor to American Affairs, a journal originally created to imagine a more Trumpist conservatism.Lind is by no means a supporter of Trump. But, for decades now, he has been developing a coherent intellectual worldview around many of the same issues that Trump intuited, however crudely, during his campaign. He’s one of the intellectuals that the nationalis
The climate crisis is an oceans crisis
Welcome to episode 2 of our climate cluster. The more I prepared for this series, the more I realize there was a big blue gap in my understanding of climate change.Oceans cover 70% of the earth, absorb 93% of the heat from the sun, and capture 30% of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forty percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the coast, and half a billion people rely on oceans as their primary food source. As go the oceans, so goes humanity.Dr. Ayana Elizabet
We live in The Good Place. And we’re screwing it up.
Welcome to the first episode of our climate cluster. This isn’t a series about whether “the science is real” on climate change. This is a series about what the science says — and what it means for our lives, our politics, and our future.I suspect I’m like a lot of people in that I accept that climate change is bad. What I struggle with is how bad. Is it an existential threat that eclipses all else? One of many serious problems politics must somehow address?I wanted to kick off the serie
Neoliberalism and its discontents
“Neoliberalism” is one of the most confusing phrases in political discourse today. The term is often used to describe the market fundamentalism of thinkers like Milton Friedman and Frederich Hayek or politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, critics often place more progressive figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and even Elizabeth Warren under the neoliberal banner. This raises an important question: what the hell is neoliberalism?I decided to bring o
The four words that will decide impeachment
Hey EK Show listeners! Something different today. The first episode of my new podcast: Impeachment, Explained.This was the week of confessions. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a Trump administration quid quo pro with Ukraine, with cameras rolling. EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland confirmed that President Trump made Rudy Giuliani the hinge of America’s Ukraine policy. And then the administration announced that the location for the upcoming G7 summit: Trump’s own resort in
We don’t just feel emotions. We make them.
How do you feel right now? Excited to listen to your favorite podcast? Anxious about the state of American politics? Annoyed by my use of rhetorical questions?These questions seem pretty straightforward. But as my guest today, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, points out there is a lot more to emotion than meets the mind.Barrett is a superstar in her field. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General
How politics became a war against reality
In his brilliant 2014 book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Soviet-born TV producer turned journalist Peter Pomerantsev described 21st-century Russia as a political anomaly. He wrote about “a new type of authoritarianism” that waged war on reality by peddling conspiracy theories, disregarding the notion of truth, and framing all political opposition as the enemy of the people.Sound familiar?Upon leaving Russia, Pomerantsev found that the world around him had been infected with the sam
The loneliness epidemic
As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Vivek Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans wanted to talk to him about the most was loneliness.Loneliness isn’t simply painful, it’s lethal. Several meta-studies have found the mortality risk associated with loneliness is higher than that of obesity and equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. So, Murthy decided to label lonelines
Ibram X. Kendi wants to redefine racism
Racism is one of the most morally charged words in the English language. It is typically understood as a form of deep inner prejudice — something that people actively feel and consciously express. My guest today, Ibram X. Kendi, wants to redefine racism. He defines the idea simply: support for policies that widen racial inequality.Kendi is a professor of African-American Studies and director of the Antiracist Policy Center at American University. His National Book Award-winning Stamped From the
Malcolm Gladwell’s Stranger Things
Malcolm Gladwell’s work is nothing short of an intellectual adventure. Sometimes, as in his podcast Revisionist History, he takes something small and mundane — a hockey statistic, a semicolon, a verbal tic — and draws a broad, sweeping conclusion that shatters your worldview. Other times, as in his new book Talking to Strangers, he takes something big and contentious — the death of Sandra Bland, the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox, the ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff — and produces ins
An inspiring conversation about democracy
Danielle Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, and a philosopher, and the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project. I talk about democracy a lot on this show, but it’s her life’s work.I've tried a bunch of different descriptions here, but they fail the conversation. I loved this one. Don’t make me cheapen it by describing it. Just download it.References:Talking to Strangers by Danielle Allen"Building a Good Jobs Economy"
Samantha Power’s journey from foreign policy critic to UN ambassador
Samantha Power reported from the killing fields of Bosnia. She watched a genocide that could’ve been stopped years earlier grind on amidst international indifference. What she saw there led to A Problem From Hell, her Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of why the world permits genocide to happen. She emerged as a fierce critic of America’s morally lax foreign policy, a position that led to a friendship with Barack Obama, and then a series of top jobs in his administration, culminating i
When meritocracy wins, everybody loses
In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits argues that meritocracy — a system set-up to expand opportunity, reduce inequality and end aristocracy — has become exactly what it was set up to combat: a mechanism for intergenerational wealth transfer that leaves everyone worse off in the process.Markovits isn’t only challenging a system; he is challenging the system that I (and probably most of you) have been part of for our entire lives. For better or worse, Meritocracy is the water we swim in. We i
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 project, choosing schools, and Cuba
“The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones “it has been borne on the backs of black resistance.”Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist at the New York Times Magazine, the winner of MacArthur Genius Grant (among countless other awards), and, most recently, the creator of the New York Times’ 1619 project, which explores the ways slavery shaped America.As Hannah-Jones points out, no group in American history has more to teach us about wha
Randall Munroe, the genius behind XKCD
I’m not usually a fanboy on this podcast, but this episode is the exception.I love the web-comic XKCD. I’ve had prints of it hanging in my house for years. It’s nerdy and humane, curious and kind. And every so often, it’s explosively, crazily creative, in ways that leave me floored. Like the Hugo-award winning “Time,” a 3,099 frame animation that unspooled every hour for over four months. Or the book Thing Explainer, which used only the 1,000 most common words in the English language to explain
Julián Castro's quiet moral radicalism
I’m careful about inviting politicians onto this podcast. Too often, questions go unanswered, and frustrated emails flood my inbox. So I only bring on candidates now if there’s a conversation directly related to themes of this show.In this case, there is.There’s a quiet moral radicalism powering Julián Castro’s presidential campaign. Laced through his policy agenda are proposals to decriminalize the movements of undocumented immigrants, to involve the homeless in housing policy, to esta
Political animals (with Leah Garcés)
Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be an animal rights activist. Tens of billions of animals are being tortured and slaughtered every year. It is, to you, a rolling horror. But to the people you love, the world you live in — it’s normal. You’re the weird one.So what do you do? How do you engage, politically and personally, when so few see what you see?Leah Garcés is the Executive President of Mercy for Animals and the author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change th
John McWhorter thinks we're getting racism wrong
Hello everyone. I'm Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism (Ezra will be back from vacation next week). "Antiracism… is now a new and increasingly dominant religion” writes John McWhorter, “it is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus.”McWhorter is a Professor of English at Columbia University, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, and an outspoken critic of what he calls “third-wave antiracism.” He believes that ou
The rocky marriage between libertarians and conservatives
Hello, everybody! I'm Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism.Today, I'm speaking with Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who has been navigating the fractious divides within the conservative movement since long before 2016.Friedersdorf is extremely hard to pin down. His intellectual hero is Friedrich Hayek and he believes the Supreme Court “ought to thwart the will of democratic and legislative majorities.” He’s also staunchly anti-war, an ou
A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs
I don’t usually begin interviews with the question “who the hell are you?” But, then again, not every guest is John Higgs.I fell into Higgs’s work by accident. An offhand recommendation of his book on the KLF, a British band that burnt a million pounds but couldn’t explain why they did it. What’s unusual is that I’ve not quite been able to climb back out of it. Higgs’s work is reality-warping. Once you put on his lenses, it’s hard to take them back off.At the center of Higgs’s strange,
Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance
The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with five intersecting problems: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our under
The original meaning of “identity politics” (with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of multiple books, including most recently How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of the term “identity politics” back to its very first use.“Since 1977,” she writes, “that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators.” Taylor’s intellectual history is driven by more than curiosity
Are bosses dictators? (with Elizabeth Anderson)
Imagine a society whose rulers suppress free speech, free association, even bathroom breaks. Where the government owns the means of production. Where the leader is self-appointed or hand-selected by a group of wealthy oligarchs. Where exile or emigration can have severe, even life-threatening, consequences.My guest today, University of Michigan Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, writes that workplaces are “communist dictatorships in our midst.” Her book Private Government: How Employers Ru
The Constitution is a progressive document
“The Constitution must be adapted to the problems of each generation,” writes Erwin Chemerisnky, “we are not living in the world of 1787 and should not pretend that the choices for that time can guide ours today.”Does that sentence read to you as obvious or offensive? Either way, it’s at the core of the constitutional debate between the left and the right — a debate the left all too often cedes to the right through disinterest.Chemerinsky is trying to change that. He’s the dean of UC Berkeley’s
Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care
The Democratic primary has been unexpectedly dominated by a single question: Will you abolish private health insurance?Wrapped in that question are dozens more. Why, if private health insurance is such a mess, do polls show most Americans want to keep it? What lessons should we take from the failure of past efforts at health reform? What does it mean to say “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it?”Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project, is firmly in su
Can Raj Chetty save the American dream?
I don’t ordinarily find myself scrambling to write down article ideas during these conversations, but almost everything Raj Chetty says is worth a feature unto itself. For instance:- Great Kindergarten teachers generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in future earnings for their students- Solving poverty would increase life expectancy by more — far more — than curing cancer- Public investment focused on children often pays for itself- The American dream is more alive in Canada than in
Astra Taylor will change how you think about democracy
Astra Taylor’s new book has the best title I’ve seen in a long time: Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.I talk a lot about democracy on this show, but not in the way Taylor talks about it. The democracy I discuss is bounded by the assumptions of American politics. This, however, is not a conversation about the filibuster, the Senate, or the Electoral College — it is far more diverse and far more radical.Taylor and I cover a lot of ground in this interview. We disc
Is big tech addictive? Nir Eyal and I debate.
“How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?”That’s the opening line of the description for Nir Eyal’s bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Hooked became a staple in Silicon Valley circles — it was even recommended to me when I started Vox — and Eyal became a celebrity.Today, Silicon Valley’s skill at building habit-forming products is looked on more skeptically, to say the least. So I was interested to see him releasing a second book
Generation Climate Change
This is one of those episodes I want to put the hard sell on. It’s one of the most important conversations I’ve had on the show. The fact that it left me feeling better about the world rather than worse — that was shocking.Varshini Prakash is co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement. Sunrise is part of a new generation of youth-led climate-change movements that emerged out of the failure of the global political system to address the climate crisis. They’re the ones who made the
Is the media amplifying Trump’s racism? (with Whitney Phillips)
Some podcasts I do are easy. There’s a problem and, hey look, here’s a great answer! Some are hard. There’s a problem and, well, there may not be a good answer. This is one of those.When Donald Trump tweeted that four new Democratic members of Congress (commonly known as ‘the Squad’) should “go back” to the “corrupt” countries he said they are from, the media went into frenzy. When he said he didn’t worry if the comment was racist, because “many people agree with me,” it got worse. Trum
Rutger Bregman’s utopias, and mine
Universal basic income. A 15-hour work week. Open borders.These ideas may strike you as crazy, fantastical, maybe even utopian... but that’s exactly the point.My guest today is Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, whose book Utopia for Realists is not only about utopian visions but about the importance of utopian thinking. Imagining utopia, he writes, “isn’t an attempt to predict the future. It’s an attempt to unlock the future. To fling open the windows of our minds.”He’s right. And so this
How white identity politics won the Republican civil war
Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage documents “the Republican Civil War”: a decade-plus struggle over whether the Republican Party would build itself around white identity politics or try to reach out to a changing America.Trump’s election settled the argument, and Alberta’s book tracks the way top Republicans processed that resolution — and submitted to their new reality — in real time. The profiles in courage are few and far between; the capitulations, however, are everywhere. Alb
George Will makes the conservative case against democracy
It’s a good time to be a Republican. But it’s a bad time, George Will argues, to be a conservative. Hence his new, 700-page manifesto, The Conservative Sensibility, which tries to rescue conservatism from the perversions of the Trumpist GOP.Will’s conservatism is rooted in a deep mistrust of majority rule, and an almost religious veneration of the Founding Fathers, or at least a certain understanding of them. Remember, he writes, “the Constitution of the first consciously modern nation,
What deliberative democracy can, and can’t, do (with Jane Mansbridge)
Every time I do an episode on polarization, I get a few emails asking: What about deliberative democracy? Couldn’t that be an answer?Deliberative democracy, if you’re not familiar, refers to a broad set of approaches in which citizens get together, with or without their representatives, to deliberate on political questions. Not just vote, or donate money, but actually work through hard questions, in a structured process, together.Jane Mansbridge is the Charles F. Adams professor of poli
Rod Dreher on America’s post-Christian culture war [CORRECTED]
[A quick note about this episode - we have fixed an error that caused some listeners to hear overlapping audio in the first portion of the show. Thank you for your understanding, and we're sorry for the issue]In 2017, Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option, a book arguing that America has grown so hostile to Orthodox Christian practice and morals that believers need to retreat into sealed communities to wait out the cultural storm. It’s a window into a mindset that is increasingly pow
White threat in a browning America (Jennifer Richeson re-air)
This conversation with Yale psychologist and MacArthur genius Jennifer Richeson first appeared a year ago, and it’s one of my favorites. But I wanted to repost it now for two reasons.First, it’s as a necessary companion to Monday’s conversation with Robert Jones over changing religious dynamics. Richeson focuses on racial demographic change, and in particular, how the perception of losing demographic power pushes people’s politics in a sharply conservative direction. I don’t think it’s
Behind the panic in white, Christian America
About seven in 10 American seniors are white Christians. Among young adults, fewer than three in 10 are. During the span of the Obama administration, America went from a majority white Christian nation to one where white Christians are a minority. That’s an earthquake, and we’re living in the aftershocks.This is a story that Robert Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute, tells in his book The End of White Christian America. Much of Donald Trump’s support is driven by
An enlightening, frustrating conversation on liberalism (with Adam Gopnik)
“Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.”That’s from Adam Gopnik’s new book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. It is, by turns, a bracing, charming, insightful, irksome defense of the most successful political movement of our age. Liberalism is so successful, in fact, that its ac
The cognitive cost of poverty (with Sendhil Mullainathan)
If you’re a Parks and Rec fan, you’ll remember Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness. Right there at the base sits “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.”It’s a joke, but not really. Few want to justify the existence of poverty, but when they do, that's how they do it. People in poverty just aren’t smart enough, or hard-working enough, or they’re not making good enough decisions. There’s a moral void in that logic to begin with — but it also gets the reality largely bac
Failing towards Utopia
Nice Try! is a new podcast from Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network that explores stories of people who have tried to design a better world, and what happens when those designs don't go according to plan. Season one, Utopian, follows Avery Trufelman on her quest to understand the perpetual search for the perfect place. Enjoy this special conversation between Ezra and Avery and an excerpt from the recent episode Oneida: Utopia, LLC, and subscribe to Nice Try! for free in your favori
Why liberals and conservatives create such different media (with Danna Young)
The debate over polarized media can make the two ecosystems sound equivalent. One is left, the other right, but otherwise they’re the same. That couldn’t be more wrong. They’re structured differently, they work differently, they value different things, they’re built atop different aesthetics. And behind all these differences is something we don’t talk about enough: their audiences, and what those audiences demand.Danna Young is an associate professor of communications at the University
Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo (Live!)
