Episodes

That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare argues we're “accelerating” toward an age of “abundance” in which AI and automation will slash production costs to near-zero, freeing humans to pursue hobbies instead of jobs. I’m less ...

Revenge has become Donald Trump’s brand. That, at least, is the view of James Kimmel Jr , author of The Science of Revenge , who argues that revenge has become America’s “deadliest addiction”. When we feel wronged, he says, o...

It’s not just the MAGA or the Woke crowd. According to Greg Lukianoff , CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ( FIRE ), free speech in America is under existential threat from all political sides. While h...

As one of the most illustrious rock stars of the sustainability movement, Tim Jackson suggests that we must “f**k the patriarchy” to get beyond capitalism. In his new book, The Care Economy , Jackson argues that our growth-ob...

We Must Save the Books. That’s Michael Kimmage’s SOS message from Trumpian Washington in this issue of Liberties Quarterly . Kimmage , former director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, describes the surreal experi...

How religious was the 80s creative scene? Very. At least according to Paul Elie , whose intriguing new cultural history, The Last Supper, charts the art, faith, sex and controversy of the 1980s. Elie argues that this was the ...

Who is the most unsung hero of the American Civil War and Reconstruction? According to Zaakir Tameez , it’s the abolitionist statesmen Charles Sumner. In his eponymous new biography of Sumner, Tameez portrays Sumner as a mode...

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. According to the Pulitzer finalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling , the majority of Americans no longer trust standard scientific proof. As he notes in his new book, The Ghost Labs , this f...

According to the legal scholar Marcus Alexander Gadson , violence is central to the constitutional history of the United States. As American, in fact, as apple pie. In his new book Sedition , Gadson argues that America's revo...

Who was America’s great power prophet during the Cold War? Perhaps not Henry Kissinger. In Zbig , Financial Times’ U.S. editor, Edward Luce, makes the case that the Polish-American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski was at least...

Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious ...

Why are the Democrats losing the American working class? According to Joan Williams , it’s because they are failing to prioritize economic concerns of working-class Americans. In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the...

In Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us , best selling writer Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals the secret history of American patriarchal values. Tubbs argues this patriarchy is the central narrative thread of Americ...

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...