Episodes

July 22, 2020

Brad Feld: How Venture Capitalists Can Reshape Communities For the Better

Brad Feld has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Prior to cofounding Foundry Group--a Boulder, Colorado-based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in information technology companies all over the United States--he cofounded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a company that helped launch and operate software companies. Feld is also a cofounder of TechStars and has been active with several nonprofit organizations. He is...
July 21, 2020

Martin Gurri: The Crisis of Authority in the 21st Century

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst specializing in the relationship of politics and global media. His book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, first published in 2014 and updated in 2018, has been praised for foreshadowing the political shocks of Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. Mr. Gurri has published numerous articles, studies, and opinion pieces on geopolitical- and media-related topics. His blog, The Fifth Wave, pursues the themes first elabora...
July 20, 2020

Anne Trubek: Why Should You Write a Book During a Pandemic?

Anne Trubek is the founder and director of Belt Publishing. She is the editor of the forthcoming Voices From the Rust Belt (Picador 2018), the author of The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting and A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian, Slate, Salon, Belt and numerous other publications. A tenured professor at Oberlin College from 1997-2015, she currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio.
July 19, 2020

Joel Kotkin: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. He is Senior Fellow for Heartland Forward and Executive Editor of the widely read website NewGeography.com. He is a regular contributor to City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette and Real Clear Politics. As director of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman, he was the lead author of a major study on housing, and recently,...
July 19, 2020

Ron Brownstein: Is Trump's America Slipping Away?

Ronald Brownstein is political director of Atlantic Media, publishers of the Atlantic, National Journal, and the Hotline, among other publications. He was national political correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of both the 1996 and 2004 presidential elections. The author or editor of five previous books, he appears regularly as an analyst for CNN and other television programs, such as Meet the Press and Charli...
July 15, 2020

Nicholson Baker: What Secrets Do the Freedom of Information Act Hold?

Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels and six works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Hermann Hesse Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano.
July 15, 2020

Eric Lonergan: Is 2020 the Year of Anger?

Eric Lonergan is a macro hedge fund manager, economist, and writer. His most recent book is Money (2nd ed) published by Routledge. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, and The Economist. He also advises governments and policymakers. He first advocated expanding the tools of central banks to including cash transfers to households in the Financial Times in 2002. In December 2008, he advocated the policy as the most efficient way out of recession post-financial crisis, contribut...
July 14, 2020

Osita Nwanevu Calls Out Yesterday's Liberals

Osita Nwanevu joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2018, covering politics and policy in Washington, D.C. He is a former staff writer at Slate and a former editor-in-chief of the South Side Weekly, a Chicago alternative weekly. His writing has also appeared in Harper’s, the Chicago Reader, and In These Times.
July 13, 2020

Camila Russo on Ethereum and the Future of the Internet

Camila Russo is one of the most prolific and dedicated cryptocurrency journalists, speaking frequently at industry events and appearing on major media outlets. She is the founder of crypto content platform The Defiant, and was a Bloomberg News reporter for eight years covering emerging markets, European stocks and digital assets from Buenos Aires, Madrid and New York City. She also worked at Chile’s largest national newspaper, El Mercurio and was awarded first place for online journalism by Braz...
July 11, 2020

Mario Alejandro Ariza: Is Miami's Future Apocalyptic?

Mario Alejandro Ariza grew up in Santo Domingo and Miami, where he lives currently. His work has appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, The Believer, the Miami New Times, and The New Tropic. He is featured in Sinking Cities, a PBS documentary series on the threat of climate change.
July 10, 2020

Cass Sunstein: How Can Social Change Happen?

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in con...
July 9, 2020

Brian Dumaine: What Does Bezonomics Tell Us About the Future of Labor?

Brian Dumaine is an award-winning journalist and a contributing editor at Fortune magazine. In addition to Bezonomics his works include The Plot to Save the Planet, and, with three coauthors, Go Long: Why Long-Term Thinking Is Your Best Short-Term Strategy. He and his wife live in New York.
July 8, 2020

Yascha Mounk: Why We Need to Defend a Free Society

Yascha Mounk is a writer, academic and public speaker known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Yascha has written three books: Stranger in My Own Country - A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, a memoir about Germany’s fraught attempts to deal with its past; The Age of Responsibility – Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, which argues that a growing obsession with the concept of individual responsibility has transformed western welfare states; and The People ve...
July 7, 2020

Eric Holthaus: What Will the World Look Like in 2030?

Eric Holthaus is the leading journalist on all things weather and climate change. He has written regularly for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist, and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
July 6, 2020

Kevin Roose: Is 2020 the End of the Wild, Wild Web?

Kevin Roose is an award-winning technology columnist for The New York Times. His column, "The Shift," examines the intersection of tech, business, and culture. He is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, Futureproof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. He is a regular guest on “The Daily,” and appears regularly on leading TV and radio shows. He writes and speaks regularly on many topics, including automation and A.I., social media, disinformation and cybersecurity, and digit...
July 5, 2020

Bret Stephens: The Threat to Liberty From the Left

Bret L. Stephens joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2017. His column appears Thursday and Saturday. Mr. Stephens came to The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. At The Post he oversaw the paper's news, editorial and digital operations and its international editions, and also wrote a weekly col...
July 4, 2020

Mehrsa Baradaran: Who's Actually Independent in 2020?

Mehrsa Baradaran is J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and author of How the Other Half Banks.
July 1, 2020

Pavlina R. Tcherneva: The Case for the Job Guarantee

Pavlina R. Tcherneva is Associate Professor at Bard College and Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.
June 30, 2020

Kevin Delaney: How to Save Democracy From Capitalism

Kevin J. Delaney is a senior editor for The New York Times. Previously, he co-founded Quartz and served as co-CEO and editor in chief from 2012 to 2019. Prior to Quartz, Kevin was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal for a decade, with that time split between Paris and San Francisco.
June 30, 2020

David Shimer on the Ideology of Putinism

David Shimer is pursuing a doctorate in international relations at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. His reporting and analysis have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Foreign Affairs. He is an associate fellow of Davenport College at Yale University, where he received his undergraduate and master's degrees in history.
June 28, 2020

Margaret O'Mara: Has Silicon Valley Ruined America?

Margaret O’Mara is the Howard & Frances Keller Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of U.S. politics, and the connections between the two. O'Mara is the author of Cities of Knowledge (Princeton, 2005), Pivotal Tuesdays (Penn Press, 2015), and The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019). She is a coauthor, wi...
June 25, 2020

Ben Ehrenreich: A Road Map for the End of Time

Ben Ehrenreich writes about climate change for The Nation. His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and Los Angeles magazine. In 2011, he was awarded a National Magazine Award. His last book, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, based on his reporting from the West Bank, was one of The Guardian's Best Books of 2016. He is also the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors.
June 25, 2020

Elif Shafak: Why Is Nationalism Not a Force For Good?

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of fifteen books, ten of which are novels, including The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love. Her work has been translated into more than forty languages and she regularly contributes to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Politico. Shafak has been longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and twice for the Women's Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She has held various teaching positions in the U.S....
June 23, 2020

Steven Weber: How Do We Make Things Better?

teven Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics. His research, teaching, and advisory work focus on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to health care, information technology, software, and global political economy issues relating to competitiveness. He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly and public debates on international politics and US foreign policy. One of the world’s ...