Episodes

December 23, 2022

Best Of: Who Wins — and Who Loses — in the A.I. Revolution?
This past year, we’ve witnessed considerable progress in the development of artificial intelligence, from the release of the image generators like DALL-E 2 to chat bots like ChatGPT and Cicero to a flurry of self-driving cars. So this week, we’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations about ...
ListenTranscript
December 20, 2022

Best Of: Is A.I. the Problem? Or Are We?
This past year, we’ve witnessed considerable progress in the development of artificial intelligence, from the release of the image generators like DALL-E 2 to chat bots like ChatGPT and Cicero to a flurry of self-driving cars. So this week, we’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations about ...
ListenTranscript
December 16, 2022

What I'm Thinking About at the End of 2022
As 2022 comes to a close, we decided to invite listeners to send in questions for an ask-me-anything episode. And boy, did you all deliver. We received hundreds of fantastic questions, and my column editor, Aaron Retica, joined me to ask some of them. Is equality of opportunity preferable to equali...
ListenTranscript
December 13, 2022

Time Is Way Weirder Than You Think
It’s not an exaggeration to say that “clock time” runs our lives. From the moment our alarms go off in the morning, the clock reigns supreme: our meetings, our appointments, even our social plans are often timed down to the minute. We even measure the quality of our lives with reference to time, of...
ListenTranscript
December 9, 2022

Three Signals We’ve Entered a New Economic Era
“From the U.S. Federal Reserve’s initial misjudgment that inflation would be ‘transitory’ to the current consensus that a probable U.S. recession will be ‘short and shallow,’ there has been a strong tendency to see economic challenges as both temporary and quickly reversible,” writes the economis...
ListenTranscript
December 6, 2022

There’s Been a Massive Change in Where American Policy Gets Made
Since 2021, Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, and they’ve used that power to pass consequential legislation, from the American Rescue Plan to the Inflation Reduction Act. That state of affairs was exceptional: In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, the U.S. House, ...
ListenTranscript
December 2, 2022

A Conservative’s Take on the Chaotic State of the Republican Party
Republicans already hold tremendous power in America. They have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices. They have more state trifectas (control of both legislative houses, as well as the governor’s seat) than Democrats. And come 2023, they will also control the House of Representa...
ListenTranscript
November 29, 2022

The Hidden Costs of Cheap Meat
About 50 years ago, beef cost more than $7 a pound in today’s dollars. Today, despite high inflation, beef is down to about $4.80 a pound, and chicken is just around $1.80 a pound. But those low prices hide the true costs of the meat we consume — costs that the meat and poultry industries have quie...
ListenTranscript
November 22, 2022

This Conversation About the 'Reading Mind' Is a Gift
Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American c...
ListenTranscript
November 15, 2022

Bill McKibben on the Power That Could Save the Planet
The fight against climate change is at a crossroads. This past year, the climate movement in the United States achieved significant success. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act represents the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U.S. history. More than a dozen states have ...
ListenTranscript
November 10, 2022

I Don’t Quite Buy the DeSantis Narrative, and Other Midterm Thoughts
The results of Tuesday’s midterm elections are still trickling in, but the broader story is clear: The red wave that many anticipated never materialized. Republicans gained 54 House seats against Bill Clinton in 1994 and 63 seats against Barack Obama in 2010. It doesn’t look as though the G.O.P. wi...
ListenTranscript
November 8, 2022

George Saunders on the ‘Braindead Megaphone’ That Makes Our Politics So Awful
George Saunders is regarded as one of our greatest living fiction writers. He won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel “ Lincoln in the Bardo ” and has published numerous short-story collections to wide acclaim, including his most recent book, “ Liberation Day .” He also happens to be one of my f...
ListenTranscript
November 4, 2022

Inflation Does More Than Raise Prices. It Destroys Governments.
“One can usually pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of wealth — that behind a person’s prosperity lies some rational basis, whether it is that person’s hard work, skill and farsightedness or some ancestor’s,” writes J. Bradford DeLong. “Inflation — even moderate inflation — strips th...
ListenTranscript
November 1, 2022

A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe
As we approach the 2022 midterms, the outlook for American democracy doesn’t appear promising. An increasingly Trumpist, anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress. And the Democratic Party, facing an inflationary economy and with an unpopular president...
ListenTranscript
October 28, 2022

These Political Scientists Surveyed 500,000 Voters. Here Are Their Unnerving Conclusions.
How does the popularity of a president’s policies impact his or her party’s electoral chances? Why have Latinos — and other voters of color — swung toward the Republican Party in recent years? How does the state of the economy influence how people vote, and which economic metrics in particular matt...
ListenTranscript
October 25, 2022

A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming a Trump Enabler
​​“What would you do for your relevance?” the political journalist Mark Leibovich asks in his new book, “ Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission .” “How badly did you want into the clubhouse, no matter how wretched it became inside?” For Leibovich, you c...
ListenTranscript
October 21, 2022

There’s Been a ‘Regime Change’ in How Democrats Think About Elections
According to the conventional rules of politics, Democrats should be on track for electoral disaster this November. Joe Biden’s approval rating is stuck around 42 percent, inflation is still sky-high and midterms usually swing against the incumbent president’s party — a recipe for the kind of polit...
ListenTranscript
October 18, 2022

A Legendary World-Builder on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Souls’ of Cities
N.K. Jemisin is a fantasy and science-fiction writer who won three consecutive Hugo Awards — considered the highest honor in science-fiction writing — for her “Broken Earth” trilogy; she has since won two more Hugos, as well as other awards. But in imagining wild fictional narratives, the beloved s...
ListenTranscript
October 14, 2022

What Rachel Maddow Has Been Thinking About Offscreen
“The Rachel Maddow Show” debuted in the interregnum between political eras. Before it lay the 9/11 era and the George W. Bush presidency. Days after the show launched in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and a few weeks later Barack Obama was elected president. And then history just kept speeding u...
ListenTranscript
October 11, 2022

Hard Fork: Elon’s Hidden Motives + A Meetup in the Metaverse
Today we’re bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times podcast, Hard Fork . Hosted by veteran tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork is a rigorous and fun exploration of Silicon Valley’s already-emerging future — and its evolving imprint on the rest of th...
ListenTranscript
October 7, 2022

How the Fed Is ‘Shaking the Entire System’
“There are moments when history making creeps up on you,” writes the economic historian Adam Tooze. “This is one of those moments.” Countries across the world are raising interest rates at unprecedented speeds. That global monetary tightening is colliding with spiking food and energy prices, fin...
ListenTranscript
October 4, 2022

Interrogating the Stories We Tell About Our Minds
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly one in five adults in America lives with a mental illness. And we have plenty of evidence — from suicide rates to the percentage of Americans on psychopharmaceuticals — that our collective mental health is getting worse. But beyond menta...
ListenTranscript
September 30, 2022

Ethereum’s Founder on What Crypto Can — and Can’t — Do
When most people hear “crypto,” the first thing they think of is “currencies.” Cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. And they’ve given rise to an entire ecosystem of financial speculation, get rich quick schemes, and in some cases outright fraud. But there’s anot...
ListenTranscript
September 27, 2022