“The phrase ‘identity politics’ is a weaponization of the Democrats’ structural advantage in elections from now until eternity,” says Stacey Abrams.In this live interview from 2019’s Code conference, Kara Swisher and I sat down with Abrams and her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo. Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, but became a Democratic superstar in the process. She was tapped to give the party’s response to Trump’s State of the Union, and she’s mentioned often as
This changed how I think about love (with Alison Gopnik)
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She’s published more than 100 journal articles and half a dozen books. She runs a cognitive development and learning lab where she studies how young children come to understand the world around them, and she’s built on that research to do work in AI, to understand how adults form bonds with both children and each other, and to examine what creativity is and how we can nurture it in oursel
The plan behind Elizabeth Warren’s plans
Oligarchic capitalism? Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that. Opioid deaths? She’s got a plan for that too. Same is true for high housing costs, offshoring, child care, breaking up Big Tech, curbing congressional corruption, indicting presidents, strengthening reproductive rights, forgiving student loans, providing debt relief to Puerto Rico, and fixing the love lives of some of her Twitter followers. Seriously.But how is Warren going to pass any of these plans? Which policy would she prioritize?
Michael Lewis reads my mind
Michael Lewis needs little introduction. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, The Fifth Risk. He’s the host of the new podcast “Against the Rules.” He’s a master at making seemingly boring topics — baseball statistics, government bureaucrats, collateralized debt obligations — riveting. So how does he do it?What I wanted to do in this conversation was understand Lewis’s process. How does he choose his topics? How does he find his characters? How does
How Mitch McConnell convinced Michael Bennet to run for president
I’m not sure what I expected Sen. Michael Bennet’s answer to be when I asked him why he was running for president. I didn’t expect it to be “Mitch McConnell.”Since arriving in the Senate in 2009, Bennet has built a reputation as a senator’s senator. He’s smart and measured, thoughtful on policy, and good at working across the aisle. I’ve had colleagues of his tell me they wish he’d run for president, that he’s the kind of guy the country needs. But Bennet’s been radicalized. He believes
How the brains of master meditators change
Richie Davidson has spent a lifetime studying meditation. He’s studied it as a practitioner, sitting daily, going on retreats, and learning under masters. And he’s pioneered the study of it as a scientist, working with the Dalai Lama to bring master meditators into his lab at the University of Wisconsin and quantifying the way thousands of hours of meditation changed their brains.The word “meditation,” Davidson is quick to note, is akin to the word “sports”: It describes a huge range of pursuits
Why good people are easily corrupted (with Lawrence Lessig)
I’ve been learning from, and arguing with, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig for a decade now. We have a long-running debate over whether money or polarization is the root cause of our political ills. But our debate works because we share a crucial belief: Bad institutions overwhelm good individuals.In his latest book, America, Compromised, Lessig is doing something ambitious: He’s offering a new definition of institutional corruption, then showing how it plays out in politics, academia, the
The art of attention (with Jenny Odell)
“For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers.”Odell is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. And she’s a visual artist who has taught digital and physical design at Stanford since 2013, as well as done residencies at Facebook, the San Francisco Plannin
Matt Yglesias and Jenny Schuetz solve the housing crisis
In this special crossover episode, Brookings Institution’s Jenny Schuetz joins The Weeds’ Matt Yglesias to discuss subsidies, zoning reform, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What kind of news is cable news? (With Brian Stelter)
Brian Stelter is the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, as well as the network’s chief media correspondent. But before he was the host of Reliable Sources, he was just a kid with a blog — a blog that obsessed over the coverage decisions, business models, and consequences of cable news.So he was the perfect person to have this conversation with. I’ve done — and continue to do — a lot of cable news. So I think a lot about the effect cable news has on the political system. How does it change
Contrapoints on taking the trolls seriously
YouTube is where tomorrow’s politics are happening today.If you’re over 30, and you don’t spend much time on the platform, it’s almost impossible to explain how central it is to young people’s media consumption. YouTube far outranks television in terms of where teens spend their time. It’s foundational to how young people — and plenty of not-so-young people — form their politics. And it features a political divide that’s different than what we see in Washington, but that I think predict
The purpose of political violence
“Between 1830 and 1860, there were more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds.”Here’s the wild thing about that statistic, which comes from Yale historian Joanne Freeman’s remarkable book The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War: It’s an undercount. There was much more violence between members of Congress even than that.Congress used to be thick with duels, brawls, threats, a
Ask Ezra Anything 3: Endgame
Time for another AMA! You all hit the big stuff in this one. What’s the purpose of this show? How do I prep for it? What did I think of the Whiteshift conversation? What has fatherhood changed in my worldview? What weird work habits do I recommend? How about weird techno sets? How about comic runs?Should we be optimistic about humanity in 100 years? How about 1,000? Why did I describe Elizabeth Warren as a “fighter” rather than “professor” candidate? What’s the likeliest sci-fi dystopia?All this
The disillusionment of David Brooks
2013 was David Brooks’s worst year. “The realities that used to define my life fell away,” he says. His marriage ended. His children moved out. The conservative movement was undergoing the crack-up that would lead to Donald Trump, and to Brooks’s excommunication.For Brooks, the past few years have been a radicalization. His new book, The Second Mountain, is an effort to work out a more service- and community-oriented definition of the good life. But on a deeper level, it’s a searing cri
Emily Oster schools me on parenthood
I’ve read a lot of Emily Oster over the past year. Her first book, Expecting Better, has become the data-minded parent’s bible on pregnancy. Her new book, Cribsheet, extends that analysis to the first years of life.Oster is an economist at Brown University, and what she brings to this particular pursuit is a passion for good evidence. And here’s the thing: it turns out that much of what we think we know about pregnancy and parenthood isn’t based on good evidence. Sometimes it’s not base
Lessons from Vox’s first 5 years
This is a special episode for me. Vox turns 5 this week! So I sat down with my co-founders, Melissa Bell and Matt Yglesias, to discuss what went right, what went wrong, what changed in the media environment, and what we learned along the way.Matt’s recommendations:Vox’s Explained on Netflix — Episode 4: “K-Pop”“Our incel problem” by Zack Beauchamp“We visited one of America's sickest counties. We're afraid it's about to get worse.” by Julia BelluzVox’s The Weeds podcastMelissa’s recommen
Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle
In the past few months, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” The second was Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article on “workism.”The two pieces speak to each other in interesting ways, and to some questions I’ve been reflecting on as my own relationship to work changes. So I asked the authors to join me for a conversation about what happens when work becomes
How social democrats won Europe — then lost it
Democratic socialism is on the rise in the United States, but it’s been a dominant force for far longer in Europe. Ask Bernie Sanders to define his ideology and he doesn’t start naming political theorists; he points across the Atlantic. “Go to countries like Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden,” he says.The populist right is on the rise in the United States too, and that’s also been a powerful force for far longer in Europe. The mix of economic populism and resentful nationalism that Donald Trump r
In defense of white-backlash politics
“The big question of our time is less, ‘What does it mean to be American?’ than, ‘What does it mean to be white American in an age of ethnic change?’” writes Eric Kaufmann in his new book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Kaufmann’s book is unusual in two respects. First, it’s explicit (and persuasive) in its argument that demographic change and the white backlash to demographic change are behind the rise of rightwing populism across the West. Second
Identity, nationalism, and fatherhood
Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and the author of My Father Left Me Ireland, a moving, lyrical memoir about fatherhood and identity. It’s also a stirring defense of nationalism, an attack on wonks, and a critique of some of the core assumptions of liberal modernity. When I opened it, I didn’t expect it to be quite so on point to my interests. But here we are.This conversation starts a little slow, but it accelerates into an exploration of some of the bigg
An ex-libertarian’s quest to rebuild the center right
Nothing would do more to repair American politics than for the center right to regain power in the Republican coalition. But before that can happen, the center right needs to exist — it needs a theory of both policy and politics, one that would allow it to organize a new right if the Trumpist coalition ever collapses.The Niskanen Center is a new Washington think tank started by refugees from the libertarian right who’ve decided to do exactly that. Will Wilkinson, Niskanen’s director of
How whiteness distorts our democracy, with Eddie Glaude Jr.
“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.”Glaude is the chair of Princeton University’s department of African American studies, the president of the American Academy of Religion, and the author of the powerful book Democracy in Black. And this is a conversation about some of the hardest issues in American life: the way racism is intertwined wit
Pete Buttigieg’s theory of political change
First off. Hello! I’m back from paternity leave. And this is a helluva podcast to restart with.Pete Buttigieg is a Rhodes scholar, a Navy veteran, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s a married gay man, a churchgoing Episcopalian, and a proud millennial. He’s also, according to CNN, “the hottest candidate in the 2020 race right now.”There’s been plenty of discussion of Buttigieg’s biography, and of whether a midsize-city mayorship is appropriate experience for the presidency. But I wanted
Meet the policy architect behind the Green New Deal
Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey introduced a Green New Deal resolution, outlining a bold effort to decarbonize the US economy and forestall the worst effects of climate change. Ever since, it has been the talk of the town in Washington, drawing praise and criticism from all quarters.But most critics completely misunderstood the resolution. It is not a policy document. It is a set of goals and principles meant to guide the development of policy.The work of fleshing ou
The somewhat fractured state of American conservatism
Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, sits down with Vox senior politics reporter Jane Coaston to discuss intellectual conservatism, the legacy of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, neoconservatism, and the role Donald Trump is playing in both the GOP and conservatism more broadly.Book recommendations:Crisis of the House Dividedby Harry V. JaffaNixon's White House Wars by Patrick J. BuchananWe are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It take
American politics after Christianity, with Ross Douthat
I’m Vox’s interviews writer, Sean Illing. Lately, I’ve been interested in the following question: Is the decline of institutionalized Christianity making our politics worse? The answer may be yes, but I’m not convinced it’s for the reasons many people suppose.Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist for the New York Times who has been one of the more thoughtful writers on this topic. Douthat believes that Christianity’s collapse has not only helped destroy civic bonds in America, it’s a
Why Gov. Jay Inslee is running for president on climate change
Vox senior politics reporter, Jane Coaston speaks to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee at South by Southwest about climate change, his 2020 candidacy, why it's time to eliminate the filibuster, and the Green New Deal.We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
ICYMI: Julia Galef
For this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, we're digging into the archives to share another of our favorites with you!*At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is willing to change their mind. Arguments where the points being made do not describe or influence the positions being held. Arguments that leave everyone dumber, angrier, sadder. Which is why I wanted to talk to Julia Galef this week. Julia is
The roots of extremism, with Deeyah Khan
What draws someone into an extremist movement? Is it about ideology? Race? Politics? So many of our discussions about extremism try to explain away the problem by reducing its complexity, but that brings us further and further away from actually solving it.Deeyah Khan is a British documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She’s the creator of two extraordinary films airing on Netflix right now, White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others. The films do a remark
ICYMI: Paul Krugman
For this episode of the Ezra Klein show we're digging back into the archives to share another of our favorite episodes with you!***On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, "When this election is finally over, I'm planning to celebrate with an orgy of...serious policy discussion.” Then, of course, Donald Trump won the election, and serious policy discussion took a backseat
Pop music can make you smarter
Vox takes culture seriously. Our coverage of movies, TV, books, and music delves deep into what our cultural touchstones reveal about who we are and what we care about — and how what we consume influences our world in turn.That's why I'm so excited to introduce you to Switched on Pop. It's a podcast that digs into both the musical theory and the cultural context of pop music, and it's now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. As a big fan of the show, I wanted to introduce you to the h
Life after climate change, with David Wallace-Wells
After years of hovering on the periphery of American politics, never quite the star of the show, it seems that climate change is having a moment. An ambitious Green New Deal, backed by a large and active youth movement, identifies global warming as a national emergency and seeks to completely decarbonize the US economy. While it’s a long way from becoming law, it has forced all the Democratic candidates to take very public positions on the subject. Climate, it seems, is finally becoming
Pramila Jayapal thinks we can get to Medicare-for-All fast
The Democratic Party is quickly coalescing around an ambitious Medicare-for-All platform — and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is shaping up to be a major voice in that debate.Jayapal co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and, earlier this week, released a sweeping new plan for single-payer health care in the United States. Her proposal is arguably the most ambitious we’ve seen yet. It envisions a wider set of benefits and a much quicker transition to government-run health care tha
Noah Rothman on the "unjustice" of social justice politics
I'm Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism and the GOP.For the last three years or so, there has been an ongoing discussion among conservatives about identity politics and what many view as the corrosive use of identity politics in the pursuit of "social justice." As they argue, "social justice warriors" are using so-called "identity politics" -- debates around race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity -- as cudgels, often against the Right
Why should we care about deficits?
