Episodes

History, Marshall Poe wrote in December 2023, shows that Israel will never win a “war of occupation”. Eighteen months later, with Israel on the brink of a full scale occupation of Gaza, Poe’s argument is even more relevant. t...

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason , according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz : “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establishment, Deresiewicz beli...

“That he not busy being born is busy dying”, Dylan noted in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” , his grim 1965 masterpiece about reinvention. Sixty years later, at a time when “ everything is technology ”, these words ha...

Is spying an un-American activity? Not according to Jeffrey Rogg , whose new book, The Spy and the State, tells the story of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Rogg explores America's ambival...

Walmart just announced it would be raising prices because of tariffs. So is that a good argument against Trump’s autarkic trade policies? Perhaps. But, as the Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge, Tim Minsha...

Something doesn’t smell right about generative AI. Earlier this week, we had a featuring a former Google researcher who described large language models (LLMs) as a “con”. Then, of course, there’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who cri...

It’s probably not news that today’s Supreme Court runs on crazy conservative grudges and even crazier patrimonial fringe theories. But according to Leah Litman , Crooked Media podcaster and author of Lawless, the Supreme Cour...

Rather than apple pie, addiction might be defining quality of 21st century American life. That, at least, is the view of Mattea Kramer , author of Untended , a contemporary novel about addiction in small town America. She arg...

Is AI a big scam? In their co-authored new book, The AI Con , Emily Bender and Alex Hanna take aim at what they call big tech “hype”. They argue that large language models from OpenAI or Anthropic are merely what Bender dubs ...

The traditional notion of western civilization is premised on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Other less Eurocentric historians, like the Silk Road author Peter Frankopan, point to the role of China in shaping classica...

“Who’s Cheating?” asks Keith Teare in his weekly summary of tech news. Keith is defending a Columbia University student who was punished for openly used AI in his classes. As Arthur C. Clark famously noted, advanced technolog...

Not everyone will like this argument. Jason Riley , the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of The Affirmative Action Myth, argues that affirmative action policies have been counterproductive for Black Americans. He cont...

As a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin, the Chapman University economist Mark Skousen might be a bit biased. That said, Skousen makes an entertaining case in his new book, The Greatest American , for Franklin as being th...

Much has been made of the hallucinatory qualities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. But as the Wall Street Journal ’s resident authority on OpenAI, Keach Hagey notes, perhaps the most hallucinatory feature the $300 billion start-u...

What is the ideological alternative to Trumpism? In The Purposeful Warrior , Michigan’s Democratic candidate for Governor, Jocelyn Benson , offers “a road map for shattering the status quo and standing up for ourselves, our c...

There are few more respected economic analysts in the world than the Financial Times Chief Economic Commentator Martin Wolf . Yesterday, we ran a conversation with Wolf about the survival of American democracy. Today, we talk...

I’ve been in London this week talking to America watchers about the current situation in the United States. First up is Edmund Fawcett , the longtime Economist correspondent in DC and historian of both liberalism and conserva...

What’s it like to have to work physically hard to make a living in America today? In A Living , the writer and physician Michael Stein shares conversations with his working-class patients. He explores how work shapes identity...

Does the United States of America still have anything going for it? According to the Arizona based Larry Aldrich , co-author of the upcoming What’s Right About America , there remains much to celebrate about his country’s fou...

Is any criticism of Israel, by definition, anti-semitic? Not according to Uri Kaufman who, in his new book American Intifada , examines what he calls the "new antisemitism" following the Gaza war. That said, Kaufman nonethele...

In today’s discussion with David Masciotra about the first hundred days of Trump 2.0 I made the (Freudian) error of referring to it as a “hundred years”. It certainly feels like a hundred years . So how should the Democrats r...

Few analysts are more familiar with the politics of both contemporary Turkey and the United States than my old friend , the distinguished Turkish political scientist Soli Ozel . Drawing on his decades of experience in both co...

Americans, it’s time to move to Europe! The American geo-strategist Jason Pack anticipated last week’s advice from Simon Kuper and moved to London a few years ago during the first Trump Presidency. Pack, the host of the excel...

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Project 2025, the 2022 Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, unambiguously plotted out the strategy of the second Trump administration. As Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham makes cl...