Episodes

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben . But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun , McKibben argues that the sun - or, at least, solar...

Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. But according to David Daley , the author of Antidemocratic, Inside the Far Ri...

Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That’s the intriguing proposition put forward by former Kaiser Permanente Chief and Stanford Medical Sc...

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. Mark Eltringham , the publisher of the excellent future of work newsletter Wor...

Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progress meant embracing the economic and cultural interests of that class. Today, ...

Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed in Silicon Valley. Alternatively, it was the week that radical change broke...

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...