Stony Brook University’s Stephanie Kelton is the most influential proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox take on government budgets that urges a focus on inflation, rather than deficits. Jason Furman was President Barack Obama’s chief economist, and while he’s firmly in the economic mainstream, he’s been pushing his colleagues to recognize that the economy has changed in ways that make our debt levels less worrying. I asked the two of them to join the podcast together because
Anniversary special: Rachel Maddow
To celebrate The Ezra Klein Show's third anniversary, I’m listening back to the very first episode: a conversation with Rachel Maddow. Rachel is, of course, the host of MSNBC's primetime news show and a best-selling author. But she took a winding path to cable news — a path that included scheming to disrupt skinhead rallies, radical AIDS activism at the height of the plague, a gig as a sidekick on drivetime morning radio, and a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. We talk about all of t
Andrew Sullivan and I work out our differences
I’ve been arguing with Andrew Sullivan online for almost 15 years now. It’s one of my oldest and most rewarding hobbies. In the past, I’ve always felt we understood each other, even in periods of sharp disagreement. Lately, that’s changed.Sullivan and I have both been writing about identity politics and demographic change, though from quite different perspectives. Our arguments of late have felt more like we’re talking past each other, or about each other, than to each other. We decided
The core contradiction of American politics
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same. I’ll say it again: The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same.I don’t just mean they believe different things. I mean they’re composed in different ways, they argue from different premises, they’re structured in different ways. We treat them as mirror images of each other — the left and right hands of American politics — but they’re not. And the ways in which they’re different make it hard for them to understand each ot
Leftists vs. liberals, with Elizabeth Bruenig
What separates Obama-era liberalism from Sanders-style democratic socialism? What are the fights splitting and transforming the Democratic Party actually about?This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a while, in part because I often find myself simultaneously in these debates and confused by them. Sometimes, arguments that are framed as deep ideological disagreements seem to actually be about differing political judgments about what public and political institutions will permit.
The world according to Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader needs no introduction. But if your knowledge of Nader mostly consists of his 2000 campaign for the presidency, his career does demand some context. Nader is one of America’s truly great policy entrepreneurs, and arguably one of its great ideologists. The consumer safety movement he founded and led has saved, literally, millions of lives. His idea of what it means to be a public citizen is deeply rooted in American traditions, but largely, and lamentably, lost today in national Americ
This conversation will change how you understand misogyny
Misogyny has long been understood as something men feel, not something women experience. That, says philosopher Kate Manne, is a mistake. In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Manne defines misogyny as “as primarily a property of social environments,” one that not only doesn’t need hatred of women to function, but actually calms hatred of women when it is functioning.Politics is thick right now with arguments over misogyny, patriarchy, and gender roles. These arguments are power
Ending the age of animal cruelty, with Bruce Friedrich
You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it.The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on endlessly,
Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress
Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky works through how a stress response that evolved for fast, fight-or-flight situations on the savannah continuously wears on our bodies and brains in modern life.But stress isn’t just an individual phenomenon. It’s also a social force,
Frances Lee on why bipartisanship is irrational
There aren’t too many people with an idea that will actually change how you think about American politics. But Frances Lee is one of them. In her new book, Insecure Majorities, Lee makes a point that sounds strange when you hear it, but changes everything once you understand it.For most of American history, American politics has been under one-party rule. For decades, that party was the Republican Party. Then, for decades more, it was the Democratic Party. It’s only been in the past few
Sean Decatur doesn’t see a free speech crisis on campus
Sean Decatur is the president of Kenyon College and the first African-American to hold that job. He’s also one of the most thoughtful voices in the debate over free speech and political correctness on campus."Colleges and universities have been charged from their very origins to advance civility, and this has meant regulating student behavior on campus,” he says. "If anything, the approach taken earlier in history was far stricter than anything that 21st-century critics of higher education see a
Cal Newport has an answer for digital burnout
Cal Newport suspects you’re a digital maximalist — someone who believes that any potential for benefit is reason enough to start using a new technology. Don’t feel bad. That’s how most of us are. That’s how society teaches us to be.Newport wants us to become digital minimalists. He defines digital minimalism as “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected activities … that strongly support things you value, and then happily
Eric Holder’s plan to save democracy
Eric Holder was attorney general during the first six years of Barack Obama’s presidency, and there are days when it feels like he’s the attorney general of Obama’s post-presidency, too. Holder chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a cause close enough to Obama’s heart that the ex-president recently folded his Organizing for America operation into it. Holder calls the project “a partisan effort for good government,” a line rich with both the promise and problems of Oba
Anil Dash on the biases of tech
“Marc Andreessen famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ but it’s far more accurate to say that the neoliberal values of software tycoons are eating the world,” wrote Anil Dash. Dash’s argument caught my eye. But then, a lot of Dash’s arguments catch my eye. He’s one of the most perceptive interpreters and critics of the tech industry around these days. That’s in part because Dash is part of the world he’s describing: He’s the CEO of Glitch, the host of the excellent tech podcast Func
Jill Lepore on America’s two revolutions
Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, and the author of These Truths, a dazzling one-volume synthesis of American history. She’s the kind of history teacher everyone wishes they’d had, able to effortlessly connect the events and themes of American history to make sense of our past and clarify our present. “The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over,” Lepore writes. This is a conversation about those revolutions. But more than tha
Best of: N.K. Jemisin
This is the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast. Nora Jemisin — better known by her pen name, N.K. Jemisin — won the Hugo Award for best novel this year for the third year in a row. No one had ever done that before. Jemisin is also the first author to have every book in a single series — her Broken Earth trilogy — win the Hugo for best novel, and the first black author to win a Hugo for best novel. She’s a badass. But what made this episode such a delight is it isn’t just a conversation
Best-of: Bryan Stevenson
Here, at the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you. Bryan Stevenson tops the list. He’s the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, a MacArthur genius, and so much more. There are some people you meet who seem like they’re operating on a higher plane of decency, grace, and thoughtfulness. Stevenson is one of them. His thoughts on justice, on poverty, on racism, and o
Kara Swisher interviews me on the Future of Journalism (Live!)
When I decided to start an interview podcast, the first person I went to for advice was Kara Swisher — founder of Recode, host of the Code Conference and the Recode/Decode podcast, and one of the most legendary interviewers in the business. Since then, she’s been a guest on this show, and Vox and Recode have started up a partnership that’s given me the gift of working with her much more closely. Recently, Kara interviewed me in front of a live audience at Manny’s in San Francisco for Re
TED’s Chris Anderson on the lessons of listening
You know TED. Black stage, red accents, wireless mic, one speaker. Billions of views each year. TED is more than a conference now; it’s a meme: “Thanks for coming to my TED talk” closes Tumblr and Twitter posts. Chris Anderson is the guy that took TED from tiny conference to global juggernaut. Today, he’s TED’s chief curator and the host of the TED Interview podcast. But I wanted him on the show for something specific — his success with TED relied on answering two questions this podcast has left
Rep. Katie Porter on how capitalism is failing
Katie Porter is the Rep.-elect from California’s 45th District, which happens to be the district I grew up in. She’s part of the brigade of Democrats who turned Orange County blue for the first time since the Great Depression. But that’s not why I asked her on the show. I asked her on the show because she’s one of the most interesting members of the incoming House majority. Porter grew up on an Iowa farm, watching the debt crises of the ’80s devastate her family and her region. At Harva
How Hasan Minhaj is reinventing political comedy
In Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix show, he does three things political comedians often don’t do. First, he makes political comedy personal. Second, he makes it visual. And third, he makes it last. Minhaj was the last correspondent hired by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Since then, he’s hosted the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner, debuted the critically-acclaimed special Homecoming King, and now, with the new show, he’s creating a unique space in the post-Stewart world. I
Adam Serwer on white political correctness
“What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth,” writes Adam Serwer, “but of power.” Serwer is a writer at the Atlantic, and he’s been looking at the identity politics and political correctness debates from a direction that’s too often ignored. What do identity politics look like when they’re white identity politics? What does political correctness look like when the people enforcing it have so much power that no one dares dispute the boundaries on speech? In general, the deb
Will Storr on why you are not yourself
“To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’.” That’s Will Storr, writing in his fantastic book Selfie. Ignore the very of-the-moment title. Storr dives deep into the cultural, evolutionary, and psychological construction of that thing that feels to us like our self, but is not actually ours, and is not a single thing. This is a mind-bending conversation that should, truly, change your understandin
How to be a better carnivore
Here are two things I believe. First, the way we treat the animals we kill for food is shameful. Second, only a tiny percentage of the population will go vegetarian or vegan and stay that way, at least until lab-grown meat gets a lot better.
The middle ground is treating the animals we kill for food more humanely. Take fish. In the United States, most of the fish we eat die by slowly suffocating to death on the deck of a boat, struggling for air. That’s horrendously cruel — and it make
Peter Beinart on anti-Semitism in America and illiberalism in Israel
This is a conversation I’ve been putting off, if I’m being honest. I can’t hold it from the safe space of journalistic distance. It’s about the strange, vulnerable space that many Jews, myself included, find themselves in today. The first part of this conversation is about being Jewish at a time of rising anti-Semitism in the Western world. The October massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence ever committed on American soil. In 2017, Cha
Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong
Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University and the co-founder of Heterodox University. His book The Righteous Mind, which describes the different moral frameworks that animate the left and the right, was a key influence on my work. But these days, Haidt is worried about something new. "Teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years," he writes in The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff. "The culture on many college cam
The Impact: Deportation without representation
For Thanksgiving listening, I have an episode of The Impact, from my Weeds co-host Sarah Kliff. The Impact is a show about how policy shapes our lives. This season, Sarah and her team are focusing on the most exciting, innovative ideas at the state and local level. They crisscrossed the country and found that state and local officials are trying to fix some of our country’s biggest problems: campaign finance, affordable housing, educational inequality, and more. This episode focuses on
Molly Ball on Nancy Pelosi’s future and Paul Ryan’s failure
The midterm elections are being interpreted almost entirely as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But it was also a referendum on Paul Ryan’s speakership, which drove Trump’s domestic policy agenda, and Nancy Pelosi’s opposition strategy. In its aftermath, the two parties need to work through a very different question. How do Republicans understand the failure of Ryan’s brief speakership, which managed to betray key promises (like cutting the debt) while crafting an agenda so unpop
Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media
Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly depressing. At any rate, Whitney Phillips did exactly that. She was one of the earliest scholars of online trolling (yes, that’s a job). She was studying trolling when it was a tiny sideshow. And she was there, studying it, as online trolling got amplified by algorithmic platforms and a cl
Ask Ezra Anything
You had questions. Smart, interesting questions. Questions about the zero-sum logic of markets, about whether compromise is possible or even desirable in today’s politics, about where the left goes too far, about local vs. national politics, about how to break into journalism, about Sam Harris and the “Intellectual Dark Web,” about deep work, about spirituality and politics, tribalism and democracy, and whose job it is to persuade racists, anyway. I have, well, not answers, exactly, but
Presidents in crisis with Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh
Slow Burn is one of my favorite podcasts of the past few years. Its first season, on Watergate, relived the confusion, chaos, and strangeness of the Richard Nixon presidency’s collapse. Its second season, on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and the surrounding allegations of sexual harassment and even assault, demanded a reckoning with one of the Democratic Party’s living icons. But where some histories use the past to comfort, Leon Neyfakh, Slow Burn’s host and creator, uses it to com
Sandy Darity has a plan to close the wealth gap
Here’s something to consider: For families in which the lead earner has a college degree, the average white family has $180,500 in wealth. The average black family? $23,400. That’s a difference of almost $160,000 — $160,000 that could be used to send a kid to college, get through an illness, start a small business, or make a down payment on a home that builds wealth for the next generation, too. Sandy Darity is an economist at Duke University, and much of his work has focused on the racial wealt
How identity politics elected Donald Trump
Identity Crisis is the most important book written on the 2016 election. Based on reams of data covering virtually every controversy, theory, and explanation for the outcome, it settles many of the debates that have raged over the past two years. More importantly, it offers a framework for thinking about American politics in this era. The authors — political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck — show how identity drives American politics, why our political identities
Rep. Mark Sanford on losing the Republican Party to Donald Trump
Mark Sanford was elected to Congress in 1994, where he quickly established himself as one of the most conservative members of the chamber. In 2002, he was elected governor of South Carolina. He was, again, one of the most conservative elected officials in the country. Many expected him to be the GOP’s nominee against Obama in 2012. Then it all happened. The disappearance. “Hiking the Appalachian trail.” Sanford left public life. He was done, it seemed. And then he wasn’t. He won a House seat in
Doris Kearns Goodwin (live!) on how great presidents are made
If you’ve got a question, Doris Kearns Goodwin has a charming, insightful, well-told presidential anecdote for you. Actually, a couple of them. I interviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian live onstage for the release of her new book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, and left the building slightly in awe: Some people are truly masterful storytellers, and Goodwin is one of them. In the book, Goodwin examines how Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ly
What Nate Silver's learned about forecasting elections
This close to an election, who do I want to hear from? Nate Silver, of course. I sat down with the FiveThirtyEight founder and math wizard to talk about how he builds his forecasting models, what they’re saying about 2018, how big the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in the House and Senate really is, whether there's a purpose to predicting election outcomes, which campaign reporters he reads, and whether Trump is the favorite for 2020. Silver and I also share the experience of buildi
Jay Rosen is pessimistic about the media. So am I.
