Podcast Episodes

Ehud Olmert on Israel's Catastrophic War in Gaza

It is impossible to overstate how hellish life in Gaza has been for the past 20 months.

The death count is above 50,000 people — more than 15,000 of whom are children — and at least 1.9 million of Gaz…

Published on 2 months, 4 weeks ago

Best Of: Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is

This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing control of your identity in the world. This happene…

Published on 3 months ago

The Emergent Trump Doctrine

Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He cal…

Published on 3 months ago

Our Lives Are an Endless Series of 'And'

This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — o…

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

The Growing Scandal of $TRUMP

Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with…

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

Trump’s Big Budget Bomb

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime.

When you think about this bill, you should think about risk.…

Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago

How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, an…

Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Is Trump Losing? A Debate

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a func…

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago

‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’

I honestly don’t know how I should be educating my kids. A.I. has raised a lot of questions for schools. Teachers have had to adapt to the most ingenious cheating technology ever devised. But for me,…

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now, the rest of us will likely be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s soc…

Published on 3 months, 4 weeks ago