Episodes

If everything is propaganda (even this show), then we are forever engaged in a war to control other people's minds. That, at least, is the view of the self-described “freedom fighter”, Connor Boyack, the libertarian author of the best-selling Tuttle Twins series of children books. In his latest piece of Tuttle Twins propaganda, A Guide to the World’s Worst Ideas, Boyack argues against all forms of government welfare, drug prohibition and foreign military engagement. And yet there's one instituti...

As we transition from the social media age (the internet of trolls) to the AI epoch (the internet of tolls), has the publishing apocalypse finally arrived? That’s the question Keith Teare and I discuss in our That Was the Week summary of tech news. Two major court cases this week—Getty Images vs. Stability AI and the Anthropic lawsuit—have fundamentally shifted the legal landscape around AI and copyright. The courts ruled that AI systems can legally "learn" from published content without copying...

Yesterday’s show was on the Great White Hoax of manufactured racism in America. Today’s is on Black Capitalists, the title of a provocative new book by Rachel Layrea. But is this a great black hoax? Or might her focus on race and class really be a blueprint for a more ethical 21st century capitalism? Laryea, who holds a PhD from Yale and works in wealth management at JPMorgan Chase, argues that Black capitalists can strategically use the tools of capitalism to create social good, not just profit...

There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific hoaxes have shaped two centuries of racist politics. From the 1840 Census Scandal to Henry Ford to George Wallace, Kadish exposes the conmen who have tried to sell racism to America. But here's the chilling twist: many of these fraudsters knew exactly what they were doing. They weren't true believers - they were cynical opportunists who saw profit in ped...

Next month, America will celebrate the centenary of the Scopes Trial, the so-called 1925 “Monkey Trial” on evolution that riveted a nation. Although perhaps celebrate is the wrong word to describe the Tennessee trial that not only riveted America but also divided it. According to the historian Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping The Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, the Scopes trial is as relevant to America in 2025 as it was in 1925. According to Wineapple, the trial w...

Don’t blame women. Men are failing spectacularly and it’s totally their own fault. In What Is Wrong with Men, cultural critic Jessica Crispin borrows from Michael Douglas movies to dissect how masculinity devolved from Seventies style vulnerability into today's aggressive displays of insecurity. While billionaires like Musk compulsively impregnate women and Zuckerberg learns jujitsu to feel "manly," basement-dwelling incels worship sex traffickers like Andrew Tate. The old patriarchy died in the...

So I get why Jeff Bezos isn’t popular in Venice this week. But why would Africans in general, and Kenyans in particular, not love Bill Gates after the philanthropist pledged to give away $200 billion of his fortune to Africa? According to Tablet staff writer, Armin Rosen, it’s because Gates’ top-down, metrics-driven approach often ignores what Africans actually want. Drawing from extensive on-the-ground reporting in Kenya, Rosen highlights how Gates' Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa pus...

Are Donald Trump and Steven Miller terrorists? Pakistani-American lawyer and author Rafia Zakaria argues that their willfully cruel immigration policies reflect what she describes as an "architecture of terror." In her June Liberties Quarterly piece "Silencings", Zakaria argues that these policies represent a deliberate strategy to terrorize communities and systematically dismantle the American democratic public sphere. Drawing on her experience both in practicing immigration law and as a natura...

In today’s age of authoritarian plutocracy, the UCLA political theorist Natasha Piano argues that we need to rethink the supposed “elitist” school of Italian thinkers like Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. In her intriguing new book, Democratic Elitism, Piano suggests Pareto, Mosca and even the Marxist Antonio Gramsci were actually "democratic theorists of elitism" who warned that electoral institutions can often enhance elite domination. Piano contends that American political science created a...

Yes, there still are some well meaning folks in Silicon Valley. Take, for example, Jimmy Chen, founder and CEO of Propel, an app designed to simplify food assistance for 41 million of the poorest Americans. Growing up food insecure himself, the Stanford educated Chen left lucrative jobs at Facebook and LinkedIn to build technology that actually serves those who need it most, proving that some Valley entrepreneurs are driven by social rather than financial ambition. Propel replaces the outdated 1...

Can we ever really know Primo Levi? We know his books, of course, especially If This Is A Man, the astonishing account of his survival from Auschwitz. But what, then, of his apparent suicide in 1987? How can a man who miraculously survived Auschwitz take his own life forty years later? That’s one of the questions that Joseph Olshan asks in Milo’s Reckoning, a new novel about Levi, suicide and our own unknowability. Olshan, himself deeply affected by Primo Levi's death when he first heard the new...

Yesterday, The Talking Heads, today, Dylan. The Great Man’s Jewish identity has long been overshadowed by his pantheistic status as American prophet. So when, for example, at the beginning of his biopic “A Complete Unknown”, Dylan arrives in Greenwich Village, he is presented as having no history, like a biblical prophet wandering out of the desert. But the London-based historian Harry Freedman argues against this tabula rasa version. In Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil, Freedman suggests ...