We Know So Little About What Makes Humanity Prosper
Why do some countries produce far more science Nobel laureates than others? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did? These are just some of the questions that have inspired the formation of a new...
ListenTranscript
September 23, 2022

Why Russia Is Losing the War in Ukraine
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the question most analysts were asking was not whether Russia would win. It was how fast. On almost every quantifiable metric from military strength to economic size Russia has decisive advantages over Ukraine. A swift Russian victory appeared inevitable. O...
ListenTranscript
September 20, 2022

The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard
In August, Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $392 billion towards a new climate budget — the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U.S. history. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bring that number up to around $450 bill...
ListenTranscript
September 16, 2022

Now All Biden Has to Do Is Build It
In the past few months, Joe Biden’s agenda has gone from a failed promise to real legislation. Taken together, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) have the potential to put America on a path to decarbonization, develop some of th...
ListenTranscript
September 13, 2022

We Build Civilizations on Status. But We Barely Understand It.
“We see status virtually everywhere in social life, if we think to look for it,” writes Cecilia Ridgeway. “It suffuses everyday possessions, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food brands we prefer, and the music we listen to.” And that’s only a partial list. Status influences the neighbor...
ListenTranscript
September 10, 2022

Opinion Roundtable: Behind America’s Public School Battles
Today we’re bringing you a special episode from New York Times Opinion: a roundtable, hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro , about how parents view the role of school. America’s schools have emerged as a battleground for the country’s most fervent cultural disagreements, and in many places, parents are f...
ListenTranscript
September 6, 2022

The Subtle Art of Appreciating ‘Difficult Beauty’
When is the last time you paused — truly paused the flow of life — to appreciate something beautiful? For as long as we know, humans have sought out beauty, believing deeply that beautiful things and experiences can enhance our lives. But what does beauty really do to us? How can it fundamentally a...
ListenTranscript
September 2, 2022

Best Of: This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift
Today we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from 2021 with the novelist Richard Powers. Enjoy! There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. This is one of them. Richard Powers is the author of ...
ListenTranscript
August 30, 2022

A Grammy-Nominated Singer Performs and Explores Music's Power
In times of deep sorrow or joy, humans have always turned to music. Archaeologists have found evidence of instruments among very early civilizations. Spiritual communities have centered on music for centuries. We teach our children their ABCs and how to brush their teeth with songs. We dance out ou...
ListenTranscript
August 26, 2022

Best Of: Margaret Atwood on the Bible and the Future
Today we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes from this year, with the prolific writer Margaret Atwood. A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash a...
ListenTranscript
August 23, 2022

Why the Evangelical Movement Is in ‘Disarray’ After Dobbs
With Roe now overturned, the evangelical movement has achieved one of its decades-old political priorities. But for many evangelicals, this isn’t the moment of celebration and unity it may have first appeared to be. In the wake of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Russel...
ListenTranscript
August 19, 2022

Best of: A Life-Changing Philosophy of Games
Today, we’re re-airing one of my favorite episodes of all time. It was originally recorded in February of 2022, but I've been unable to stop thinking about it ever since. When we play Monopoly or basketball, we know we are playing a game. The stakes are low. The rules are silly. The point system i...
ListenTranscript
August 16, 2022

The Office is Dying. It’s Time to Rethink How We Work.
Over the past year, many places have returned to something approximating a prepandemic normal. Restaurants are filling up again. Airports and hotels are packed. Even movie theaters have made a comeback. But that hasn’t been the case for the office. Only about a third of office workers are back in...
ListenTranscript
August 12, 2022

How Do We Face Loss With Dignity?
In his latest work, “ The Last White Man ,” the award-winning writer Mohsin Hamid imagines a world that is very like our own, with one major exception: On various days, white people wake up to discover that their skin is no longer white. It’s a heavy premise, but one of Hamid’s unique talents as a ...
ListenTranscript
August 9, 2022

Three Sentences That Could Change the World — and Your Life
Today’s show is built around three simple sentences : “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundation of an ethical framework known as “longtermism.” They might sound obvious, but to take them seriously is a truly radical...
ListenTranscript
August 5, 2022

Gender Is Complicated for All of Us. Let’s Talk About It.
It’s hard to think of anything changing more quickly in our society right now than our understanding of gender. There’s an explosion of young people identifying as gender nonconforming in some way or another, and others are coming out as transgender or nonbinary throughout their lives, from childho...
ListenTranscript
August 2, 2022

The Argument: Who Can Write About What?
Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at The Argument , about cultural appropriation in creative work. In recent years, book written by white authors like “American Dirt” and “The Help" have been criticized for their portrayals of characters of color. Artists’ job is to imagine and ...
ListenTranscript
July 29, 2022

Best Of: Ruth Ozeki’s Enchanted Relationship to Minds and Possessions
Today we're taking a short break and re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from 2022, a conversation with the novelist and Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki. We'll be back with new episodes next week! The world has gotten louder, even when we’re alone. A day spent in isolation can still mean a day bu...
ListenTranscript
July 26, 2022

The Mid-Century Media Theorists Who Saw What Was Coming
“At the very heart of democracy is a contradiction that cannot be resolved, one that has affected free societies from ancient Greece to contemporary America,” write Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing in their new book, “ The Paradox of Democracy .” In order to live up to its name, democracy must be open...
ListenTranscript
July 22, 2022

A Top Mental Health Expert on Where America Went Wrong
There’s a paradox that sits at the center of our mental health conversation in America. On the one hand, our treatments for mental illness have gotten better and better in recent decades. Psychopharmaceuticals have improved considerably; new, more effective methods of psychotherapy have been develo...
ListenTranscript
July 19, 2022

Why Housing Is So Expensive — Particularly in Blue States
America is experiencing a housing crisis — or, more accurately, multiple housing crises. A massive housing shortage in major cities has resulted in skyrocketing rents. Low- and middle-income individuals find themselves priced out of the places with the most opportunity. Homelessness is rampant in c...
ListenTranscript
July 15, 2022

A Weird, Wonderful Conversation With Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the great living science fiction writers and one of the most astute observers of how planets look, feel and work. His Mars Trilogy imagined what it might be like for humans to settle on the red planet. His best-selling novel “ The Ministry for the Future ” is a mast...
ListenTranscript
July 12, 2022

First Person: To Fight for Ukraine’s Freedom, He Went Back Into the Closet
Today, we're bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times Opinion podcast, “First Person,” hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In each episode, Lulu sits down with people living through the headlines for intimate and surprising conversations that help us make sense of our complicate...
ListenTranscript
July 8, 2022

Michelle Goldberg Grapples With Feminism After Roe
“It’s true: We’re in trouble,” writes Michelle Goldberg of the modern feminist movement . “One thing backlashes do is transform a culture’s common sense and horizons of possibility. A backlash isn’t just a political formation. It’s also a new structure of feeling that makes utopian social projects...
ListenTranscript
July 5, 2022

