Podcast Episodes

When Is It Genocide?

In December 2023, when South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice, I thought it was wrong to do so. Israel had been attacked. Its defense was legitimate. The bl…

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Mahmoud Khalil Tells His Story

Mahmoud Khalil was a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. In March, he was arrested by ICE agents and held for more than 100 days in a Louisiana detention facility. The Trump adm…

Published on 3 months ago

Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we defin…

Published on 3 months ago

Best Of: Barbara Kingsolver on ‘Urban-Rural Antipathy’

“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is one of those “country people,” as well as a literary legend …

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

Is Decarbonization Dead?

Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energy in America? Where does the climate movement go …

Published on 3 months, 1 week ago

Why American Jews No Longer Understand One Another

The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down. 

That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews; anti-Zionism is a form of antisemiti…

Published on 3 months, 2 weeks ago

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

MAGA has been infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein files. And that’s because the conspiracy theories around Epstein hit at the very core of MAGA’s whole worldview.

Today’s episode looks closer at that …

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Why Does My Mind Keep Thinking That?

I have had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I started hoping it would calm me down, and it has. But it’s also made me more aware of the strangeness of my mind. Certain thoughts emerge se…

Published on 3 months, 3 weeks ago

How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us

Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the c…

Published on 3 months, 4 weeks ago

The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate

President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted toward the rich, along with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutr…

Published on 4 months ago