Episodes

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown . But the point of Jeff Chang ’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo , is that by 1973, when Lee died, Asia...

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good , Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve our...

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck , author of World Enemy Number One , the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was own...

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay , cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last centu...

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, indeed,...

Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old Testament politics of retribution has exposed the limitations of liberal thou...

“It’s happening. The question is whether it’s a dream or a nightmare. This week, OpenAI introduced Pulse , an AI assistant that knows what we want to do and think before we do. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare welcomes...

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry , that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems remai...

Jacob Ward warned us. Back in January 2022, the Oakland-based tech journalist published The Loop , a warning about how AI is creating a world without choices. He even came on this show to warn about AI’s threat to humanity. T...

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch , the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country run b...

Donald Trump made his own controversial case against the United Nations at the UN today, lecturing world leaders that “the UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.” But he was beaten to this ant...

As the prize-winning author of Dreamland and The Least of Us , Sam Quinones is one of the most acclaimed authorities on America’s deadly drug epidemics. So it might seem a little surprising that his follow-up to these two bes...

I suspect both left and right have the Kimmel-Kirk story wrong. Rather than being about free speech versus hate speech, it’s actually the story of the end of the television era and the rise of open internet platforms like You...

Is there anyone who will defend Kamala Harris’ latest debacle, her 107 Days memoir that has irritated prominent Democrats like Josh Shapiro, Tim Walz and Pete Buttigieg? Certainly not the progressive writer David Masciotra , ...

Gutted by AI larceny and glutted by an avalanche of shows, the podcast economy is in deep crisis. So says Marshall Poe, founder of The New Books Network , a publisher of almost 30,000 independent podcasts. Things really are t...

It’s the most curious paradox of today’s digital revolution. While the computers, the internet, smartphones and AI all appear magical, they haven’t actually translated into equally magical economic progress. That, at least, i...

Should being a billionaire be illegal? Or, at least, actively discouraged? That’s the argument at the heart of Ingrid Robeyns ’ intriguing case against extreme wealth, Limitarianism . It’s an argument particularly pertinent i...

If Donald Trump is a broken clock only right twice daily, then one of those truths might be US policy toward Greenland. According to the Australian based geo-strategist Elizabeth Buchanan , Trump is correct to be preoccupied ...

So are millennials really the unluckiest generation? Yes and no. At least according to their unofficial biographer, Charlie Wells, the energetic London based Bloomberg reporter and author of What Happened to Millennials . In...

So why do we humans have such big brains? According to the NYU neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin , it’s because of language. In wanting to talk to one another, Kukushkin argues in his new book, One Hand Clapping, we need to be...

How should we punish criminals? In Impermissible Punishments , the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Judith Resnik , provides a historical narrative of punishment in European and American prisons. Tracing the ...

In a week dominated by the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cynthia Miller-Idriss ’ insights as the founding director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab ( PERIL ) are particu...

Today’s $3 trillion investment in AI is not only rational and beyond inevitable - it’s “predestined”. At least according to That Was The Week newletter publisher and techno-determinist Keith Teare. Exuberance is not only requ...

David Lesch is a poster child for something. I’m just not sure what. On the one hand, given his personal reinvention from Los Angeles Dodgers first-round draft pick to official biographer of Bashar al Assad, some might consid...