Episodes

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 ...

So who killed privacy? It's the central question of Tiffany Jenkins ' provocative new history of private life, Strangers and Intimates . The answer, according to Jenkins, is that we are all complicit—having gradually and ofte...

Is Mohammed bin Salman a tyrant or an enlightened despot? According to the former Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Man Who Would Be King , a new biography of MBS, he mig...

Sociocide is a chilling word. Coined by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, it means the deliberate destruction of a society's social infrastructure and capacity to function as a cohesive unit. According to Boston Colleg...

It’s the fantasy of countless Wall Street analysts. Amran Gowani traded his lucrative career in hedge funds for the scarily solitary world of novel writing. His debut satirical novel Leverage draws from his insider experience...

How can anyone forget those photos of Trump’s sons celebrating over the carcasses of dead animals that they shot in Africa? Fortunately, not all sons of American Presidents behave so tastelessly in the wild. As Nathalia Holt ...

The last time Peter Wehner , who I’ve always imagined as America’s conscience, appeared on the show to talk about the “ethical darkness” that has fallen upon America, I suggested that this was an “important” interview. Today’...

From suburban swimming pools and SUVs to White Lives Matter rallies, the Johns Hopkins anthropologist Anand Pandian has been exploring the everyday walls of American life. In his new book, Something Between Us , Pandian trave...

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...