This is a tough conversation. It was a tough one to hold, and it’s a tough one to publish. I’m a journalist. I’ve been a journalist for 15 years. I believe in journalism. But right now, I’m worried we’re failing. I’m worried we’re making American politics worse, not better. That’s not because we're not doing remarkable, courageous, heroic work. It’s not because we’re fake news or biased hacks. Look at the #MeToo movement, the investigations of Donald Trump's finances, the remarkable rep
Why Bill Gates is worried
“To put it bluntly,” wrote Bill and Melinda Gates in their foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Report, “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling. This is because the poorest parts of the world are growing faster than everywhere else; more babies are being born in the places where it’s hardest to lead a healthy and productive life.” There is no topic in the philanthropic world more fraught than population growth. The history of eff
Reihan Salam makes the case against open borders
In his new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders, Reihan Salam tries to do something difficult: build a pro-immigrant case for a more restrictive immigration system. This is an argument, interestingly, that’s as much about inequality as it is about immigration. “Diversity is not the problem,” Salam writes. “What’s uniquely pernicious is extreme between-group inequality.” Salam, the executive editor of the National Review, thus makes a tw
Jose Antonio Vargas on living undocumented in Trump’s America
Jose Antonio Vargas was born in the Philippines in 1981. When he was 12, his mother sent him to America, to live with family. When he was 16, he went to the DMV to get a driver's license and found out his green card was forged; he was an undocumented immigrant. Vargas went on to be a decorated journalist, winning a Pulitzer as part of the Washington Post team covering the Virginia Tech shootings. He profiled Mark Zuckerberg for the New Yorker and led a technology vertical at the Huffing
Rebecca Traister: Women's rage is transforming America
Why did Christine Blasey Ford have to smile and politely ask for breaks while Brett Kavanaugh could rage at the cameras and dismiss the hearings as a farce? The answer is in Rebecca Traister’s essential, perfectly timed new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. It’s a book, Traister writes, about how anger works for men in ways it doesn’t for women. I happened to read it the weekend before the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings, and it was eerily prescient: The book was essential to
Patrick Deneen says liberalism has failed. Is he right?
Liberalism, write Patrick Deneen, "has been for modern Americans like water for a fish, an encompassing political ecosystem in which we have swum, unaware of its existence.” Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, isn’t talking about the liberalism of the left, the liberalism of Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Pelosi. He’s talking about the liberalism that drives both the left and the right, the one that elevates individual flourishing over groups, families, places, nature. That’s the lib
Francis Fukuyama’s case against identity politics
Is all politics identity politics? And if so, then what does it mean to condemn identity politics in the first place? That’s the subject of my discussion with Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama. In his new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, he builds a theory of what identity means in modern societies and how spiraling demands for recognition are tearing at the fabric of our politics. "The retreat on both sides into ever narrower identities
Carol Anderson on the myth of American democracy
The president of the United States was the runner-up in the popular vote. The majority in the US Senate got fewer votes than the minority. And even if Democrats win a hefty majority of the vote in 2018’s House elections, Republicans, due to gerrymandering and geography, may retain control of the chamber. But it’s not just the structure of our system that eats at America’s democratic claims. It’s the rules being layered on top of it. In 2017, 99 bills to limit voting have been introduced
Martha C. Nussbaum on how fear deforms our politics
In her new book Monarchy of Fear, famed philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum identifies fear as the oldest and deepest of our emotions. Fear takes hold in our earliest infancy, when we can experience need but we can’t act. And it lurks underneath our psyches, communities, and polities forever after that. This is a conversation about what fear is and how it shapes our worldviews and our politics. It’s also a conversation about what hope is, and whether embracing it is a choice we can, and shou
David French on “The Great White Culture War"
David French is a senior writer for National Review and one of the conservatives I read most closely. About a month ago, he published an interesting column responding to some things I had said, and to the broader currents cutting through our politics. “Conservative white Americans look at urban multicultural liberalism and notice an important fact,” he wrote. "Its white elite remains, and continues to enjoy staggering amounts of power and privilege. So when that same white elite applauds the dec
Your attention is being hijacked. Chris Bailey can help.
Life is the sum focus of what you pay attention to. You hear that a lot. But look at the verb there: “pay” attention to. As if attention is something we consciously spend out. As if it’s something we control. But do we? Not these days. There’s a war on for our attention, and we’re often losing it. Chris Bailey’s Hyperfocus looks, from the outside, like a book about productivity. But it’s really one of the best books I’ve read about attention: what it is, how much it can hold, how we lose track o
Anand Giridharadas on the elite charade of changing the world
“How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good?” asks Anand Giridharadas in his new book, Winners Take All. “The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm.” Giridharadas has done his time in elite circles. His education took him through Oxford and Harvard, he spent years as a New York Times columnist, he's a regular on Morning Joe, he’s a TED talker. And so when he mounted the stage at the Aspen Institute and told his fellow fellows
I build a world with fantasy master N.K. Jemisin
I’m just going to say it. This may be the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast. Nora Jemisin — better known by her pen name, N.K. Jemisin — just won the Hugo Award for best novel for the third year in a row. No one had ever done that before. Jemisin is also the first author to have every book in a single series win the Hugo for best novel, and the first black author to win a Hugo for best novel. She’s a badass. What makes Jemisin’s work so remarkable is the power and detail of the worlds
Reup: Zephyr Teachout vs. Corruption
Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the nation’s foremost experts on political corruption. She’s also, after a glowing New York Times endorsement this week, arguably the frontrunner in the race to replace Eric Schneiderman as New York’s attorney general. The Democratic primary, which will likely decide the race, is on September 13. The NY AG position is unusually important right now. President Trump’s businesses are in New York, his family works in New York, his a
Is our economy totally screwed? Andrew Yang and I debate.
"The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max,” writes Andrew Yang. Well then. Yang is the founder of Venture for America, the author of The War on Normal People, and an outsider candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. His campaign is based on a grim view of the economy he sees coming: AI, automation, and globalization leading to mass joblessness. The only things that can save us, he says,
Chef Marcus Samuelsson on immigration, creativity, and Anthony Bourdain
Marcus Samuelsson is the Michelin-starred chef behind Harlem’s The Red Rooster an award-winning cookbook author,the winner of the first season of Top Chef: Masters, ;nd the host of No Passport Required, a new food and travel show from Eater and PBS. Samuelsson’s story is remarkable. He was born in Ethiopia to a mother who carried him and his sister 75 miles on foot to a hospital when all three of them were suffering from tuberculosis. Samuelsson’s mother died, but he and his sister surv
Why online politics gets so extreme so fast
During the 2016 campaign, Zeynep Tufekci was watching videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. But then, she writes, she "noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay' videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” And it wasn’t just Trump videos. Watching Hillary Clinton rallies got her "arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behi
Taking Trump’s corruption seriously
The question of whether President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election has consumed Washington since the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller special counsel in March 2017. But there's another question worth considering: the financial corruption swirling around Trump’s businesses, and now his administration. In any other White House, this would be the ongoing, constant story — the site of endless investigations and inquiries. And it still might be. We know Mueller
The surprising story of how American politics polarized
We talk a lot on this podcast about the epic levels of political polarization and how much of our ongoing breakdown they explain. But what was American politics like before it was polarized? And what got us from there to here? Sam Rosenfeld is a political scientist at Colgate University and author of the book The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. I’ve read a lot of books on polarization, and Rosenfeld’s is the best I’ve seen at painting a picture of what American polit
The most important idea for understanding American politics in 2018
America is changing. A majority of infants are, for the first time in US history, nonwhite — and the rest of the population is expected to follow suit in the coming decades. The number of religiously affiliated Americans is at a record low, and the share of foreign-born residents is at a historically high level. What happens to a country amid this kind of demographic change and strain? What does it do to our politics, to our identities, to our worldview? I’ve come to believe that you ca
What economists and politicians get wrong about trade
For decades, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has been a lonely voice in the economics profession warning that the academics were getting this one wrong. Trade is not an unalloyed good; “globalization would deepen societal divisions, exacerbate distributional problems, and undermine domestic social bargains,” Rodrik warned. But few listened. The tendency to emphasize trade’s benefits while ignoring its costs created a massive political backlash. “Economists would have had a greater—and much more p
How to disagree better
Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington’s most respected and powerful conservative think tanks. He’s also launching a new podcast, The Arthur Brooks Show, with Vox Media on the art and practice of disagreement. I’ve known Brooks for a while. And I disagree with him on, well, a lot — at least when it comes to American politics. And yet, those disagreements haven’t ended a years-long conversation between us on everything from management to sp
Jaron Lanier’s case for deleting social media right now
During my book leave, I took a social media sabbatical. No reading Facebook. No reading Twitter. And you know what? It was great. I felt able to think more clearly, and listen more closely, than had been true in years. I’m not sure that was all because of social media — I was also hanging back from much of the news — but I’m certain the blackout helped. The experience of coming back, and reopening myself to the feeds and the tweets and the algorithms, has been profound. It feels like, suddenly,
The most clarifying conversation I’ve had about Trump and Russia (part 2)
What have we actually learned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, and his administration’s efforts to cover those ties up? What role did Russia really play in the 2016 election? And what are special counsel Robert Mueller’s possible endgames — what can he really do, and when might he do it? In January, I had Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey on the podcast to guide me through the Trump-Russia case, and it’s one of the most helpful — and popular — episodes we’ve done. Now she’s back, and given how much
The Supreme Court vs. Democracy
If 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had tipped the other way, President Hillary Clinton would’ve named both Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy’s replacements. But they didn’t. And now Donald Trump, in less than two years, will fill as many Supreme Court seats as Barack Obama did in eight. When news of Kennedy’s retirement came down, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s exceptional legal analyst, and host of the podcast Amicus. I can’t say
Eric Garcetti on the lessons of Los Angeles
There’s been a lot of talk about the coming of majority-minority America — the point, projected for roughly 2045, when there will no longer be any racial or ethnic group that makes up a majority of the United States. But there are plenty of places in America where this has already happened. Los Angeles is one of them. LA has about 4 million people, making it more populous than 23 states, and a demography in rapid flux. Non-Hispanic whites make up about 30 percent of the population, whil
What Ellen Pao saw coming
Ellen Pao had a rough 2015. She lost her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most powerful venture capital firms. She also stepped down as CEO of Reddit after a tumultuous tenure in which she came under withering criticism for, among other things, shutting down online communities devoted to shaming fat people and posting upskirt photos. A few short years later, Pao’s 2015 looks prophetic. Her fight against Kleiner Perkins presag
The Green Pill
What accounts for the way most of us eat? What’s the ideology, the theory, behind our diets? And what happens when you stop believing in it? Over the past decade, I’ve been on a fitful journey toward veganism. At least, that’s the way I normally say it. That’s the polite way to say it. The truth is I’ve been on a fitful journey away from the idea that unnecessarily inflicting suffering and death on literally billions of beings that can feel pain is moral. And it’s been one of the most d
How Jane Mayer exposed Eric Schneiderman, Bush’s torture program, and the Kochs
On May 7, Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow published a story in the New Yorker detailing New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s alleged history of sexually and psychologically terrorizing the women he dated. Hours later, Schneiderman stepped down. Schneiderman was only Mayer’s most recent investigation. Over the course of her career, she’s exposed America’s torture programs, the Koch brothers’ takeover of Republican Party politics, the role the reclusive Mercer family had in funding Donald Tru
Political power and the racial wealth gap
The racial wealth gap is where past injustice compounds into present inequality. When I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates, on this show, what would prove to him that white supremacy was over in this country, he pointed to the closing of the racial wealth gap. The numbers here are startling. In 2016, the median white family in America had $171,000 in wealth. The median black family had just $17,400. Put differently, for every dollar in wealth the average white family has, the average black family h
Tyler Cowen on the painful end of American complacency
Headlining any conversation with Tyler Cowen is difficult. This one, for instance, covers how to write a book, single-payer health care, political correctness, loneliness, the expanding Overton window, the tech backlash, technological innovation, the case for American optimism, how to change our cultural assumptions about race, and much more. But if there is a theme, it calls back to Cowen’s fascinating 2017 book, The Complacent Class. There, Cowen argued that contrary to the widespread belief t
A mind-expanding conversation with Michael Pollan
This is perhaps the most literal title I’ve given a conversation on this podcast. This is a discussion about how to expand your mind — how to expand the connections it makes, the experiences it’s open to, the sensory information it absorbs. And, more than that, this is a conversation about recognizing that our minds are narrower than we think, that there is a lot we’re filtering out and pruning away and outright ignoring. You know Michael Pollan’s work. He wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
Optimism about America
In a February 2017 column, David Brooks wrote about "the Fallows Question, which I unfurl at dinner parties: If you could move to the place on earth where history is most importantly being made right now, where would you go?” The Fallows question is based on the life and work of Jim and Deborah Fallows. Jim is a national correspondent at the Atlantic; Deborah is a writer and linguist. When Japan looked like the future, they moved there to watch it happen; when software was eating the wo
The New York Times’s lead Clinton reporter reflects on her coverage
It’s time to talk about the damn emails — and the way the media covered them. Amy Chozick reported on Hillary Clinton for a decade. She was there as Clinton’s campaign fell short in the 2008 Democratic primaries. And as the New York Times’s lead reporter on the Clinton campaign in 2016, she was there as Clinton seemed certain to win in 2016 — and there on that night in November when she lost. Her new book, Chasing Hillary, is a memoir of these years and that reporting. In it, Chozick reflects on
The age of "mega-identity" politics
Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 years ago, but now that they’re here, they change the way we see each other, the way we engage in
Is American democracy really in decline? A debate.
