Episodes

I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian model and Instagram influencer to the author of Rad Future , a manifesto about...

Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and astronomer Martin Rees . He’s the co-founder of Cambridge University’s Centre f...

So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton , the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final invention. Which, as the so-called Godfather of AI acknowledges, is his way...

We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller . But most of us, I’m guessing, don’t know about another McCabe, this one African-American, the bla...

Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu ’s new book, The Right of the People . What America needs, the Baltimore-based Nigerian-born ...

In what climate pessimists define as our environmentally apocalyptic times, we’ve become the metaphorical frog in the boiling water. That, at least, is the bleak conclusion of Roy Scranton , the author of Impasse , a new book...

How many more times can we report on a week in tech that changed the world? But here we go again…. We just had a week in Silicon Valley where everything , supposedly, changed. At least according to Keith Teare , publisher of ...

Like it or not, Trump and his surreal version of a libertarian patrimonial America is reshaping the world. At least in what the FT’s Janan Ganesh dubs “the high summer of Donald Trump”. But my old friend Jason Pack , host of ...

Are we Rome yet? It’s become all too easy to compare contemporary America's woes with those of late republican Rome. And even easier to argue that the democracy destroying Donald Trump is the second coming of Julius Caesar. B...

For five hundred years, scientists as credible as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Freud chipped away at the scientific existence of God. So, by the beginning of the 20th century, Nietzsche was able to announce the dea...

For all its multiple obituary notices, the American Dream is alive and kicking. That, at least, is the view of Matson Money CEO and founder, Mark Matson , author of Experiencing the American Dream . But you have to work for i...

Podcasts are ruining our lives. That, at least, is the thesis of the sometime podcaster, Liel Leibovitz . It’s the insidious charm of chat, Leibovitz believes, that is behind the faux intimacy of popular podcasters like Joe R...

Yesterday, the Canadian writer Diane Francis argued that Donald Trump should consider Xi Jinping’s China a competitor rather than an enemy. Perhaps. But in this zero-sum “competition” between Trump and Xi for top tough guy, t...

Should America go soft on China? According to the Toronto based foreign affairs writer Diane Francis , the United States ought to consider Xi Jinping’s China a competitor, rather than a enemy. In contrast, Francis views Vladi...

I’ve always considered my friend Keith Teare a bit weird. Maybe it’s living in Palo Alto amidst the tech plutocracy. But I wonder if the That Was The Week weekly tech news publisher has finally lost his mind. In this week’s c...

Can Democrats pull a Ronald Reagan? That's the provocative question at the heart of Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch 's New York Times intriguing piece about how the Democrats can win back the presidency in 2028. Just as the n...

How to write about the kaleidoscopic Sixties in the gloom of 2025? According to James Grady , author of the classic Six Days of the Condor and the new mid-century novel American Sky , the key is calibrating nostalgia with unf...

Both the American left and right are revolted by elites. But whereas the right has channeled its distaste for the powers-that-be into Trump and MAGA, the left has mostly failed to capitalize on populist hatred of American eli...

Dubbed the Meme Queen of Depression by Mashable, Aiden Arata 's real goal on Instagram was to build a big enough following to convince traditional publishers to let her write a book. Thus her new collection of essays, You Hav...

The troubling thing about William F. Buckley , the media savvy founder of modern American conservatism, isn’t so much his politics, but his likability. How could such an overtly reactionary racist and homophobe (even if he wa...

Yesterday, we focused on the death of the American way of work. But today the news on the AI front isn’t quite as dire. According to the New York based economic historian Dror Poleg , AI will be too busy to take your job. Tha...

In 1963, Jessica Mitford published her remarkable account of the American funeral industry, An American Way of Death . Over sixty years later, another distinguished Englishwoman, the workplace futurist Julia Hobsbaw m, is ann...

It’s an old thesis - that capitalism has created a religion out of money. But nobody, not even Marx, has been quite as theologically explicit as Paul Vigna, author of The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue,...

Douglas Rushkoff has spent decades warning how each new digital technological “revolution” has promised liberation but actually only compounds social and economic injustice. Six months after describing AI to me as the "first ...