Episodes

So what, exactly, is the AI wedge? According to Ewan Morrison , author of For Emma , an already acclaimed novel about our dystopian biotech future, it means a “V-shaped” force that starts small but gradually drives people apa...

You've heard it before and you'll hear it again. AI is a gold rush. It will change everything. But 2025 is different, That Was The Week tech newsletter publisher Keith Teare argues. This is the year that the AI gold rush is c...

On July 4, 2025, is America still worth the fireworks? For Paul Orgel, producer of America 250, C-SPAN's upcoming celebration of 250 years of independence, the answer is a full stars 'n stripes YES! But even this C-SPAN veter...

Few people have spent more of their lives thinking about the Nazis than the English filmmaker and writer Laurence Rees . In his new book, The Nazi Mind , Rees offers a lifetime of knowledge about the Nazis to warn about today...

If the American dream died in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, then who killed it? According to the crime novelist Terrence McCauley, the JFK assassination was carried out by organized crime. That’s the heart of his new nov...

If everything is propaganda (even this show), then we are forever engaged in a war to control other people's minds. That, at least, is the view of the self-described “freedom fighter”, Connor Boyack , the libertarian author o...

As we transition from the social media age (the internet of trolls) to the AI epoch (the internet of tolls), has the publishing apocalypse finally arrived? That’s the question Keith Teare and I discuss in our That Was the Wee...

Yesterday’s show was on the Great White Hoax of manufactured racism in America. Today’s is on Black Capitalists , the title of a provocative new book by Rachel Layrea. But is this a great black hoax? Or might her focus on rac...

There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific hoaxes have shaped two centuries of racist politics. From the 1840 Census Scandal...

Next month, America will celebrate the centenary of the Scopes Trial , the so-called 1925 “Monkey Trial” on evolution that riveted a nation. Although perhaps celebrate is the wrong word to describe the Tennessee trial that no...

Don’t blame women. Men are failing spectacularly and it’s totally their own fault. In What Is Wrong with Men , cultural critic Jessica Crispin borrows from Michael Douglas movies to dissect how masculinity devolved from Seven...

So I get why Jeff Bezos isn’t popular in Venice this week. But why would Africans in general, and Kenyans in particular, not love Bill Gates after the philanthropist pledged to give away $200 billion of his fortune to Africa?...

Are Donald Trump and Steven Miller terrorists? Pakistani-American lawyer and author Rafia Zakaria argues that their willfully cruel immigration policies reflect what she describes as an "architecture of terror." In her June L...

In today’s age of authoritarian plutocracy, the UCLA political theorist Natasha Piano argues that we need to rethink the supposed “elitist” school of Italian thinkers like Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. In her intriguing ...

Yes, there still are some well meaning folks in Silicon Valley. Take, for example, Jimmy Chen , founder and CEO of Propel , an app designed to simplify food assistance for 41 million of the poorest Americans. Growing up food ...

Can we ever really know Primo Levi ? We know his books, of course, especially If This Is A Man , the astonishing account of his survival from Auschwitz. But what, then, of his apparent suicide in 1987? How can a man who mirac...

Yesterday, The Talking Heads , today, Dylan. The Great Man’s Jewish identity has long been overshadowed by his pantheistic status as American prophet. So when, for example, at the beginning of his biopic “ A Complete Unknown ...

Do The Talking Heads, the quinessential art school band of the East Village scene of the 1970’s, still matter? Very much so. At least according to the band’s biographer, Jonathan Gould , who believes that The Talking Heads re...

What does it really mean to be a “good woman”? For the controversial podcaster and writer Elise Loehnen , female goodness is a misery trap. And so reclaim their happiness, to make themselves whole, Loehnen says, women need to...

“Let me tell you about the very rich”, Scott Fitzgerald once said. “They are different from you and me”. One way they are different, the New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos reports, is that they own yachts - very very big, exp...

It all began in 2019 at DeadSpin where Megan Greenwell was editor-in-chief. She had her dream job at the sports publication she'd always loved, leading a profitable digital media company with a devoted readership. Then the cu...

25 years after serving as the bridge between the Web 1.0 and 2.0 revolutions, Google stands at the vortex of another technological revolution. The company's new AI mode threatens to destroy the "simple bargain" that has susta...

Happy NO KINGS DAY! Today, as nationwide protests sweep America, historian and activist Mark Bray argues that Trump and his MAGA movement represent a type of American fascism rooted in the country's long history of racist bac...

So what, exactly, is libertarianism? Spike Cohen , the Libertarian Party's 2020 vice presidential nominee, boils it down to "the principle of human respect"—treating people as individuals, not as what he calls "tax cattle." S...