Yascha Mounk’s new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, is perhaps the year’s scariest read. In it, Mounk argues that “liberal democracy, the unique mix of individual rights and popular rule that has long characterized most governments in North America and Western Europe, is coming apart at its seams. In its stead, we are seeing the rise of illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy.” It’s
Special episode: The Syrian conflict, explained by a UN diplomat who saw it start
Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of you even wrote in to say it had changed your career path and you were now reorienting towards humanitarian work and crisis response.
Now, Vox Media, in partnership with the IRC, is launching Displaced, a podcast about the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises and the people whose lives they upe
Is modern society making us depressed?
“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In his new book, Lost Connections, Hari advances an argument both radical and obvious: Depression and anxiety are more than just chemical imbalances in the brain. They are the result of our social environments, our relationships, our political contexts — our lives, in short. Hari, who has strugg
Carol Anderson on White Rage and Donald Trump
Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s book emerged from a viral op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2014, amid the backlash to the Ferguson, Missouri, protests. She writes: "The operative question seemed to be whether African Americans were justified in their rage, even if that rage manifested itself in the most destructive, nonsensical ways. Again and again,
The Sam Harris Debate
There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray about a year ago. In that interview, the two argued that African-Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next
It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: the company has lost almost $100 billion in market cap in recent weeks. Behind Facebook’s hard year is a collision between the company’s values, ambitions, business model, and mindboggling scale. Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, has long held that
Is Mitch Landrieu the "White, Southern Anti-Trump"?
Mitch Landrieu is the white mayor of New Orleans, and he wants America to talk about race. Landrieu is the author of the new book, In The Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. The statues he refers to are Confederate war memorials, four of which he controversially took down in May of 2017. "These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said,
Melinda Gates (live!) on stopping climate change, ending malaria, and the problems money can’t solve
Melinda Gates is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States. With more than $40 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation works on a dizzying array of issues, from eradicating polio to feeding the world to treating HIV to stopping climate change to reforming the US education system. Gates has also been working, in recent years, on increasing diversity in the technology industry. “If you [only] have products created by w
A better conversation on guns
Want to know why we can’t make any progress on the guns debate? Because this isn’t a debate over policy. It’s a debate over identity. After last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I remembered a book Evan Osnos recommended on this show, called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson. Carlson, a sociologist, realized that her discipline had missed a major social transformation: that Americans weren’t just buying guns for hu
This isn’t Joe Kennedy’s grandfather’s Democratic Party, and he knows it
When you’re sitting in front of Rep. Joe Kennedy, it’s clear that you’re sitting in front of a Kennedy. The face, the jawline — it’s all uncannily familiar. But Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is rising in a changed Democratic Party. In the 1950s, the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote was about 7 percent. In 2012, it was about 44 percent — and that number is ticking upward. Kennedy is navigating it smoothly. Tapped to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and y
Amy Chua on how tribalism is tearing America apart
Human beings are tribal creatures, particularly when they feel threatened. And the reality of living in America in 2018, at a time of massive demographic change and social upheaval, is that we all feel threatened, and so we are all becoming more tribal. In her new book, Political Tribes, Amy Chua argues that America’s foreign policy has long been undermined by our underestimation of tribalism abroad, and that our domestic stability is now being hollowed out by our inability to see it clearly at
How technology brings out the worst in us, with Tristan Harris
In 2011, Tristan Harris’s company, Apture, was acquired by Google. Inside Google, he became unnerved by how the company worked. There was all this energy going into making the products better, more addicting, more delightful. But what if all that made the users’ lives worse, more busy, more distracted? Harris wrote up his worries in a slide deck manifesto. “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” went viral within the company and led to Harris being named Google’s “design ethi
Steven Pinker: enlightenment values made this the best moment in human history
Does the daily news feel depressing? Does the world feel grim? It’s not, says Harvard professor Steven Pinker. This is, in fact, the best moment in human history — there’s less war, less violence, less famine, less poverty, than there ever has been. There’s more opportunities for human flourishing, more personal freedom, more democracy, more education, more equality, more technological wonder, than the world has ever seen. In Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, he mounts both his case that th
Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara
Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and publisher of Jacobin, a journal of “socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” He launched the publication in 2011 when he was an undergraduate at George Washington University. Today, its print edition has 40,000 subscribers and a million readers monthly online. Jacobin is at the vanguard of a resurgent American left that judges traditional liberalism as too weak and feckless for the times we live in and sees politics as fundamentally about cl
How Democracies Die
The year is young, but Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is going to be one of its most important books. It will be read as a commentary on Donald Trump, which is fair enough, because the book is, in part, a commentary on Donald Trump. But it deserves more than that. It is more than that. How Democracies Die is three books woven together. One summarizes acres of research on how democracies tumble into autocracy. The second is an analysis of the troubling conditions under w
How to oppose Trump without becoming more like him
Krista Tippett is the host of the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. For good reason. She's created, over decades, something rare in American life: spaces where people of different faiths, disciplines, and ideologies discuss divisive questions without becoming more divided, without losing sight of each other's humanity. Tippett comes from a political family, and spent her early adulthood working on Cold
You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it
Oftentimes it’s easy for me to describe these conversations. This one is on Trump and Russia. That one is on health care. But not this time. I want you to listen to this conversation, because Jaron Lanier is brilliant and his mind is unusual and spending some time within it is a privilege. But I don’t know how to describe it to you. It begins with the story of Lanier tripsitting Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, when he was dying from cancer and decided to try LSD, and it goes from there. La
The most clarifying conversation I’ve had on Trump and Russia
What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general might get fired over it. The president’s former campaign manager and his original national security adviser were charged with crimes as part of it. The president himself might ultimately be charged with obstruction of justice for his response to it. It’s also a devilishly difficult story to follow,
Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau on Trump’s first year, the GOP’s “rot,” and the left’s failures
Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality was persistently skewed. Today, Favreau is changing the media from the inside. He’s a co-host on Pod Save America, and co-founder of Crooked Media, both of which have seen tremendous growth in 2017. In this conversation, we look back on 2017, t
The inside story of Doug Jones’s win in Alabama
“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by two points. We ended up winning by 1.8.” This, Trippi says, was the reality of the Alabama Senate election. It was a dead heat when it started. It was a dead heat on the day it ended. And a lot of what the media thinks they know about it is wrong. Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, was the chie
What life is like in North Korea
The most important story in the world right now is how real the chance of war with North Korea is — and how cataclysmic such a war would be. Part of the reason the risk of war is so real is that our understanding of North Korea is so sparse. "The Hermit Kingdom" is a world unto itself; a land of deprivation, of lunacy, of tyranny, of delusion. We have no diplomatic relations, no trade, no cross-cultural exchanges. We don't understand Kim Jong Un, we don't understand his people, and they don't un
"An orgy of serious policy discussion" with Paul Krugman
On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, "When this election is finally over, I'm planning to celebrate with an orgy of...serious policy discussion.” Then, of course, Donald Trump won the election, and serious policy discussion took a backseat to alternative facts, at least for awhile. But now it’s time! In this podcast, Krugman and I cover a lot of ground. We talk taxes, net neutr
The case for impeachment
I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel? I’ve spent the past few months reporting out a story o
What Buddhism got right about the human brain
I wanted to take a post-Thanksgiving break from politics and current events this week to talk to Robert Wright. He's written some of the best books on religion and evolutionary psychology, including Non-Zero and The Evolution of God. His latest book is Why Buddhism is True, and it’s fantastic. I’m interested in mindfulness, and so have read a lot of books on the subject. This isn’t like those. It’s a not a how-to guide, or an argument for meditation’s health benefits. It’s a deep dive into theor
Rebecca Traister on #MeToo, female rage, and Anita Hill’s legacy
We’re living through an upheaval. The #MeToo moment has engulfed some of the most powerful men in politics, entertainment, and media. It has also forced a national reckoning with the reality of America’s sexual and workplace cultures — how often they permitted harassment and assault to flourish, how routinely they protected perpetrators and blamed victims. But why is it happening now? And will it continue or be swept away in backlash? Rebecca Traister is a writer-at-large at New York magazine,
Ai-jen Poo: the future of work isn’t robots. It’s caring humans.
When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we’re told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary. Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think about the future of work, she says, we need to think about care workers. Home care work — caring for the elderly and for children — is the fastest-growing occupation in the entire workforce, expanding at five times the rate of any other job. By the
Evan Osnos on the North Korea crisis, Trump’s mental health, and China's rise
Evan Osnos is the author of the National Book Award-winning The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, as well as a staff writer at the New Yorker. And he’s recently back from a trip to North Korea, where he learned how Trump’s threats are playing in one of the strangest and most sealed-off regimes on earth. “To go between Washington and Pyongyang at this nuclear moment is to be struck, most of all, by how little the two understand each other,” he wrote. “In eightee
Why politics needs more conflict, not less
Here’s a counterintuitive thought: maybe Congress in particular, and politics in general, has too little conflict, not too much. That’s James Wallner’s argument, and it’s more persuasive than you might think. Wallner is a political scientist who became a top Republican Senate aide, working as legislative director for Senators Jeff Sessions and Pat Toomey, as well as executive director of the Senate Steering Committee under Toomey and Lee. He’s now a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, and t
Why the Weinstein scandal gives Tig Notaro hope about Hollywood
Tig Notaro dropped out of high school. She drifted between odd jobs for a long time and eventually found her way to Colorado, where she discovered open mic nights and a talent for stand-up comedy. Stand-up brought discipline to her life. But fame eluded her until 2012, when she released "Live," the comedy album of the stand-up set she performed just four days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and soon after her mother suddenly passed away. Now, Notaro has her own show, "One Mississip
What happens when human beings take control of their own evolution?
