Episodes

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act. About the Guest Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a senior ...

Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich , founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book , Meat , Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can ...

There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead , his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human engi...

Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin , the problem isn’t ...

Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay , appropriately...

When asked what his parents did, Atlantic CEO and competitive marathoner Nicholas Thompson had a stock response. "My mother's an art historian at Babson," he would answer, "my father runs a male brothel in Bali." Thompson's n...

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026: * Land by Maggie O’Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two...

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett , co-editor of a new...

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Will...

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill , the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted , has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene fr...

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revoluti...

One of the most bracing presentations at DLD this year was given by Crunchbase's data queen Gene Teare . Breaking down America's VC dominance, Teare's speech might have been entitled "64% and Counting." As Teare told Keith an...

Not everything at DLD this year was on the growing US-European economic and technological divide. There were many speeches on the environment including from heavyweights like Kate Raworth. And I had the opportunity to catch u...

Few speakers at DLD this year were more sombre than The Economist 's deputy executive editor Kenneth Cukier . “Civilizations aren’t killed,” Cukier says, “they commit suicide.” It's now "three minutes to midnight" in Europe, ...

Few people experienced the Dot-Com bubble with more vertiginous intensity than Bill Gross , the Pasadena-based founder of Idealab and many many other internet startups over the last 30 years. So when I sat down with Gross at ...

Yesterday’s show from the DLD conference was about the need for Europe to relearn the language of power. Today, things get even more dire for our European friends. I asked another DLD speaker, Carl Benedikt Frey , a Swedish e...

I'm just back from another stimulating Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich where all the talk was about the growing technological and political gap with the United States and China. From Machiavelli and Hobbes to N...

For a country forever flirting with amnesia about its racial history, America sure struggles to forget. Take, for example, Bernie Goetz, the white subway vigilante, who shot four black teenagers on a NYC subway in December 19...

In his new co-authored book It’s On You , the English behavioral scientist Nick Chater exposes how the rich and powerful - the THEM - have convinced us that we're to blame for society's deepest problems. Can't lose weight? Th...

According to the New Yorker writer Nicholas Niarchos , Africa is rich in both raw materials and tragic paradox. We know about the continent's wealth in the rare earth minerals that enable our global transition from fossil fue...

We all have our own favorite Robert Redford movie. But what's Redford’s most prescient film about today’s America? His Seventies trilogy about American politics — The Candidate , Three Days of the Condor and All the President...

Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics , it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is about...

The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive people o...

Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein . The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jefferson ,...