Episodes

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus , Restall places Genoa’s most famous sailor as a prisoner of history - endlessly protean to reflect each era’s changing values. The many lives of Columbus, then, is a mirror of how we have thought differently about him over the last 500 years. As hist...

Last weekend, the English reggae band UB 40 played in the Orpheum in Los Angeles and included in the set their 1980 song “Tyler”. Tyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not so In the audience was the song’s muse Gary Tyler who, as a sixteen year...

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic , the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity Is overrated and what to do instead. Drawing from extensive behavioral science research, Chamorro-Premuzic contends that success comes not from unleashing your unfiltered self but from understanding where “the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins.” Authen...

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the United States together. As the historian Nicholas Buccola notes in his intriguing new book One Man’s Freedom , these competing freedoms are represented in the thinking of the two icons of modern American conservatism and liberalism: Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King. For Goldw...

We’ve done a couple ( here and here ) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the tenured Emory law professor Deepa Das Acevedo , what she calls in her new book, The War on Tenure , is really an attempt to transform the modern university into an academic version of Uber. By getting rid of tenure, Acevedo argues, academia is creating a new precariat of adjunc...

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America again? For the philosopher Michael Brownstein , co-author of Somebody Should Do Something , progressives need to learn to lose both cleverly and loudly. And they can learn from NRA on this. Despite holding positions unpopular with most Americans, Brownstein acknowledges that the...

“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, Asian America was more than just Chinatown. Lee made Asian America, Chang argues, by giving Asian Americans dignity. Chang shows how Lee’s journey from segregated Seattle and San Francisco neighborhoods to global stardom paralleled the rise of Asian American political consciousn...

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 most pressing social problems. Thirty five years ago, when his investors vetoed a reading machine for the blind because the market was only $1 million annually, Fruchterman walked away from his $25 million-funded AI company to start his first nonprofit. Today, he’s still on...

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 owned and operated by a global cabal of Jews. And so, Hellbeck argues, it was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fact, “World Enemy No. 1.” Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and wer...

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 century, they argue. The UN figures they cite—60 to 80 million direct deaths since the automobile’s invention—don’t even include premature deaths from air pollution or the millions seriously injured. Yet we’ve become “car blind,” Moore and Kay contend, unable to see how we’ve sur...

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, be asking. In his co-authored book The Great Upheaval , Levine argues that the United States is experiencing a profound transformation not seen since the Industrial Revolution—when America’s classical colleges adapted to meet the needs of an emerging industrial economy. So ...

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 thought. In his new book, Anger, Fear, Domination , Galston argues that liberals must recognize the dark passions driving politics and incorporate them into their own language. The power of political speech, Galston reminds us, depends on the recognition and promise of human pas...

“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 Pulse as a “habit” that will “shape your day.” Unlike the techno-teleological Keith, however, I’m less enamored by Pulse. Do we really want a proactive AI assistant that not only controls what Keith calls the “front door” but every other door (and window) in our lives? Keit...

“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 remained a weak, divided party struggling to counter the MAGA-controlled Republicans. Learning from the campus success of Charlie Kirk, he says, the Democrats need to rediscover what once made them a party of the vibrant counterculture. And that certainly isn’t going to happen if...

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. Three years later, we’ve all caught up with Ward. So where is he now on AI? Moderately vindicated but more pessimistic. His original thesis has proven disturbingly accurate - we’re outsourcing decisions to AI at an accelerating pace. But he admits his book’s weakest section w...

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 by an equally small and landlocked man called Viktor Orban. For Rauch, this suggests that America is on its way to becoming the sort of pathetically petty patrimonial state that the wannabe dictator Orban is trying to establish in Hungary. But the idea of the world’s dominant...

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 anti-UN manifesto by the New York City based journalist Seth Barron , who wrote “ The End of the UN ” cover story for Tablet magazine this month. While Barron’s historically grounded critique is more academically rigorous than Trump’s, it essentially makes the same realpolitik ...

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 best-sellers is a book in praise of the bass horn, a relatively unglamorous musical instrument that he neither plays nor learned in marching band. But it all makes perfect sense. In The Perfect Tuba , Quinones resurrects the American Dream in the form of the bass horn (tuba) w...

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 YouTube and Substack. So when Keith Teare asks who is for free speech in his latest That Was The Week newsletter, what he’s really saying is that free speech has never been freer. Anyone can say anything they want, he says. The only real question is whether anyone is actually l...

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 , who has appeared on this show several times in the past to defend the former Vice President. According to Masciotra, the person most damaged by the ridiculous narcissism in 107 Days is Harris herself, who appears utterly out of touch with reality. "I was wrong, you were righ...

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 that bleak, Poe insists. Drawing parallels between today's AI content appropriation and Napster's music piracy in the late Nineties, he argues we've entered an era where "the theft of IP is an accepted business model." AI companies appear to scrape podcast content without per...

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, is the counter-intuitive argument of the Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey whose new book, How Progress Ends , suggests that the digital revolution isn’t resulting in an equivalent revolution of productivity. History is repeating itself in an equally paradoxical way, Frey w...

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 in a week when Tesla is offering to make Elon Musk a trillionaire if he can reach certain sales targets. For Robeyns, an ethicist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, her arguments against extreme wealth are both moral and utilitarian. On the one hand, she argues ...

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 with American influence over, and perhaps even ownership of Greenland. In her new book, So You Want To Own Greenland , Buchanan argues that the 57,000-person continental super-sized island is becoming central to 21st Century geopolitics. From the Vikings to the (yes) coloniz...