Liberals Need a Clearer Vision of the Constitution. Here’s What It Could Look Like.
For decades now, the conservative legal movement has been on a mission to remake this nation’s laws from the bench. And it’s working. On Friday we released an episode with the legal scholar Kate Shaw that walked through case after case showing how conservative Supreme Court majorities have lurche...
ListenTranscript
July 1, 2022

A Guide to the Supreme Court's Rightward Shift
In the past few weeks alone, the Supreme Court has delivered a firestorm of conservative legal victories. States now have far less leeway to restrict gun permits. The right to abortion is no longer constitutionally protected. The Environmental Protection Agency has been kneecapped in its ability to...
ListenTranscript
June 28, 2022

The Supreme Court Went Off the Rails Long Before Dobbs
On Friday, a Supreme Court majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. On Sunday, we released an episode with Dahlia Lithwick that goes through the court’s decision in detail, and we will continue to come out with new episodes on the ruling — and its vast implications — in the days and weeks to come....
ListenTranscript
June 26, 2022

The Dobbs Decision Isn’t Just About Abortion. It’s About Power.
On Friday, a Supreme Court majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Nearly all abortions are already banned in at least nine states, home to 7.2 million women of reproductive age. And it is likely that other bans and restrictions will follow. As the court’s three liberal justices put it in their d...
ListenTranscript
June 24, 2022

The Case for Prosecuting Trump
The Jan. 6 hearings have made it clear that Donald Trump led a concerted, monthslong effort to overturn a democratic election. The extensive interviews — over 1,000 — that the House select committee conducted prove that Trump was told there was no evidence of election fraud, but he pressed his anti...
ListenTranscript
June 21, 2022

Two Years Later, We Still Don’t Understand Long Covid. Why?
Depending on the data you look at, between 10 and 40 percent of people who get Covid will still have symptoms months later. For some, those symptoms will be modest. A cough, some fatigue. For others, they’ll be life-altering: Debilitating brain fog. Exhaustion. Cardiovascular problems. Blood clotti...
ListenTranscript
June 17, 2022

The End of 'The Everything Bubble'
This week, the S&P 500 entered what analysts refer to as a bear market. The index has plunged around 22 percent from its most recent peak in January. Many growth stocks and crypto assets have crashed double or triple that amount. New home sales declined 17 percent in April, causing some analysts t...
ListenTranscript
June 14, 2022

Is Climate Change a Reason to Avoid Having Children? and Other Listener Questions Answered
It’s that time of year, when we invite listeners to send in questions, and I answer them on the air. And as usual, you delivered. I’m joined by my producer Annie Galvin, who asks me some of the most intriguing questions of the many we received: Is climate change a reason to forgo having kids? What ...
ListenTranscript
June 10, 2022

Socialism Is Supposed to Be a Working-Class Movement. Why Isn’t It?
American socialists today find themselves in a tenuous position. Over the past decade, the left has become a powerful force in American politics. Bernie Sanders seriously contested two presidential primaries. Democratic socialists have won local, state and congressional races. Organizations like De...
ListenTranscript
June 7, 2022

Thomas Piketty’s Case For ‘Participatory Socialism’
The French economist Thomas Piketty is arguably the world’s greatest chronicler of economic inequality. For decades now, he has collected huge data sets documenting the share of income and wealth that has flowed to the top 1 percent. And the culmination of much of that work, his 2013 book “ Capital...
ListenTranscript
June 3, 2022

A Conservative's View on Democrats' Biggest Weakness
“There is definitely a contest for the future of the center right,” says Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. In his telling, one side in this contest is “deeply pessimistic about the prospect of a diversifying America, explicitly anti-urban and incre...
ListenTranscript
May 31, 2022

Sex, Abortion and Feminism, as Seen From the Right
For decades, the conservative position on abortion has been simple: Appoint justices who will overturn Roe V. Wade. That aspiration is now likely to become reality. The question of abortion rights will re-enter the realm of electoral politics in a way it hasn’t for 50 years. And that means Republic...
ListenTranscript
May 27, 2022

Best Of: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Fight Over U.S. History
What does it mean to reckon with the violence, the tragedy, and the numerous contradictions of America?  That is the focus of this conversation – originally aired in July of 2021 – with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta- Nehisi Coates. On one level, the conversation is a reflection on the fights over tea...
ListenTranscript
May 24, 2022

A Conversation With Ada Limón, in Six Poems
​​“One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity,” the poet Ada Limón tells me. “It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.” When the news feels sodden with violence and division, it can be hard to know where to put the difficult emotions it pro...
ListenTranscript
May 20, 2022

The Ethics of Abortion
When Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked a few weeks ago, it signaled that Roe v. Wade appears likely to be overturned in a matter of weeks. If Roe falls, questions about the right to abortion will re-enter the realm of electoral politics in a...
ListenTranscript
May 17, 2022

Anne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism
The experience of reading Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic “ The Origins of Totalitarianism ” in the year 2022 is a disorienting one. Although Arendt is writing primarily about Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, her descriptions often capture aspects of our present moment more clearly than those of us ...
ListenTranscript
May 13, 2022

What Does the ‘Post-Liberal Right’ Actually Want?
“It begun to dawn on many conservatives that in spite of apparent electoral victories that have occurred regularly since the Reagan years, they have consistently lost, and lost overwhelmingly to progressive forces,” Patrick Deneen writes in a recent essay titled “ Abandoning Defensive Crouch Conser...
ListenTranscript
May 10, 2022

Sway: 'Fear and Panic Are Bedfellows' in Ukraine
Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at Sway about the war in Ukraine and the challenges of conflict-zone reporting.  Clarissa Ward has had, as she puts it, a “long and very complicated relationship” with Russia. The chief international correspondent for CNN, she has had stints in ...
ListenTranscript
May 6, 2022

Donald Trump Didn’t Hijack the G.O.P. He Understood It.
Right now, Republicans of all stripes — Ron DeSantis, J.D. Vance, Mike Pence, Glenn Youngkin — are trying to figure out how to channel the populist energies of Donald Trump into a winning political message. The struggle to achieve such a synthesis is the defining project on the American right today...
ListenTranscript
May 3, 2022

The Argument: Why the G.O.P. Can't Stop Saying 'Gay'
Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at The Argument about Florida's “Don't Say Gay” bill and the broader wave of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, spurred by the political right, that is spreading across the country. According to the Human Rights Campaign , this year alone, more than 3...
ListenTranscript
April 29, 2022

Elon Musk Might Break Twitter. Maybe That's a Good Thing.
If Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter comes to fruition, the world’s richest person will own one of its most important communications platforms. Twitter might have a smaller user base than Facebook, Instagram and even Snapchat, but it shapes the dominant narratives in key industries like politics,...
ListenTranscript
April 26, 2022

Putin May Not Like How He’s Changed Europe
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed Europe within a matter of weeks. A continent once fractured by the refugee crisis is now taking in millions of refugees. Countries such as Germany have made considerable pledges to increase military spending. The European Union said it would cut ...
ListenTranscript
April 22, 2022

