Episodes

“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington One night in 2023, t...

“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare , publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.” Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can...

“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well...

“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool...

“Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States , Australian writer Don Watson has...

“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie H...

“Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Frank...

“You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader Fifty years a...

“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for...

“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade u...

“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion...

“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stab...

“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar...

“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leade...

“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi What’s the last taboo? The thing that w...

“Historically, when the college-educated become politically radicalised, that does tend to lead to real shifts.” — Noam Scheiber A university degree has always been seen as a passport out of the working class. But according t...

“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admit...

“His ultimate failure is not simply losing. It’s his failure to stop Trumpism from being such a dominant force in America.” — Julian Zelizer On this Easter Sunday, can we resurrect Joe Biden’s reputation? Perhaps not — accord...

“We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan (attributed) Who gets to tell the AI story? A movie, a media company or Marshall McLuhan? 1. The movie: the AI doc, How I Became an Apocaloptimist , which...

“Millions of people have gone out and said, ‘Stop, don’t do that.’ And that is a wonderful thing.” — Peter Edelman We are in Washington DC this week, in search of America’s heart. And there may be no better guide than Peter E...

“That’s my story, but not where it ends.” — Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in the American story. But it is, of course, a narrative of second chances. And there’s no more ...

“When Haiti plays Brazil, Haitians will feel equal. Football gives even the weakest and the poorest a fighting chance. That is profound.” — Dimitri Elias Léger Yesterday , Simon Kuper defined the World Cup as a religious feas...

“The World Cup is a kind of religious feast. It’s like Easter, or Passover, or Eid, but it’s for all of humanity.” — A Church of England vicar, quoted by Simon Kuper Nick Hornby measured his (sad) life in Arsenal fixtures. Th...

“There is tremendous loneliness in the kind of life where you just don’t feel like anybody knows you.” — Margaret Rutherford Yesterday, the Brooklyn psychotherapist Daniel Smith defined perfection as the devil. Today, the Ark...