Do The Talking Heads, the quinessential art school band of the East Village scene of the 1970’s, still matter? Very much so. At least according to the band’s biographer, Jonathan Gould, who believes that The Talking Heads remain "the archetype of what we now think of as the alternative rock group" - a band prioritizing aesthetic evolution over commercial success. Born from New York's affordable cultural moment when rent cost $275 and abandoned industrial spaces fostered creativity, Talking Heads...

What does it really mean to be a “good woman”? For the controversial podcaster and writer Elise Loehnen, female goodness is a misery trap. And so reclaim their happiness, to make themselves whole, Loehnen says, women need to stop being good. The former goop executive and co-author of the upcoming Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness explains how the seven deadly sins reveal women's hidden conditioning, how the wellness industry became toxic, and why the Enneagram can help women embrace their full se...

“Let me tell you about the very rich”, Scott Fitzgerald once said. “They are different from you and me”. One way they are different, the New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos reports, is that they own yachts - very very big, expensive yachts. In The Haves and The Have-Yachts, Osnos’ dispatches about today’s ultrarich, he takes us on board these boats to reveal the obscenity of our new gilded age. From Mark Zuckerberg's obsession with Augustus Caesar to the thin-skinned grievances of figures like Ma...

It all began in 2019 at DeadSpin where Megan Greenwell was editor-in-chief. She had her dream job at the sports publication she'd always loved, leading a profitable digital media company with a devoted readership. Then the curse of private equity arrived. Within three months, everything collapsed. As Greenwell argues in her new book, Bad Company, she was pushed out, her entire staff followed, and the site was eventually sold to a Maltese gambling operation. What should have been a routine busine...

25 years after serving as the bridge between the Web 1.0 and 2.0 revolutions, Google stands at the vortex of another technological revolution. The company's new AI mode threatens to destroy the "simple bargain" that has sustained the web since 2005 — Google’s deal with websites which sent them traffic in exchange for indexing their content. Unlike traditional search results with links, Google’s revolutionary new AI Mode delivers knowledge directly from training data, eliminating the traffic pipe...

Happy NO KINGS DAY! Today, as nationwide protests sweep America, historian and activist Mark Bray argues that Trump and his MAGA movement represent a type of American fascism rooted in the country's long history of racist backlash against the struggle for civil rights. As the author of the iconic Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Bray connects today's resistance to Trump to historical anti-fascist movements, from the KKK's post-Civil War violence to European fascism of the 1930s. He discusses p...

So what, exactly, is libertarianism? Spike Cohen, the Libertarian Party's 2020 vice presidential nominee, boils it down to "the principle of human respect"—treating people as individuals, not as what he calls "tax cattle." Speaking from FreedomFest in Palm Springs, the founder of You Are The Power offers a scathing critique of both major parties while exposing what he calls a federal funding scheme that encourages states to separate children from their families. From defending controversial Silk...

According to Deborah Baker, author of Charlottesville: An American Story, America has become the Charlottesville of the Unite the Right Rally of August 12, 2017. Baker, who grew up in Charlottesville in the shadow of Jefferson's Monticello, watched in shock as neo-Nazis marched through her hometown in August 2017 with torches and flags. What began as her attempt to understand how such hatred could manifest in a progressive college town became a deeper reckoning with America's buried histories an...

Postmodern Patrimonialism. That’s the term Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch uses to describe Trump's second presidency, arguing it represents a 21st century model of running government as if it’s his own personal property. Rauch describes Trump 2's "everything everywhere all at once" strategy as a venture capital-like approach: launching numerous initiatives simultaneously to overwhelm opposition, expecting some to succeed while recognizing that others will fail. Noting that this str...

FreedomFest, America’s annual celebration of libertarian values, begins tomorrow in Palm Springs. According to FreedomFest’s CEO Valerie Durham, there’s something quintessentially American about her libertarian creed. Attracting speakers as diverse as Cornell West and RFK Jr, Durham argues that the libertarian doctrine articulated at FreedomFest offers America a politics beyond the conventional dogmas of right and left. But is Durham’s vision practical? Can radical libertarian principles like pr...

Karen Hao has been warning us about Sam Altman’s OpenAI for a while now. In her bestselling Empire of AI, she argues that the Silicon Valley startup is a classic colonial power, akin to Britain’s East India Company. Like those colonial merchants and policy makers who wrapped profit-seeking in civilizing missions, OpenAI cloaks its relentless scaling ambitions behind the noble goal of "ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." But as Hao reveals, this pursuit comes at en...

Do we get the nonfiction we deserve? LATimes book critic Bethanne Patrick wrestles with this question through five new books that both mirror and address our fractured psyche. From Melissa Fibos’ choice of celibacy over toxic sexual romance to a lone wolf crossing impossible borders, all these works expose a world grappling with isolation, AI empires, and the collapse of meaningful discourse. Whether it's Thomas Chatterton Williams's critique of wokeness, Damon Young's biting anthology of new bl...