Emily St. John Mandel on Time Travel, Parenting and the Apocalypse
“ Station Eleven ” by Emily St. John Mandel was published in 2014. That book imagined the world after a pandemic had wiped out, well, almost everyone. It’s a gorgeous novel with a particular emotional power: it helps you grieve a life you still have. But then came a real pandemic, not as lethal as ...
ListenTranscript
April 19, 2022

Can Democrats Turn Their 2022 Around?
With the midterms just over six months away, the electoral prospects for Democrats are looking bleak. President Biden’s approval rating is at 42 percent , around where Donald Trump’s was at this point in his presidency. Recent polls asking whether Americans want Republicans or Democrats in Congr...
ListenTranscript
April 15, 2022

Best Of: This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma
“Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist ...
ListenTranscript
April 12, 2022

A Ukrainian Philosopher on What Putin Never Understood About Ukraine
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only getting more brutal: We’ve seen the bodies of civilians strewn in the streets in Bucha, the city of Mariupol almost leveled and, just a few days ago, a Russian missile attack on a crowded train station in Kramatorsk killing at least 50 people. The United Nations...
ListenTranscript
April 8, 2022

Fiona Hill on Whether Ukraine Can Win — and What Happens if Russia Loses
The Russia-Ukraine war has changed considerably in recent weeks. Vladimir Putin is no longer talking explicitly about regime change in Ukraine. The Russian military has shifted its focus away from taking Kyiv and toward making territorial gains in Ukraine’s east. The prospect of an outright Ukraini...
ListenTranscript
April 5, 2022

The Most Thorough Case Against Crypto I've Heard
The hype around cryptocurrencies has reached a fever pitch. There are Super Bowl ads for crypto companies featuring celebrities like Matt Damon and Larry David. The Staples Center in Los Angeles is now the Crypto.com Arena. And behind that hype is a distinct vision: a more decentralized economy whe...
ListenTranscript
April 1, 2022

Sanctioning Russia Is a Form of War. We Need to Treat It Like One.
The Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev recently described the impact of the West’s sanctions on his country as “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” He’s not exaggerating. Economists expect the Russian economy to contract by at least 15 percent of G.D.P. this year. Inflati...
ListenTranscript
March 29, 2022

I Keep Hoping Larry Summers Is Wrong. What if He’s Not?
“There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation,” wrote Larry Summers in February 2021. A year later, the debate still rages over the first part of t...
ListenTranscript
March 25, 2022

Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible
A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. The seductions and dangers of genetic engineering. Climate change leading to so...
ListenTranscript
March 22, 2022

How Energy Markets Are Shaping Putin’s Invasion — and the World
Nearly every dimension of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been shaped by energy markets. Russia’s oil and gas exports have long been the foundation of its economy and geopolitical strength. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine — like his annexation of Crimea in 2014 — coincided with high en...
ListenTranscript
March 18, 2022

A Realist Take on How the Russia-Ukraine War Could End
As we enter the fourth week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many of the possible pathways this conflict could take are terrifying. A military quagmire that leads to protracted death and suffering. A Russian takeover of Kyiv and installation of a puppet government. An accidental strike on Polish or...
ListenTranscript
March 15, 2022

Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans
“Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing rea...
ListenTranscript
March 11, 2022

Masha Gessen on Putin’s 'Profoundly Anti-Modern’ Worldview
For Western audiences, the past few weeks have been a torrent of information about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. Daily updates of Russian military advances. Horrifying videos of buildings exploding and innocent civilians being killed. Announcements of increasingly severe economic sanction...
ListenTranscript
March 8, 2022

Fiona Hill on the War Putin Is Really Fighting
Vladimir Putin was looking for a swift invasion that would halt Ukraine’s drift toward the West, reveal NATO’s fractures and weaknesses and solidify Russia as a global power. In response, the West threatened moderate sanctions, but ultimately showed little interest in stepping between Russia and Uk...
ListenTranscript
March 4, 2022

Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China
“Russia’s utterly unprovoked, unjustifiable, immoral invasion of Ukraine would seem to mark the end of an era,” writes Fareed Zakaria, “one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.” Many of us, myself included, grew up in that era. We came of age in a unipolar world, dominated by a s...
ListenTranscript
March 1, 2022

Can the West Stop Russia by Strangling its Economy?
There’s the Russia-Ukraine war that’s easy to follow in the news right now. We can watch Russian bombs falling on Ukraine, see Russian tanks smoking on the side of the road, hear from Ukrainian resistance fighters livestreaming their desperate defense. But there’s another theater to this war that’...
ListenTranscript
February 25, 2022

A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life
When we play Monopoly or basketball, we know we are playing a game. The stakes are low. The rules are silly. The point system is arbitrary. But what if life is full of games — ones with much higher stakes — that we don’t even realize we’re playing? According to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, games...
ListenTranscript
February 22, 2022

Best Of: Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.
We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the boundaries between work and home, the feeling of constantly being behind, lackluster productivity num...
ListenTranscript
February 18, 2022

A Critique of Government That Liberals Need to Hear
Government is a bureaucratic, slow-moving institution. It’s too easily captured by special interests. It’s often incapable of acting at the speed and scale our problems demand. And when it does act, it can make things worse. Look no further than the Food and Drug Administration’s slowness to approv...
ListenTranscript
February 15, 2022

Relationships Are Hard. This Unusual Parenting Theory Can Help.
This is one of those episodes I feel I need to sell. Because on one level, it’s about an unusual theory of parenting known by the acronym RIE — for the nonprofit group Resources for Infant Educarers, which promotes its principles — that I’ve become interested in. But this isn’t a parenting podcast,...
ListenTranscript
February 11, 2022

It's Not Your Fault You Can't Pay Attention. Here's Why.
“The sensation of being alive in the early 21st century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention — to focus — was cracking and breaking,” writes Johann Hari in his new book, “Stolen Focus.” Later he says, “It felt like our civilization had been covered with itching powder and we spe...
ListenTranscript
February 8, 2022

What the Heck Is Going on With the U.S. Economy?
Should we be celebrating a Biden boom? Lamenting inflation and its consequences? Both? We know how to talk about booms, like the ’90s. We know how to talk about busts, like after the financial crisis. We know how to talk about stagnation. What we don’t know how to talk about is contradictory extre...
ListenTranscript
February 4, 2022

Let’s Talk About How Truly Bizarre Our Supreme Court Is
“Getting race wrong early has led courts to get everything else wrong since,” writes Jamal Greene. But he probably doesn’t mean what you think he means. Greene is a professor at Columbia Law School, and his book “How Rights Went Wrong” is filled with examples of just how bizarre American Supreme C...
ListenTranscript
February 1, 2022

Democrats Chase Shiny Objects. Here's How to Build Real Power.
There’s good reason to worry about the future of democracy, and little reason to believe Democrats have a viable plan for protecting it. They built their strategy around passing a major suite of voting reforms and protections through Congress, and a few weeks back, their whole agenda collapsed in t...
ListenTranscript
January 25, 2022