Over the past decade, scientists have developed what was once just the subject of dystopian fiction: gene editing technology. It's known as CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, was a key member of the research group that developed the technology. She's also the co-author of the recent book A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. A straightforward description of CRISPR i
Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you
“It’s important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Coates’s view of his career flows from his view of human events: contingent, unguided, and devoid of higher morality or cosmic justice. He is not here to comfort you. He is not here to comfort himself. "Nothing in the record of human history argues for a divine morality, and a great deal argues
How the Republican Party created Donald Trump
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress. In 2012, they rocked Washington when they published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book that marshaled their considerable authority to argue that the dysfunction poisoning American government was the result of “asymmetric polarization,” notably a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extr
Reihan Salam wants to remake the Republican Party -- again
In 2008, Reihan Salam co-wrote Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with his frequent collaborator Ross Douthat. After nearly eight years of President Bush, Salam wanted to remake the Republican Party to appeal to the working-class voters it needed. The vision was idea-driven: tax policy that helped the middle class, healthcare ideas that would mean more insurance for more people, and a generalized effort to remake the safety net to support mode
David Remnick on journalism in the Trump era and why he hires obsessives
For the past 19 years, David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker, perhaps the greatest magazine in the English language. Under his leadership, the New Yorker has received 149 nominations for National Magazine Awards and won 37. It’s also, perhaps more impressively, been consistently profitable in an era where many august journalism organizations have seen their business models collapse. And Remnick keeps writing. He’s the author of six books, including Lenin’s Tomb, which won a Pulitze
What Hillary Clinton really thinks
On page 239 of What Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals that she almost ran a very different campaign in 2016. Before announcing for president, she read Peter Barnes’s book With Liberty and Dividends for All, and became fascinated by the idea of using revenue from shared natural resources, like fossil fuel extraction and public airwaves, alongside revenue from taxing public harms, like carbon emissions and risky financial practices, to give every American “a modest basic income.” Her ambitions for
Dan Rather thought he'd seen it all. But then came President Trump.
Dan Rather has covered the most momentous events of the modern era. He was in Dallas, Texas, during President Kennedy's assassination. He was in Vietnam, embedded with US troops, in 1965 and 1966. He reported on Watergate, stood at the Berlin Wall as it fell, and interviewed young Chinese dissidents as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. Rather has seen it all. So when I sat down with him a few weeks back, I wanted to know how he compared our current political climate to all of the contentious m
From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it's going
Angela Nagle spent the better part of the past decade in the darkest corners of the internet, learning how online subcultures emerge and thrive on forums like 4chan and Tumblr. The result is her fantastic new book, Kill All the Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, a comprehensive exploration of the origins of our current political moment. We talk about the origins of the alt-right, and how the movement morphed from transgressive aesthetics on the interne
Why prosecutors, not cops, are the keys to criminal justice reform
Angela J. Davis is the former director of the DC public defender service, a professor of law at American University, and editor of a remarkable new book titled Policing the Black Man, which pulls together deeply researched essays on virtually every aspect of how black men and black boys interact with the criminal justice system. It is a revelatory, comprehensive tour of the subject that’s often in the news but rarely treated in a thorough way. We cover a lot of ground in this podcast, looking at
Chris Hayes on whether Trump should be removed from office
In the aftermath of Trump’s bizarre, dangerous North Korea tweets, I’ve been fixated on a question: Should Trump be removed from office? The mechanisms we have for curbing a dangerous presidency are limited, at least as we normally think about them. Though legal scholars argue over the founders’ intent, impeachment is thought to be a remedy for executive criminality, while the 25th Amendment is only meant to be used amid physical and mental incapacitation. But what if neither condition is pr
Sen. Michael Bennet on why this is a dismal, sociopathic era in Congress
Michael Bennet is an accidental senator. He was unexpectedly appointed to fill an open seat after Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. He had never run for elected office before, or served in a legislative body. Perhaps that’s why he’s always, in my experience, been appropriately shocked by how the US Congress actually works. Since joining the Senate (and winning reelection in 2010 and 2016), Bennet has become one of its more effective members. He was part of the Gang of Eight that autho
What’s scary isn’t Trump’s illiberalism but America's acceptance of it
Yascha Mounk is a lecturer at Harvard, a columnist at Slate, and the host of The Good Fight podcast. He’s also an expert on how democracies backslide into illiberalism — which was the topic of our first conversation on this podcast. But when Mounk and I last spoke, fears of Trump’s illiberal instincts seemed to have been overblown. This was an administration too incompetent to be authoritarian. But Mounk made a prediction then that has, I think, been borne out: Trump’s illiberal instincts would
Julia Galef on how to argue better and change your mind more
At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is willing to change their mind. Arguments where the points being made do not describe, or influence, the positions being held. Arguments that leave everyone dumber, angrier, sadder. Which is why I wanted to talk to Julia Galef this week. Julia is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, and the creator of the Upd
Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, the first psychologist to run a jail
Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart calls the 8,000-person Cook County Jail the largest mental health institution in the country. Thirty percent of its inmates have diagnosed mental health issues, and the number with undiagnosed conditions is thought to push the true percentage much higher. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Dart chose Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, a psychologist, to run it. What is surprising is that Jones Tapia is the first mental health profession to run a jail. In this conversation, w
Eddie Izzard on World War I, cake or death, and marathoning
Now that I've gotten Eddie Izzard to re-derive his famed "cake or death?" routine in real time, I'm ending this podcast. Always good to go out on top. Okay, maybe I won't actually end it. But this episode was a thrill to do. Eddie Izzard has long been one of my favorite comics. I've watched his specials more times than I can count. And this conversation was a real pleasure. Izzard — whose new memoir, Believe Me, is now on shelves — thinks fast, and not always linearly, so we covered a lot of gro
Avik Roy and Ezra debate the Senate GOP's health bill
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate GOP’s health care bill — officially known as the Better Care Reconciliation Act — will lead to 22 million fewer people with health insurance and plans with such high deductibles that low-income people won’t be able to afford them. On the bright side? Massive tax cuts for the rich. It’s not a widely popular vision — the bill is struggling to attract Republican support, and is polling between 12 and 17 percent. But it does have defenders. Ch
danah boyd on why fake news is so easy to believe
danah boyd is an anthropologist and computer scientist who studies the way people actually use technology. Not the way we wish we used technology, or the way we hope we will use technology, but the way we actually use it.“Technology,” she says, "is made by people. In a society. And it has a tendency to mirror and magnify the issues that affect everyday life.”boyd is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society, a visiting professor at New York University, and a fan
Al Franken on learning to be a politician
Sen. Al Franken’s new book, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate, is the rare politician memoir that’s actually interesting. And note that I said interesting, not funny (though it is also funny).Most books by politicians are about how they’re not really politicians — they’re authentic, they’re honest, they shoot from the hip, they still remember what it was like growing up in a mill town raised by feral dogs and subsisting on nothing but hay.Franken’s book is the opposite: It’s the story of how he le
Zephyr Teachout on suing Trump, fighting corruption, and breaking monopolies
Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University, the author of Corruption in America, one of the lead lawyers in the emoluments case that’s been brought against Donald Trump, and a former gubernatorial and congressional candidate. Which is all to say that Teachout is someone who knows a lot about political corruption, and so we dive deep into that topic in this podcast.We talk about how political corruption was defined by the Founding Fathers, and why, during the Constitutional Conventi
Masha Gessen offers a plausible Trump-Russia theory
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of, among other books, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Since the election, she has been analyzing Donald Trump through the lens of Russian politics and personalities in a series of viral essays in the New York Review of Books. But as the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia has evolved into a dominant storyline of his presidency, Gessen has grown skeptical. She thinks the left has been overwhelmed by c
Kwame Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism
Few words are as reviled in American politics as “cosmopolitan.” The term invokes sneering, urban, elite condescension. It’s those smug cosmopolitans who led to Donald Trump’s election. It’s those rootless cosmopolitans who’re shipping jobs overseas with no thought for their home communities. Cosmopolitans. Ick. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher at New York University, as well the writer of the New York Times Magazine’s “Ethicist” column. He’s also the author o
Yascha Mounk: Is Trump’s incompetence saving us from his illiberalism?
Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, a Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America, and host of the podcast, The Good Fight. He’s also the author of some of the scariest political science research I’ve seen in a long time.What Mounk found is that the consensus we thought existed on behalf of democracy and democratic norms is weakening. The percentage of Americans who think it’s important to live in a democracy has been plummeting in recent decades. The percen
Bryan Stevenson on why the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, but justice
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release for more than 115 wrongly convicted prisoners on death row. He’s the author of the power book Just Mercy, and a winner of a MacArthur “Genius” grant. There are only a few people I’d say this about, but he’s a genuine American hero.This conversation begins with one of Stevenson’s most provocative arguments. “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth,” he says.
Death, Sex, and Money’s Anna Sale on bringing empathy to politics
There’s much talk of “empathy” in today’s politics, but it’s a cramped, weaponized form of empathy — an empathy designed to force us to grudgingly tolerate each other, or an empathy used to explain away the reasons we hurt each other.You can glimpse something better in the space Anna Sale creates on the WNYC podcast Death, Sex, and Money. Her show is, in this moment, powerful; the empathy she extends to her guests feels real and deep; the conversations she holds are bracingly difficult while sti
Cory Booker returns, live, to talk trust, Trump, and basic incomes
Senator Cory Booker is back! In this special live episode of The Ezra Klein Show — taped at Vox Conversations — Booker and I dig into America’s crisis of trust. Faith in both political figures and political institutions has plummeted in recent decades, and the product is, among other things, Trump’s presidency. So what does Booker think can be done about it?We also talk about: Whether Democrats need to be angry to fight Trump The $400,000 President Barack Obama recently accepted for a speech to
VC Bill Gurley on transforming health care
Washington has been gripped of late by the world’s most depressing, least imaginative, debate over health care. The question, as it stands, is whether Obamacare will survive (while being mildly, but persistently, sabotaged by the Trump administration), or whether it will be rolled back and replaced with a system that covers 24 million fewer people in order to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans. Huzzah!But a better conversation awaits. Bill Gurley is a partner at Benchmark Capital, and an ea
Elizabeth Warren on what Barack Obama got wrong
Elizabeth Warren is the founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the senior senator from Massachusetts, and the author of the new book, “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class.”You might have heard of her.Warren is also one of the Democrats most capable of defining the Democratic Party’s soul and message in a post-Trump era. In her book, she says she had at least one big disagreement with President Obama — a disagreement that speaks to the direction she wa
Cal Newport on doing Deep Work and escaping social media
I was asked recently to name a book that changed my life. The book I chose was Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” and for the most literal of reasons: it’s changed how I lived my life. Particularly, it’s led me to stop scheduling morning meetings, and to preserve that time for more sustained, creative work.Which is all to say that I’m a bit obsessed with Newport’s work right now, and especially his account of how the digital environment we inhabit is training us out of concentration and into distraction
G. Willow Wilson on religion, comics, and modern myths
This is a podcast about topics we don’t always cover on this show. Religion. Spirituality. Gender roles. Traditionalist societies. Comic books.G. Willow Wilson is the author of The Butterfly Mosque, Alif the Unseen, and the Hugo award winning comic book, Ms. Marvel. She’s also lived a fascinating, unusual life: she’s an American who converted to Islam and then moved to Egypt, where she met her now-husband. The hallmark of her work is an empathy and appreciation for societies that are often caric
Chris Hayes on the crisis of elites and the politics of order
I could describe this podcast, and I will. But the tl;dr is this is one of my favorite conversations so far, and you’re going to enjoy it. So just go listen. Chris Hayes is, of course, the host of the MSNBC primetime show, “All In.” He’s also the author of the new book “Colony in a Nation,” as well as (the extremely prescient) Twilight of the Elites. But beyond the bio, Chris is a crazily smart and insightful thinker on US politics and society, and he's in rare form here. Among our topics:• The
Tyler Cowen explains it all
I have never come across a mind quite like Tyler Cowen’s. The George Mason economist, and Marginal Revolution blogger, has an interesting opinion on, well, everything. He’s a genuine polymath who can talk knowledgeably about more subjects than I even know exist.So coming in to this interview, I had a simple plan: ask Cowen for his thoughts on as many topics as possible. And I think it worked out pretty well. We discuss everything from New Jersey to high school sports to finding love to smoked tr
Molly Ball on whether facts matter in politics
You may remember the Atlantic's Molly Ball from the fantastic pre-election conversation we had on this podcast. She's back this week to talk about an issue I've become more and more obsessed with — does factual argument matter in American politics? Or is it just a contest of identity activation?In the most recent Atlantic, Ball profiles Kellyanne Conway, whose television appearances and "alternative facts" offer an unusually clear window into this debate. We talk about that, as well as:- What's
Denis McDonough on how to run the White House
How do you actually run a White House? What is the president’s actual job? What is the chief of staff’s role? What happens if you screw up? These are questions I’ve been reflecting on rather a lot lately, for obvious reasons. And so I asked Denis McDonough on the podcast to talk about them.McDonough served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2013 to 2017 — a position in which he earned the nickname “Obama’s Obama.” This is his first lengthy interview since leaving the White House, an
Cecile Richards on Planned Parenthood, labor organizing, and the Supreme Court
Before Cecile Richards was president of Planned Parenthood, she was a labor organizer working with garment workers in El Paso, Texas. The experience taught her a key principle of political change: people do things for their reasons, not your reasons.In this conversation, we talk about her organizing background, and how it's informing her work as she tries to protect her the institution she leads. Defunding Planned Parenthood is a core Republican promise. It is also, as she explains, a more punit
Tim Ferriss on suffering, psychedelics, and spirituality
Tim Ferriss is the author of the 4-Hour Workweek, as well as the new book, Tools of Titans. He’s also the host of The Tim Ferriss Show, which is one of my favorite podcasts, and an inspiration for this show. Tim is a relentless optimizer, and on his program, he interviews fascinating people to discover how they work, think, and get things done. It’s a show about the secrets of high performers. Here, I ask Tim about basically the reverse of that. How does he think about the parts of his life that
Yuval Harari, author of “Sapiens,” on AI, religion, and 60-day meditation retreats
Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, “Sapiens,” was an international sensation. The Israeli historian’s mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus, is about what comes next for humanity — and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. And it, too, is fantastically interesting. I’ve wanted to talk to Harari since reading Sapiens. I’ve had one big question abou
Elizabeth Drew covered Watergate. Here's what she thinks of Trump.
