Episodes

The zealously anti-regulatory Trump is back and anti-corruption activist Frank Vogl is very worried. Vogl warns that MAGA’s increasingly deregulated America financial landscape could make the 2008 crash look like a minor bump...

So what to J.D. Vance's highly controversial speech at the Paris AI Summit this week? According to That Was The Week ’s Keith Teare, it was “a breath of fresh air”. Others will argue it was just more MAGA putridity designed ...

“ Expect More Bulldozings ”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month’s Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of the Democrats' loss to Trump, Karp argues that the supposedly progressive part...

What can a mother say to the cold-blooded executioner of her son? In American Mother , the heartrending story of the murdered American journalist Jim Foley, the writer Colum McCann and Diane Foley , Foley’s mother and founde...

If there’s anyone who knows the value of a pardon, it’s Jeffrey Toobin , the publicly shamed and now rehabilitated CNN legal analyst. In his latest book, The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy , Toobin examines the hi...

The acclaimed American writer Walter Mosley has a new King Oliver book out: B een Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right , a novel that follows Oliver's search for both a missing woman and his estranged father who was released fro...

According to the Scottish economist Sir John Kay , author of The Corporation in the 21st Century , the Magnificent Seven tech companies that supposedly control the global economy aren’t quite as magnificent as we are led to b...

So what’s it like co-authoring a book with Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and amongst Silicon Valley’s most prominent Democrats? According to Greg Beato , who just co-wrote Superagency with Hoffman...

It’s been quite a few days in Silicon Valley. "There are decades where nothing happens,” Lenin famously observed, “and there are weeks where decades happen”. As Andrew and Keith Teare reflect in their regular THAT WAS THE WE...

Wow. According to the journalist and historian Eoin Higgins, right wing tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Peter Thiel have “bought” prominent anti establishment journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt ...

Internet scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman is horrified by the American ban on TikTok. As a self-described “progressive” with a long and distinguished career advocating for internet freedom, Zuckerman expresses alarm at ho...

Trust a gay Jewish atheist to defend the value of American Christianity. In his new book Cross-Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy, the Brookings scholar and gay marriage activist Jonathan Rauch argues that...

Who gets to go to heaven and who doesn’t? According to John Lee Hooker Jr. , son of the legendary bluesman and author of From The Shadow of the Blues , many are called but not everyone is chosen. In the new autobiography, he ...

Few people know the U.S. car industry more intimately than the Wall Street Journal deputy auto editor Mike Colias . His new book, Inevitable , offers an insiders guide into what he sees as our messy, yet unstoppable transitio...

More than 6 million Americans now suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. So the stakes in find a cure for this neurological illness are huge. Too large, in fact, for some fraudulent American medical researchers. As the investigativ...

A week is certainly a long time in tech. On last week’s That Was the Week roundup, Keith Teare and I were asking if Trump’s America was a tech oligarchy. This week is all about the so-called “Sputnik Moment” of DeepSeek, a re...

In an era where even toothpaste shopping can trigger an existential crisis, intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld explore how we became both imprisoned and freed by endless options. Her new book The Age of Choice traces our...

According to Andrew Lipstein , here are 3 questions at the heart of his acclaimed new novel Something Rotten : a) What do we want masculinity to look like? b) What constitutes truth? c) How to present death in our culture? Ye...

From Dylan to democracy, from Bobby Kennedy to Putin's Russia - this wide-ranging conversation with Michael Ignatieff riffs off “ The Adults in the Room ,” his latest essay for Liberties Quarterly. A liberal intellectual and ...

A new book by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Nicholas Carr is always a major event. And today’s release of SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart offers a prescient critique of our social media age. As Carr exp...

Is AI the latest chapter in our long history of creating an all-knowing God? AI ethicist Christopher DiCarlo certainly suspects it is. In his new book " Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Co...

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s another anti tech book. In Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia , digital activist Mike Pepi argues that major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and OpenAI are all driven b...

In Keith Teare’s That Was the Week newsletter for this week, he categorically asserts that there is no oligarchy in Trump’s America. Instead there are “just technologists with a passion for change and, of course, self-interes...

So what, exactly, is a philosophical life? According the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard , author of the much acclaimed new book Open Socrates, it means being able to ask questions with the intuitive fluency o...