Learning to Listen to the Voices Only You Hear
The world has gotten louder, even when we’re alone. A day spent in isolation can still mean a day buffeted by the voices on social media and the news, on podcasts, in emails and text messages. Objects have also gotten louder: through the advertisements that follow us around the web, the endless scr...
ListenTranscript
January 21, 2022

The View From the White House
It’s been a year since Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. And what a roller coaster of a year it’s been. The Biden administration blew past its Covid vaccination goal of 100 million shots in 100 days, only to run into the realities of vaccine skepticism, the Delta w...
ListenTranscript
January 18, 2022

The Pandemic Lessons We Clearly Haven’t Learned
I remember thinking, as Covid ravaged the country in December 2020, that at least the holidays the next year would be better. There would be more vaccines, more treatments, more immunity. Instead, we got Omicron and a confusing new phase of the pandemic. What do you do with a variant that is both m...
ListenTranscript
January 11, 2022

Chris Hayes on How Biden Can Have a Better 2022
Nothing like a newborn and paternity leave to leave you feeling a bit out of the loop. So for my first podcast back since October, I wanted to wander through the thickets of where we are politically and how we got here. Because where we are is strange: the Omicron wave and the breakdown of the lib...
ListenTranscript
January 4, 2022

Best Of: This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Thinking
For decades, our society’s dominant metaphor for the mind has been a computer. A machine that operates the exact same way whether it’s in a dark room or next to a sunny window, whether it’s been working for 30 seconds or three hours, whether it’s near other computers or completely alone. But that’...
ListenTranscript
December 28, 2021

Best Of: Why Sci-Fi Legend Ted Chiang Fears Capitalism, Not A.I.
For years, I’ve kept a list of dream guests for this show. And as long as that list has existed, Ted Chiang has been atop it. Chiang is a science fiction writer. But that undersells him. He has released two short story collections over 20 years — 2002’s “Stories of Your Life and Others” and 2019...
ListenTranscript
December 21, 2021

Best Of: Noam Chomsky's Theory of the Good Life
How do you introduce Noam Chomsky? Perhaps you start here: In 1979, The New York Times called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” More than 40 years later, Chomsky, at 92, is still putting his dent in the world — writing books, giving interviews, changing minds. There are...
ListenTranscript
December 14, 2021

Timeless Wisdom for Leading a Life of Love, Friendship and Learning
“Today, we are supercompetent when it comes to efficiency, utility, speed, convenience, and getting ahead in the world; but we are at a loss concerning what it’s all for,” Leon Kass writes in his 2017 book “ Leading a Worthy Life .” “This lack of cultural and moral confidence about what makes a lif...
ListenTranscript
December 7, 2021

Families Are Drowning in Care Costs. Here’s How To Change That.
Every day in the United States, more than 10,000 babies are born and 10,000 people turn 65. But America doesn’t have anything close to a comprehensive family policy. That means no guaranteed paid family leave, no universal child care or preschool and a patchwork system of elder and disability c...
ListenTranscript
December 3, 2021

Predicting the Future Is Possible. ‘Superforecasters’ Know How.
Can we predict the future more accurately? It’s a question we humans have grappled with since the dawn of civilization — one that has massive implications for how we run our organizations, how we make policy decisions, and how we live our everyday lives. It’s also the question that Philip Tetlock...
ListenTranscript
November 30, 2021

Best Of: How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable
Joe Biden’s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone. But there’s a ...
ListenTranscript
November 23, 2021

Why Is Murder Spiking? And Can Cities Address It Without Police?
In 2020 the United States experienced a nearly 30 percent rise in homicides from 2019. That’s the single biggest one-year increase since we started keeping national records in 1960. And violence has continued to rise well into 2021. To deny or downplay the seriousness of this spike is neither mora...
ListenTranscript
November 19, 2021

The Case Against Loving Your Job
The compulsion to be happy at work “is always a demand for emotional work from the worker,” writes Sarah Jaffe . “Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail.” Jaffe is ...
ListenTranscript
November 16, 2021

Are We Witnessing the Mainstreaming of White Power in America?
Over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, the far-right fringe became a surprisingly visible and influential force in American politics. Eruptions of extremist violence — including the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection — have made militan...
ListenTranscript
November 12, 2021

It's Time for the Media to Choose: Neutrality or Democracy?
“Making it harder to vote, and harder to understand what the party is really about — these are two parts of the same project” for the Republican Party, Jay Rosen writes . “The conflict with honest journalism is structural. To be its dwindling self, the G.O.P. has to also be at war with the press, ...
ListenTranscript
November 9, 2021

Two Acclaimed Writers on the Art of Revising Your Life
Many of the most contentious debates right now center on whether we, as individuals — and as a country — are willing to revise. To revise our understanding of history. To revise the kind of language we use. To revise the nature of our personal, and national, identities. To revise how we act in our ...
ListenTranscript
November 5, 2021

Best Of: How Octopuses Upend What We Know About Ourselves
I’ve been on an octopus kick for a little while now. In that, I don’t seem to be alone. Octopuses (it’s incorrect to say “octopi,” to my despair) are having a moment: There are award-winning books, documentaries and even science fiction about them. I suspect it’s the same hunger that leaves many of...
ListenTranscript
November 2, 2021

The Life-Altering Differences Between White and Black Debt
Public policy in the United States often overlooks wealth. We tend to design, debate and measure our economic policies with regard to income alone, which blinds us to the ways prosperity and precarity tangibly function in people’s lives. And that blind spot can ultimately prevent us from addressing...
ListenTranscript
October 29, 2021

Why This Conservative Wants a More Radical Republican Party
“Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism,” Sohrab Ahmari writes . “To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.” Five years a...
ListenTranscript
October 26, 2021

Long Covid and the Blind Spots of American Medicine
One of the most frightening, least understood aspects of the coronavirus pandemic is what’s come to be known as “long Covid.” Stories abound of young, healthy adults who experienced mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infections and recovered fairly quickly, only to experience an onset of debilitating...
ListenTranscript
October 22, 2021

What Keeping American Democracy Alive Looks Like
In the wake of the “Stop the Steal” campaign, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the wave of voter suppression bills making their way through Republican legislatures across the country, the struggle for American democracy feels, for many, visceral and even existential. But for Martha S. Jones, a ...
ListenTranscript
October 19, 2021

The Story of America's Founding You Weren’t Taught in School
There are few periods of U.S. history that are as vigorously debated, as emotionally and civically charged as the American Revolution. And for good reason: How Americans interpret that period — its heroes, its villains, its legacy — shapes how we understand our social foundations, our national iden...
ListenTranscript
October 15, 2021

A Crypto Optimist and a Crypto Skeptic Walk Into a Podcast Studio
I’ve been wanting to explore the world crypto and blockchain technologies could build on the show for a while. In certain ways, I’m an optimist: I think these technologies matter, and many of them will work. In other ways, I’m a skeptic: I’m unconvinced that their wide adoption will lead to the gli...
ListenTranscript
October 12, 2021

Lessons on Living Well, From Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman is best known for his role as Ron Swanson, the mustachioed, libertarian outdoorsman who led the Pawnee, Ind., Parks and Recreation Department on the beloved show “Parks and Recreation.” But there’s more to Offerman than Swanson: His new book, “ Where the Deer and the Antelope Play ,” ...
ListenTranscript
October 8, 2021

