Podcast Episodes

Capitalism and Its Critics

We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

John Cassidy.

John Cassidy of Th…

Published on 4 months, 3 weeks ago

Trade, Trumped

We’re staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the People’s Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while to tell …

Published on 5 months ago

Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism

We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he stands for by …

Published on 5 months, 1 week ago

Miracles and Wonder

We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and ar…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Trump vs. Harvard

We’re tracking President Trump’s squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 m…

Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago

From Social to Spiritual Media

We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media…

Published on 6 months, 1 week ago

A New World

We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who ste…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

Angus King’s Civics Lesson

Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of…

Published on 7 months, 1 week ago

Muskology

In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists a…

Published on 7 months, 3 weeks ago

Trump Part II

We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us?

Kurt Andersen.

Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a miss…

Published on 8 months, 1 week ago