Elizabeth Drew is the author of Washington Journal, one of my favorite books about Watergate. Drew covered the story as a reporter for the New Yorker, and the book emerges from the real-time, journalistic diary she kept amidst the chaos. As such, it does something no other Watergate book does: tells the story not as a tidy tale with a clear beginning and inevitable end, but as an experience thick with confusion, rumors, alarm, and half-truths.Of late, I've heard a lot of people comparing the ear
Avik Roy on why conservatives need to embrace diversity
Avik Roy advised Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign on health care, ran the policy shop on Rick Perry’s 2016 campaign, and then worked for Marco Rubio after Perry dropped out. So Roy’s Republican credentials are pretty solid. But he’s aghast at the direction his party has taken in recent years. The question Roy asks of conservatives today is a profound one: what is it you’re seeking to conserve? Under Donald Trump, he fears Republicans are fighting to conserve the idea of America as a fundamentally whi
Kara Swisher gives a master class on reporting and interviewing
Before I launched this podcast, I asked Kara Swisher to coffee. Swisher founded the technology news site Recode, hosts the excellent Recode Decode podcast, and runs a legendary conference series. She is among the best interviewers working today. Some of her gets — including the first and only dual interview of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — have passed nearly into myth. I've used the advice Swisher gave me in every episode of this podcast. But in this conversation, she goes further, offering her ti
David Miliband explains the global refugee crisis
Donald Trump's executive order temporarily banning Muslim refugees from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and indefinitely banning them from Syria, doesn't come in a vacuum. The world is currently experience the worst refugee crisis since World War II — a crisis that has destabilized the Middle East, torn at the fabric of Europe, and left 65 million people displaced.This is what America is turning its back on. And just because we slam our doors, it doesn't mean the crisis eases. It c
Jennifer Lawless on why you — yes, you — should run for office
There are 500,000 elected positions in the United States. I'll say that again: 500,000. And that's no accident. "Our political system is built on the premise that running for office is something that a broad group of citizens should want to do," writes political scientist Jennifer Lawless.But Lawless's research reveals something scary — something that helps explain the political moment we're in. Participating in politics has begun to repulse the average America. 89 percent of high schoolers says
JD Vance: the reluctant interpreter of Trumpism
J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy has been adopted as the book that explains Trumpism. It's the book that both Senator Mitch McConnell and Senator Rob Portman recommended as their favorite of 2016. It's a book Keith Ellison, the frontrunner to lead the DNC, brought up in our conversation last week. Everyone, on both sides of the aisle, has turned to Vance to explain What It All Means.All of which is a bit odd, because Vance's book is an awkward fit with Trumpism. As Vance describes it, it's about "wh
Keith Ellison: The Democratic National Committee has become the Democratic Presidential Committee, and that needs to end
Congressman Keith Ellison is the frontrunner to lead the Democratic National Committee in the Trump era. Ellison has a fascinating backstory: he's the first Muslim elected to the US Congress, and he was the second member of Congress to endorse Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Now, Sanders has returned the favor, backing Ellison to lead the DNC. But in an unexpected effort to close ranks, Senator Chuck Schumer — who does not exactly come from Sanders's wing of the Democratic Party — has al
Elizabeth Kolbert: We have locked in centuries of climate change
Elizabeth Kolbert covers climate change for the New Yorker. She's the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. And she recently wrote a paragraph I can't stop thinking about. "The problem with global warming—and the reason it continues to resist illustration, even as the streets flood and the forests die and the mussels rot on the shores—is that experience is an inadequate guide to what’s going on. The climate operates on a time delay. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere
Sarah Kliff and Ezra Interview Obama About Obamacare
Two weeks before he leaves office, President Obama sits down for a lengthy conversation about the lessons of the Affordable Care Act and the law's uncertain future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
You Ask, Ezra Answers
At long last, here’s the Ask Ezra Anything episode. You sent in great questions, and I answered as many as I could. To keep me honest — and to make sure I didn’t just talk to myself for two hours — I invited friend-of-the-show Grant Gordon back to the program to help out. We covered a lot of ground. Topics included:- Immortality - The best concerts I’ve been to- Why I think culture is the biggest impediment to a universal basic income- Three lessons this podcast has taught me- Three lessons the
Evelyn Farkas explains the crisis in Syria and the threat of Russia
From 2012 to 2015, Evelyn Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, where she was responsible for policy toward Russia, the Black Sea, the Balkans, and Caucasus regions and conventional arms control.Farkas is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and I asked her on the show to explain two of the issues that worry me most right now: the horror that has befallen Syria, and the risky belligerence that has overtaken Russia. If this sounds like a
Tim Wu's interesting, unusual, fascinating life
Columbia law professor Tim Wu makes me feel boring and underaccomplished. He’s been a Supreme Court clerk, a Silicon Valley startup employee, a bestselling author, and a star academic. He coined the term "network neutrality," wrote the superb book The Master Switch, and was dubbed "Genius Wu" by Richard Posner — a man many consider to be our smartest living judge. And this is to say nothing of Wu's award-winning side-gig as a — yes — travel writer.Anyway, screw that guy. Wu's new book is The Att
Ta-Nehisi Coates: "There’s not gonna be a happy ending to this story"
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author at the Atlantic. His book, Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award, and was spoofed on SNL. He's writing the (awesome) Black Panther series for Marvel. He's a certified MacArthur Genius. And he just released a blockbuster story based on hours of interviews with President Obama about the role race played in Obama's upbringing, his presidency, and the 2016 campaign.Coates is also one of my favorite people to talk to, and I think this conversation shows w
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on management, rationalism, and the enlightenment
Patrick Collison is the 28-year-old CEO of Stripe, the online payments company that was just valued at $9 billion.Haven't heard of Stripe? You've probably used it. Last year, 40 percent of people who bought something online used Stripe's payment systems. The company has become an integral part of the internet's financial plumbing. And Collison has become one of Silicon Valley's leading lights — he made the cover of Forbes last year, where one venture capitalist described him as "the LeBron James
Award-winning chef José Andrés on cooking, creativity, and learning from the best
José Andrés isn't just a chef. He's a force. All that talk of how DC is now a hot dining scene? Andrés deserves more than a bit of the credit. He's popularized Spanish tapas through Jaleo, brought El Bulli-style molecular gastronomy to America through MiniBar, and racked up some Michelin stars and James Beard awards along the way.Andrés has hosted television shows, taught courses on the science of cooking at Harvard, extended his restaurant empire to Las Vegas and South Beach, set up a nonprofit
Heather McGhee returns to talk Trump, race, and empathy
There are few episodes of this show that people loved as much as my conversation with Heather McGhee, president of the think tank Demos. Our first discussion focused on race, class, populism, and the sometimes toxic ways the three interact. It's a topic I wanted to revisit in the aftermath of Trump's election, and so I asked Heather back to the show. After this conversation, I'm very, very glad I did. Among other things, we discussed:-The three factors that explain the election results-Why race
Ron Brownstein: Clinton didn’t lose because of the white working class
Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Why did Donald Trump win it? And why was the polling so completely wrong?No one digs deeper into the demographics, polls, and trends of modern American politics than the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein. Though he didn't predict Trump's win, his pre-election writing explained exactly how it could — and eventually did — happen. And it's a more complicated story than you've heard.In the week since the election, much has been made of Trump's strength among white
David Frum on the 2016 election, and the long decline of the GOP
We’re bringing the Ezra Klein Show to you a little early this week because, well, there's an election coming in a few days. And we wanted to talk about it. The 2016 election is the product of profound failures on the part of different institutions in American life: the Republican Party, the media, the financial system. And few have tracked those failures as clearly, or closely, as David Frum.Frum is Canadian by birth — a perspective, he says, that helps him see American politics as the product o
Deborah Tannen on gendered speech, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and you
To understand the 2012 election, you had to ask a political scientist. To understand the 2016 election, you need to call a linguist.At least, I did. Deborah Tannen is a Georgetown University linguist who's done pioneering work in how men and women's communication styles differ. Her book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as number one. But I got to know her earlier this year, as part o
Joseph Stiglitz on broken markets, bad trade deals, and basic incomes
This week’s guest is a Nobel Prize winner. We like to sprinkle those in every so often. Joseph Stiglitz revolutionized how economists understood market failures (hence that prize), served as chief economist at The World Bank, led the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton, has written more great books and articles than I can count, and now leads The Roosevelt Institute. He's a pretty smart guy. Markets, Stiglitz argues, are man-made, and we need to make them a lot better. We often treat
Let's talk about Hillary Clinton's policy ideas, with Jonathan Cohn
The overwhelming focus of this election has been Donald Trump — the things he does, says, tweets. But the next president is likely to be Hillary Clinton. And we've put a lot less effort into understanding her lengthy, detailed agenda for the country.So I sat down with one of my favorite journalists, The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn, who has been doing that work, to talk through what Clinton's platform actually says, and what it all adds up to. We also discussed:-How the stereotype of her has
Francis Fukuyama on whether America's democracy is decaying
Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, a public intellectual, and progenitor of the famed "End of History" thesis. But his recent work is his most important yet. Over two volumes, he's been studying how societies become safe, pluralistic liberal democracies — and then how those advanced democracies descend, and decay, into chaos.Sound familiar?This is a scary conversation that comes at just the right time. We discussed:-How American became a “vetocracy”-Why the representative democracy we ha
Tyler Cowen interviews Ezra Klein about politics, media, and more
A number of you have asked that we turn the tables and have someone interview me for the show. So when Tyler Cowen — economist at George Mason University, blogger at Marginal Revolution, and generalized genius — invited me on his podcast Conversations with Tyler, I said yes, and asked if we could post the discussion here, too. Tyler — whose podcast you should listen to — asks some of the hardest, strangest, most provocative questions of anyone I know, and so this was a lot of fun. Among the topi
The best conversation I’ve had about the election, with Molly Ball
This election season has left pretty much everything I thought I knew about politics in doubt. Both parties nominated unpopular candidates, even when they had popular alternatives. One party's nominee isn't really running any ads, and has barely bothered to build a field operation. The same party's nominee says things on a regular basis that would've been — or would've been thought to be — disqualifying in any other year. So it's been weird.One of the best chroniclers of that weirdness has been
HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on running Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid
This week, I've turned over the mic to The Weeds' Sarah Kliff. She went to Capitol Hill to interview HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell about all things healthcare. They talked about how to pay doctors to provide better care, the current state of the Obamacare marketplaces, and what she's learned about management running the federal government's largest agency. I hope you enjoy this, and I'll be back next week! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Dr. Leana Wen on why the opposite of poverty is health
There are a couple of ideas that drive how I see policy and politics. One of them is that most of what drives health outcomes has nothing to do with what happens in doctor's offices. Another is that we overestimate the importance of the president national politics and underestimate the important of city officials and local politics.Dr. Leana Wen — and this episode — stands at the intersection of those two ideas.Wen is the Baltimore City Health Commissioner — a job she got when she was only 31, a
Arlie Hochschild on how America feels to Trump supporters
I’ve been reading sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s writing for about a decade now. Her immersive projects have revolutionized how we understand labor, gender equity, and work-life balance. But her latest book, Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, is something new: she spent five years among tea party supporters in Louisiana, trying to bridge the deepest divide in American politics. It was, she says, an effort to scale the "empathy wall," to create an understanding
Stewart Butterfield on creating Slack, learning from games, and finding your online identity
If you came by the Vox office, you would find it oddly quiet. That's not because we don't like each other, or because we're not social, or because we don't have anything to say. It's because almost all our communication happens silently, digitally, in Slack.Slack is Stewart Butterfield's creation, and it's the fastest-growing piece on enterprise software in history. But here's the kicker: he didn't mean to create it, just like he didn't mean to create Flickr before it. In both cases, Butterfield
W. Kamau Bell on the lessons of parenthood, Twitter, and fame
W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and a writer. But you probably know him from one of his podcasts(Denzel Washington Is The Greatest Actor Of All Time Period and Politically Re-Active) or his CNN show The United Shades of America.In this conversation, Bell and I go wide. We begin with an inquiry into the nature of health food, transition into a discussion of how future historians will view our present (and, particularly, a discussion of which stories we're ignoring that they'll see as central), move i
Malcolm Gladwell on the danger of joining consensus opinions
Malcolm Gladwell needs no introduction (though if you didn't know the famed author has launched a podcast, you should — it's called Revisionist History, and it's great.).Gladwell's work has become so iconic, so known, that it's become easy to take it for granted. But Gladwell is perhaps the greatest contrarian journalist of his generation — he looks at things you've seen before, comes to conclusions that are often the opposite of the conventional wisdom, and then leaves you wondering how you cou
Grant Gordon on studying the world's worst conflicts
Grant Gordon is a political scientist and policymaker who specializes in humanitarian intervention. He’s a fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, and has worked on humanitarian and development policy for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the UN Office of Humanitarian Coordination, the UN Refugee Agency, as well as the Rwandan Government, Open Society Justice Initiative and other organizations. All of that is a long way of saying he works
Melissa Bell on starting Vox, managing media, and connecting newsrooms
I first started working with Melissa Bell at the Washington Post. I was trying to launch a new product — Wonkblog — and I needed some design work done. Melissa wasn't a designer. She wasn't a coder. She didn't manage designers or coders. She was, rather, a blogger, like me. But somehow, no one would meet with me to talk Wonkblog unless Melissa was also in the room.It was my first exposure to Melissa's unusual talent for finding and connecting the different parts of a modern newsroom. We went on
Atul Gawande on surgery, writing, Obamacare, and indie music
I've wanted to do this interview for a long, long time.Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He's a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He's a New Yorker writer. He's the author of some of my favorite books, including Better: A Surgeon's Notes on
Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show
This is a serious conversation with a very funny man.Trevor Noah is the host of Comedy Central's the Daily Show. He's also a stand-up comic who grew up in apartheid South Africa, the son of a black mother and a white father. That was illegal in apartheid-era South Africa, so Noah grew up hiding his real parentage, only seeing his father in carefully controlled circumstances. Somehow, he managed to turn this into a very funny, very incisive stand-up act. Today, he occupies one of the commanding h
Conservative intellectual Yuval Levin on how the Republican Party lost its way
Yuval Levin has been called "the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era," and the moniker fits. As editor of National Affairs — in my opinion, the best policy journal going on the right — he's been at the head of the "reformicon" movement, and his work has had a heavy influence on top Republicans like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio. If you had asked me a year ago to name the conservatives likely to set the agenda for the Republican Party in 2016 and beyond, Levin would've been at
Hillary Clinton. Yes, that Hillary Clinton.