Let's Talk About the Anxiety Freedom Can Cause
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and cultural theorist whose work includes the award-winning 2016 book “The Argonauts.” Her newest work, “On Freedom,” pierces right into the heart of America’s founding idea: What if there’s no such thing as freedom, at least not freedom as a state of enduring libera...
ListenTranscript
October 5, 2021

How to Do the Most Good
Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do? This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky’s current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn...
ListenTranscript
October 1, 2021

Eric Adams Has a Message for the Democratic Party
In July, Eric Adams narrowly won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, making him the odds-on favorite to win in November. And he won the nomination by running directly against the verities of today’s progressives: asserting that the police are the answer, not the problem; that “defund t...
ListenTranscript
September 28, 2021

This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift
There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. This is one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should. I...
ListenTranscript
September 24, 2021

Opinion Crossover: California Republicans, Facebook and Media Navelgazing
Today, we’re doing something a little different. Instead of a normal interview, we wanted to let you in on a special round table discussion I recently had with my fellow Opinion Audio hosts: Jane Coaston of “The Argument” and Kara Swisher of “Sway.” We discuss California’s recall election, the ...
ListenTranscript
September 21, 2021

We’re on the Precipice of a Post-Roe World
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court let stand a Texas law creating a system of vigilante legal enforcement against anyone who participates in an abortion after the point of fetal cardiac activity. In effect, Texas’ law bans abortions after about six weeks, which is long before many women even know t...
ListenTranscript
September 17, 2021

Economics Needs to Reckon With What It Doesn’t Know
“The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used...
ListenTranscript
September 14, 2021

How Colson Whitehead Writes About Our ‘Big Wild Country’
“If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around,” writes Colson Whitehead in his new novel, “Harlem Shuffle.” “Dizzying and powerful as it was. Ever...
ListenTranscript
September 10, 2021

Tyler Cowen on the Great Stagnation’s End
Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University, the co-founder of the blog Marginal Revolution, and host of the podcast “Conversations With Tyler.” But more than that, he’s a genuine polymath who reads about everything, goes everywhere and talks to everyone. I’ve known him for years, and wh...
ListenTranscript
September 7, 2021

Can We Change Our Sexual Desires? Should We?
“Feminists have long dreamed of sexual freedom,” writes Amia Srinivasan. “What they refuse to accept is its simulacrum: sex that is said to be free, not because it is equal, but because it is ubiquitous.” Srinivasan is an Oxford philosopher who, in 2018, wrote the viral essay “ Does Anyone Have th...
ListenTranscript
September 3, 2021

This Isn’t Your Grandpa’s Joe Biden
President Biden’s economic policy isn’t what you would have expected from his long career. That’s true in the legislation he’s backing, which is bigger and bolder than anything we’ve seen from him before, but it’s even truer in the appointments he’s making and the theories he’s embracing. On everyt...
ListenTranscript
August 31, 2021

Ask Ezra Anything: Degrowth, Third Parties, Reading and More
We asked for your questions, and you answered. Hundreds and hundreds of fantastic questions poured in, and our producer Annie Galvin joined me to ask some of the best of them. Does the infrastructure bill mean there’s more hope for bipartisanship than we thought? What’s my view on the degrowth move...
ListenTranscript
August 27, 2021

The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington Doesn’t Want to Have
Everything about the Afghanistan withdrawal is tragic. But that tragedy is the result not of the withdrawal, but the occupation, and America’s profound misjudgment of its own power and limits. This is the foreign policy conversation much of Washington is trying desperately to avoid. The answer for...
ListenTranscript
August 24, 2021

This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma
“Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist ...
ListenTranscript
August 20, 2021

The Argument: Should We Say "Hi" to Aliens?
We're taking this week off from publishing new episodes, so today we're bringing you an episode from "The Argument" about one of my favorite topics: aliens. We'll be back with new episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Tuesday. With the U.S. government puzzling over U.F.O.s , and potentially habit...
ListenTranscript
August 17, 2021

Best of: George Saunders on Kindness in a Cruel World
We’re taking a week off from releasing new episodes, so today I wanted to re-up one of my favorite episodes of the show, a conversation with fiction writer George Saunders that covers much more than just his writing. Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens o...
ListenTranscript
August 13, 2021

How Identity Politics Took Over the Republican Party
One problem with the conversation around political polarization is that it can imply that polarization is a static, singular thing. That our divisions are fixed and unchanging. But that’s not how it is at all. The dimensions of conflict change, and they change quickly. In the Obama era, Republicans...
ListenTranscript
August 10, 2021

We’re Living in the World the War on Terror Built
The Sept, 11 attacks might have taken place almost 20 years ago, but we’re still living in the America that the war on terror built. Its legacy is not just mass surveillance and drone strikes but birtherism, nativism and Donald Trump. And much of it has been — and continues to be — a bipartisan eff...
ListenTranscript
August 6, 2021

The Good and Bad News About the Delta Variant
“The war has changed.” That’s what the leaked C.D.C. document says about the way the Delta variant has upended our coronavirus policies. Delta is astonishingly contagious. It can generate 1,000 times the viral load of the original coronavirus strain, and it spreads with the ease of chickenpox. The ...
ListenTranscript
August 3, 2021

41 Questions For The Technologies We Use, and That Use Us
We all know by now that Zoom causes fatigue, social media spreads misinformation and Google Maps is wiping out our sense of direction. We also know, of course, that Zoom allows us to cooperate across continents, that social media connects us to our families and Google Maps keeps us from being lost....
ListenTranscript
July 30, 2021

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Fight Over U.S. History
You’ve heard plenty by now about the fights over teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. But behind those skirmishes is something deeper: A fight over the story we tell about America. Why that fight has so gripped our national discourse is the question of this podcast: What changes when...
ListenTranscript
July 27, 2021

Ross Douthat Has Been ‘Radicalized a Little Bit, Too’
Am I too panicked about the future of American democracy? My colleague Ross Douthat thinks so. He points to research suggesting that voter ID laws and absentee voting have modest effects on elections and the reality that Republican state officials already have tremendous power to alter election ou...
ListenTranscript
July 23, 2021

How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable
Joe Biden’s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone. But there’s a ...
ListenTranscript
July 20, 2021

Our Workplaces Think We’re Computers. We’re Not.
For decades, our society’s dominant metaphor for the mind has been a computer. A machine that operates the exact same way whether it’s in a dark room or next to a sunny window, whether it’s been working for 30 seconds or three hours, whether it’s near other computers or completely alone. But that’...
ListenTranscript
July 16, 2021

Ibram X. Kendi on What Conservatives—and Liberals—Get Wrong About Antiracism
“What if instead of a feelings advocacy we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?” wrote Ibram X. Kendi in his 2019 book “ How to Be an Antiracist .” “What if we focused our human and fiscal resources on changing power and policy to actually make society, ...
ListenTranscript
July 13, 2021

How Octopuses Upend What We Know About Ourselves
I’ve spent the past few months on an octopus kick. In that, I don’t seem to be alone. Octopuses (it’s incorrect to say “octopi,” to my despair) are having a moment: There are award-winning books, documentaries and even science fiction about them. I suspect it’s the same hunger that leaves many of u...
ListenTranscript
July 9, 2021

Critical Race Theory, Comic Books and the Power of Public Schools
Eve Ewing’s work as a sociologist, poet, visual artist, podcaster and comic book writer manages to do two things that are often in tension: it gives us a clear picture of how race, power and education work in America right now, and envisions a world that could work radically differently. “Dreaming...
ListenTranscript
July 6, 2021

Best of: What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America
In February, I spoke with Heather McGhee. I’ve been thinking about the conversation ever since.  “The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes McGhee in her recent book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism ...
ListenTranscript
July 2, 2021

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy Wants You to Be Bad at Something. It’s for Your Own Good.
Recently, I picked up Jeff Tweedy’s “How to Write One Song.” It was a bit of a lark. Tweedy is the frontman for Wilco, one of my favorite bands, but I’m not a songwriter, and I don’t plan to become one. But, unexpectedly, I loved the book. It’s the most generous and approachable guide to the crea...
ListenTranscript
June 29, 2021

Why Do We Work So Damn Much?
Historically speaking, we live in an age of extraordinary abundance. We have long since passed the income thresholds when past economists believed our needs would be more than met and we’d be working 15-hour weeks, puzzling over how to spend our free time. And yet, few of us feel able to exult in...
ListenTranscript
June 25, 2021

Republicans Are Setting Off a ‘Doom Loop’ for Democracy
The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 failed. Donald Trump is not the president. But at the state level, the Republican war on elections is posting startling wins. They are trying to do what Trump failed to do: neuter elections as a check on Republican power. A new report by three voting rig...
ListenTranscript
June 22, 2021

Sarah Schulman’s Radical Approach to Conflict, Communication and Change
Sarah Schulman’s work — as a nonfiction writer, novelist, activist, playwright and filmmaker — confronts the very thing most people try to avoid: conflict. Schulman, far from running from it, believes we need more of it. This was true in Schulman’s 2016 book, “Conflict Is Not Abuse,” which argues ...
ListenTranscript
June 18, 2021

Welcome to the ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ Economy
This is a strange moment in the economy. Wages are up, but so is inflation. Jobs are growing, but maybe not fast enough. Quit rates are at a 21st-century high. It isn’t clear what’s a trend, what’s a blip, what’s a transition and what’s now normal. And all this as the virus continues to stalk us an...
ListenTranscript
June 15, 2021

The Freeing of the American Mind
Free minds. Freedom fries. Free speech. The Freedom Caucus. Freedom from. Freedom to. What do Americans really mean when they talk about freedom? Louis Menand’s “ The Free World ” is a 700-plus-page intellectual history of the Cold War period that traces the opening of the American mind to new ide...
ListenTranscript
June 11, 2021

Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power
“The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel,” writes Sam Altman in his essay “Moore’s Law for Everything.” “This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, i...
ListenTranscript
June 8, 2021

Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.
There has been a bit of panic lately over employers who say not enough people want to apply for open jobs. Are we facing a labor shortage? Have stimulus checks and expanded unemployment insurance payments created an economy full of people who don’t want to work — and who are holding back the econom...
ListenTranscript
June 4, 2021

Is A.I. the Problem? Or Are We?
If you talk to many of the people working on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence research, you’ll hear that we are on the cusp of a technology that will be far more transformative than simply computers and the internet, one that could bring about a new industrial revolution and usher in a u...
ListenTranscript
June 1, 2021

Obama Explains How America Went From ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘MAGA’
“My entire politics is premised on the fact that we are these tiny organisms on this little speck floating in the middle of space,” Barack Obama told me, sitting in his office in Washington, D.C. To be fair, I was the one who had introduced the cosmic scale, asking how proof of alien life would ch...
ListenTranscript
May 28, 2021

Sway: How Online Sleuths Pantsed Putin
Today, while I'm on vacation, we're sharing an episode from Sway, a fellow New York Times Opinion podcast. Host Kara Swisher talks to Eliot Higgins, CEO of the open source investigative operation Bellingcat. Kara presses Higgins about the perils of taking on Vladimir Putin and how Bellingcat’s work...
ListenTranscript
May 25, 2021

The Argument: Should We Cancel Student Loan Debt?
This week, while I'm on vacation, we'll be sharing work from two other New York Times Opinion podcasts. First up, an episode from our friends at The Argument about how to cancel student-loan debt. Host Jane Coaston is joined by activist Astra Taylor and economist Sandy Baum, who agree that addressi...
ListenTranscript
May 21, 2021

Violent Crime Is Spiking. Do Liberals Have an Answer?
Early estimates find that in 2020, homicides in the United States increased somewhere between 25 percent and nearly 40 percent, the largest spike since 1960 , when formal crime statistics began to be collected. And early estimates indicate that the increase has carried over to 2021. Violent c...
ListenTranscript
May 18, 2021

The Spectacle of the G.O.P.'s Shrinking Tent
On May 12, House Republicans voted to remove Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican in the House, from her leadership post. Her transgression? Vocally rebuking the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But Cheney’s ouster is just the latest plot development in...
ListenTranscript
May 14, 2021

Status Games, Polyamory and the Merits of Meritocracy
Agnes Callard is an ethical philosopher who dissects, in dazzlingly precise detail, familiar human experiences that we think we understand. Whether her topic is expressing anger, fighting with others, jockeying for status, giving advice, or navigating jealousy, Callard provokes us to rethink the em...
ListenTranscript
May 11, 2021

Michael Lewis Is Asking the Right Question
Michael Lewis’s new book, “The Premonition,” is about one of the most important questions of this moment: Why, despite having the most money, the brightest minds and the some of the most robust public health infrastructure in the world, did the United States fail so miserably at handling the Covi...
ListenTranscript
May 7, 2021

Elizabeth Warren on What We Get Wrong About Inequality
One lesson of covering policy over the past 20 years is that whatever Elizabeth Warren is thinking about now is what Washington is going to be talking about next. So when I read Senator Warren’s new book, “Persist,” I read it with an eye toward that question: Where is Warren trying to drive the ...
ListenTranscript
May 4, 2021

How to Have Better Conversations About Hard Things
Anna Sale is one of my favorite interviewers. As the host of WNYC Studios’ “Death, Sex and Money,” she has an uncanny ability to get her guests to open up about the most personal, tragic, beautiful and embarrassing parts of their lives, whether it’s childhood trauma, the death of a partner or losin...
ListenTranscript
April 30, 2021

How Chuck Schumer Plans to Win Over Trump Voters
In his 100 days address this week, Joe Biden outlined his plans for a big, bold legislative agenda to come. He previewed a two-pronged economic package: the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. He spoke about the need to pass universal background checks fo...
ListenTranscript
April 27, 2021