My interview this week is with Hillary Clinton. You may have heard of her.I won't bore you with Clinton's bio. Instead, I want to say a few words about what this interview is, as it's a bit different than the EK Show's normal fare (though I do ask her for book recommendations!).I got about 40 minutes with Hillary Clinton. I wanted to use that time to try to answer a question I've had about Clinton for years: why is the candidate I see on the campaign trail so different from the person described
Patrick Brown on plant-meat that bleeds and the science of flavor
Not long ago, I had the chance to eat a burger from a company called Impossible Foods. The burger was delicious. It was juicy, savory, and bloody. Oh, and it was made from plants.Yes, they've created a veggie burger that bleeds. Patrick Brown is the CEO and Founder of Impossible Foods. His company is the Tesla of plant-based meat: they are trying to create a burger that carnivores will prefer to the thing cut from the side of the cow. And they've got some big backers in that effort: Brown has hu
Heather McGhee on what Democrats get wrong about racism
Heather McGhee is the president of the think tank Demos, and one of the most interesting thinkers today on the intersection of racism and economic inequality.Among Heather's most interesting arguments is her belief that "the left will have to challenge its own orthodoxy that defines racism as something that wholly benefits whites and solely victimizes people of color." In this podcast, she explains why. We also talk about:- Why Heather, an African-American woman, worked for John Edwards rather t
Jesse Eisenberg on Jewish humor, writing lessons, and interrogating strangers
My guest on this episode is Jesse Eisenberg — who you may know as Lex Luthor in Batman V. Superman, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, or Daniel Atlas in the just-released Now You See Me 2.I was apprehensive about this interview. I haven't interviewed many movie stars. But this turned out to be one of the most natural, easy, and interesting conversations I've had for the show. Eisenberg is a cerebral Jewish writer who sees the world through the lens of sociolology and has a lot of trouble re
Jessica Valenti on honesty, internet trolls, and modern feminism
Jessica Valenti is the founder of Feministing, a columnist at the Guardian, and the author of the new book "Sex Object." She's also a friend from the early days of blogging. In this podcast, we talk about the early days of blogging, as well as how the internet has changed as the conversation has moved from comment sections to the social web. Jessica's insight here — that in comment sections, trolling was something you did, while on Twitter, a troll is something you are — is powerful, and I've be
Moby on how cheap rent leads to great art
Moby's new memoir, Porcelain, is a great read for policy wonks. Really.It's less a history of music than a history of New York in the 80s and 90s, and a reflection on how density, crime, racial and sexual marginalization, and lax zoning policy created the conditions for an explosion of creativity. No one would want to recreate those conditions today. But as a non-New Yorker, Moby has written one of the only tracts I've seen that helps explain why so many are nostalgic for that era in NYC history
Secretary of Labor (and maybe VP?) Tom Perez
Tom Perez is President Obama's Secretary of Labor. He is also, according to the New York Times, on Hillary Clinton's shortlist for the vice presidency.I spoke with Perez about his path to the Labor Department, the powers of the Secretary of Labor, the push for a $15 minimum wage, the future of unions, a universal basic income, and much more. Perez sees his role as pushing a new contract between the government, employers, and workers, and in this episode, we delve deep into that vision.This is a
Andrew Sullivan on quitting blogging, fearing political correctness, and Donald Trump
Last year, Andrew Sullivan quit blogging — the medium he had done so much to create. And you know what? He was pretty damn happy about it. He was taking walks, meditating, exercising, reading, and generally living the good life. Of course, then Donald Trump just had to go and drag him back into the fray...In this extremely, extremely fun conversation, I talked with Andrew about:- His 10-day silent meditation retreat- His central role pushing gay marriage from a fringe idea to a constitutional ri
Alice Rivlin, queen of Washington's budget wonks
There is no budget wonk in Washington with a resume as thick as Alice Rivlin's. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office. She was the director of President Bill Clinton's Office of Management and Budget. She was vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board. She was a member of the Simpson-Bowles Commission. She's co-authored policies with Paul Ryan, served as president of the American Economic Association, and, in 2008, was named as one of the greatest public servants of the l
Arianna Huffington on sleep, death, and social media
Arianna Huffington is, of course, the editor and namesake of the Huffington Post, one of the true juggernauts of the new media world. But her path to that position has been a winding one. She was a prominent conservative — and a confidante of Newt Gingrich — in the 1990s. Her first web site was actually dedicated to persuading Bill Clinton to resign from the presidency. The Huffington Post came later, and the stress of it nearly destroyed her. After fainting from exhaustion and seriously injurin
Robert Reich on supporting Bernie Sanders, dating Hillary Clinton, and fighting inequality
You could fill a podcast just reciting Robert Reich's biography. Rhodes Scholar. Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork. Director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission under Carter. Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton. Candidate for governor of Massachusetts. Co-founder of the American Prospect (where I got my first job in journalism!). Member of Barack Obama's economic transition team. Author of bestselling book after bestselling book. Professor. Viral video star. Document
Bruce Friedrich on how technology will reduce animal suffering
When I first met Bruce Friedrich, he was running PETA's awareness campaigns. Yeah, those campaigns — the ones where naked people stuffed themselves in saran wrap and cages, and where wounded chickens limped outside KFCs.He was also one of the smartest, most informed, and most thoughtful experts I'd found on animal suffering. He had immersed himself in a subject most of us — myself very much included — would prefer to ignore, and he had learned some surprising things, including that vegetarianism
Ben Thompson on how to make it in media in 2016
Note: If you saw this twice, this is a reissue of a previous episode, with corrected audio.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson has established himself as one of the smartest and most thoughtful analysts at the intersection of media, business, and technology. I’ve become addicted to his commentary, as have many of my colleagues.So getting to geek out with Ben on these topics is a lot of fun. In this conversation, we discuss a couple of issues very close to my heart, includin
Ben Thompson on how the media business is changing
Note: There was a technical issue with the first upload of this show, please re-download if you got to it early.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson has established himself as one of the smartest and most thoughtful analysts at the intersection of media, business, and technology. I’ve become addicted to his commentary, as have many of my colleagues.So getting to geek out with Ben on these topics is a lot of fun. In this conversation, we discuss a couple of issues very close
Grover Norquist explains what it takes to change American politics
This is an interview you all have been asking for since day one. Grover Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform, the creator of the no-new-taxes pledge that virtually every Republican officeholder has signed, and the founder of the Wednesday meetings that bring together basically every group of note on the American right. Newt Gingrich has called him "the single most effective conservative activist in the country." MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell called him "the most powerful man in America
Neera Tanden on what it's like to work for Hillary Clinton
Neera Tanden is CEO of the Center for American Progress — perhaps the most influential left-leaning think tank in Washington. Before that, though, she was the policy director for both Hillary Clinton's Senate office and 2008 campaign, as well as a senior advisor to the Department of Health and Human Services during the drafting of Obamacare. She’s also someone many of you requested to hear on the program.Neera Tanden has had a unique vantage point on the Democratic frontrunner. Tanden is a Hilla
David Chang, head of the Momofuku empire
David Chang has driven many of the most important food trends of the last decade. His Momofuku empire has put pork belly on your plate, ramen on your corner, and bagel bombs in your local coffee shop. He's received four James Beard awards, been named a GQ Man of the Year, and appeared on Time's 100 most influential people list.He's also just a smart, funny, thoughtful and profane guy. In this episode, Ezra and David cover a lot of ground, including:- Whether restauranteurs should be able to pate
Cory Booker on the spiritual dimension of politics
Cory Booker is a United States senator from New Jersey, the only vegan in Congress, and the author of the new book "United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good". In this conversation, Ezra and Booker go deep on Booker's history and unusual approach to politics. Topics covered include:- How Booker's parents used a sting operation to desegregate a neighborhood, and why they did it- Why Ezra doesn't eat breakfast- Booker's disagreements with Ta-Nehisi Coates- How a 10-da
Michael Needham on the Republican Party's crack-up
Want to understand what's happened to the Republican Party? Then listen to this discussion.Michael Needham is the CEO of Heritage Action for America, where he's been one of the activists at the center of the fight between the Republican establishment and the conservative movement that's trying to overturn it. The Wall Street Journal called Needham "the strategist at the center of the shutdown" and the Washington Post wrote that "Before Donald Trump began terrorizing the Republican establishment,
Jim Yong Kim on revolutionizing how we treat the world's poor
This was an amazing interview.Jim Yong Kim is the president of the World Bank — the massive, multilateral institution dedicated to eradicating poverty. But Kim is also a public-health legend: he was a co-founder of Partners in Health, which revolutionized how we treat the world's poor. He's won a MacArthur Genius award, chaired the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, led Dartmouth University, and been named one of the 50 most powerful people in the world by
Theda Skocpol on how political scientists think differently about politics
Political science is a misunderstood discipline. It's often laughed off by people who think it's ridiculous that something as human and contingent and unpredictable as politics can be called a science. Chemistry is a science. Politics is a hobby. Politics isn't chemistry. But it is something that can be studied rigorously, and understood using models, evidence and testable theories. In this episode, Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard (and a former chair of the American Political Sci
Bill Gates on stopping climate change, building robots, and the best books he's read
Bill Gates is one of those people for whom "needs no introduction" is actually true. The polymathic Microsoft founder now leads the world's largest and most important private foundation, and he's predicting that we're on the cusp of the energy breakthrough that's going to save the world. He also talks about the controversial idea that technological innovation is slowing down, assesses how close we are to true artificial intelligence, and explains why you really want to save being sick for 20 yea
How lobbying works, with super-lobbyist Tony Podesta
When the New York Times profiled Tony Podesta, the headline was simply: "Tony Podesta, superlobbyist." Podesta is head of the Podesta group, and considered by many to be the most powerful, or at least one of the most powerful, lobbyists in Washington. Companies turn to him in their greatest time of need — he represented BP after the oil spill, and Bank of America after the financial crisis. Lobbying is not exactly the most popular profession. And yet, DC is full of lobbyists — they're a genuinel
Rachel Maddow on skinhead rallies, AIDS activism, and why she doesn't read op-eds
Rachel Maddow is, of course, the host of MSNBC's top-rated, Emmy-award winning primetime news show and the bestselling author of "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power." But Maddow took a winding path to cable news — a path that included scheming to disrupt skinhead rallies, radical AIDS activism at the height of the plague, a gig as a sidekick on drivetime morning radio, and a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (where she, um, may have temporarily borrowed some very rare books).In th