Shame, Safety and Moving Beyond Cancel Culture
I’ve been thinking lately about how to move beyond the binary debate over cancel culture. And a good place to start is with the deeper question we’re all trying to ask: What is the kind of politics — the kind of society — we’re trying to achieve in our fights over acceptable speech? To talk throug...
ListenTranscript
April 23, 2021

Noam Chomsky’s Theory of the Good Life
How do you introduce Noam Chomsky? Perhaps you start here: In 1979, The New York Times called him “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” More than 40 years later, Chomsky, at 92, is still putting his dent in the world — writing books, giving interviews, changing minds. There are...
ListenTranscript
April 20, 2021

That Anxiety You’re Feeling? It’s a Habit You Can Unlearn.
This has been a bad year for the anxious among us — myself very much included. The pandemic was objectively terrifying. And many of us were trapped inside, with nothing we could do about it, severed from social connection and routine, with plenty of time to fret. But that almost gives anxiety, at ...
ListenTranscript
April 16, 2021

Why Adults Lose the ‘Beginner’s Mind’
Here’s a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. This isn’t just habit hardening into dogma. It’s encoded into the way our brains change as we age. And it’s worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses...
ListenTranscript
April 13, 2021

Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone
Prepping for a conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom is intimidating. McMillan Cottom is a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur fellow, co-host of the podcast “Hear to Slay,” and the author of the essay collection “Thick,” which was a National Book ...
ListenTranscript
April 9, 2021

The Best Explanation of Biden's Thinking I’ve Heard
With the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, the economic theory that is Bidenomics is taking shape. It’s big. It puts climate at the center of everything. It is more worried about political risks — losing the House, giving Donald Trump a path back to power — than some traditional economic risks, like ...
ListenTranscript
April 6, 2021

Did the Boomers Ruin America? A Debate.
Donald Trump was the fourth member of the baby boomer generation to be elected president, after Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, is a boomer. Chief Justice John Roberts is a boomer. The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, is a boomer. Presi...
ListenTranscript
April 2, 2021

Humanity’s Awesome, Terrifying Takeover of Evolution
For years now, I’ve had the same recurring worry: Am I focusing on the trivial? When future generations look back on this moment in history, will they remember the daily political fights — or will everything just look like a sideshow compared to humans being able to edit genetic code?  The technol...
ListenTranscript
March 30, 2021

The Author Behind ‘Arrival’ Doesn’t Fear AI. ‘Look at How We Treat Animals.’
For years, I’ve kept a list of dream guests for this show. And as long as that list has existed, Ted Chiang has been atop it. Chiang is a science fiction writer. But that undersells him. He has released two short story collections over 20 years — 2002’s “Stories of Your Life and Others” and 2019...
ListenTranscript
March 26, 2021

A Top G.O.P. Pollster on Trump 2024, QAnon and What Republicans Really Want
In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, the polling firm Echelon Insights decided to ask voters a simple question: Do they think the goal of politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it?” Only 25 percent of Republicans said politics is ab...
ListenTranscript
March 23, 2021

An Unusually Optimistic Conversation With Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath. If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for forever, without much of the compromise or...
ListenTranscript
March 19, 2021

Andrew Cuomo and the Performance of Power
Six months ago, Andrew Cuomo was on top of the world. He was touted as the anti-Donald Trump — the calm, fact-driven coronavirus leader the country needed. Now, amid allegations of hiding the true number of Covid-19 deaths in New York nursing homes and of workplace sexual harassment and abusive beh...
ListenTranscript
March 16, 2021

Mark Bittman Cooked Everything. Now He Wants to Change Everything.
Mark Bittman taught me to cook. I read his New York Times cooking column, “The Minimalist,” religiously. I bought “How to Cook Everything,” that red brick of a cookbook, and then, when I gave up meat, I bought its green companion, “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” He was like my cranky, no-B...
ListenTranscript
March 12, 2021

How America’s Covid-19 Nightmare Ends
On Jan. 28, I published a column that began like this: “I hope, in the end, that this article reads as alarmism. I hope that a year from now it’s a piece people point to as an overreaction.” Today, that column, thankfully, does look like alarmism. Cases fell, and kept falling, even in places bes...
ListenTranscript
March 9, 2021

What Does Toxic Stress Do to Children?
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris’s pioneering work on how childhood trauma shapes adult outcomes led to her being named the first surgeon general of California. That was in 2019. And then, of course, the novel coronavirus hit. The job of California’s surgeon general in 2020 was not what it was in 2019. But ...
ListenTranscript
March 5, 2021

Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.
We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the boundaries between work and home, the feeling of constantly being behind, lackluster productivity num...
ListenTranscript
March 2, 2021

What a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look Like
If you watched this past weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, you heard a lot of debunked election conspiracies, dire warnings about “cancel culture” and unwavering fealty to Donald Trump. What you didn’t hear was much in the way of policy ideas to raise wages, improve health care or...
ListenTranscript
February 26, 2021

How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis
Last week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the Texas power grid, setting off rolling blackouts that left millions without power during an intense winter storm. But this story is a lot bigger than Texas: Our world is built around a model of the climate from the 19th and 20th centuries. Global warm...
ListenTranscript
February 23, 2021

A Radical Proposal for True Democracy
One thing I want to do on this show is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one of those ideas. She calls it “open democracy,” and the premise is simple: What we call democracy...
ListenTranscript
February 19, 2021

What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World
George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” won the 2017 Booker Prize; and his nonfiction work has empathy and insight t...
ListenTranscript
February 16, 2021

What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America
“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” These pools were the pride of their communi...
ListenTranscript
February 12, 2021

The Senate Is Making a Mockery of Itself
The Senate is where Joe Biden’s agenda will live or die. More specifically, the intricacies of archaic Senate rules — the budget reconciliation process, the filibuster, the majority leader’s ability to control the floor — combined with the fealty today’s senators have to yesterday’s structures will...
ListenTranscript
February 9, 2021

Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming the world to our purposes, breeding new species into existence and driving countless more into ext...
ListenTranscript
February 5, 2021

An Appalled Republican Considers the Future of the G.O.P.
"I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society,” Yuval Levin told me. “I think it can only function in defense of them.” Levin is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, as wel...
ListenTranscript
February 2, 2021

To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems
As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw that the public health community was ignoring the evidence on masking, and raised the alarm persuasi...
ListenTranscript
January 29, 2021

What’s Happening to Our Economy Is Like a Natural Disaster
The Biden administration’s first legislative priority is a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. It’s the kind of mega-package where the individual policies contained inside it — a $15 minimum wage, $1,400 checks, a huge child tax credit expansion, a $50 billion virus testing infrastructure — woul...
ListenTranscript
January 25, 2021

The Man With the Plan to Beat the Pandemic
I’ve never covered a moment that simultaneously merits so much despair and so much hope. It’s dizzying. The Biden administration takes office with over 25 million Covid-19 cases nationwide, over 420,000 Americans dead, and new, highly contagious variants of the virus stalking our future. It’s as gr...
ListenTranscript
January 12, 2021

Coming Soon: The Ezra Klein Show
Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedel...
ListenTranscript