Episodes

"I'm much more likely to protest when I feel responsible—when violence is being done in my name." — Bruce Robbins As always, the media is full of stories about political protest. A Columbia University Gaza protester held by I...

"We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people." — Emily Galvin Almanza Back in April 2024, we interviewed Thelton Henderson , one of the first African American federal judges in America. ...

"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare) Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spi...

"She's a ten to me and that's the part that matters." — Paul Eastwick If it's Valentine's Day, we must be talking about love. Paul Eastwick studies attraction and relationships at UC Davis, and his new book Bonded by Evolutio...

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène Landemore In February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landemore,...

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper Culpepper From Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully toge...

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan Rauch Jonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump administrat...

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott Eden In October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered on h...

"We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him." — Jonathan Turley Jonathan Turley's new book asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while the...

"It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now." — Erika Dilday On Super Bowl Sunday — with America celebrating its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday joins to discuss the power of documentary film to cut throu...

"I didn't use my own software this week because the OpenAI agents were better. And that's me retiring my own software." — Keith Teare Something broke this week. Both Anthropic and OpenAI launched multi-agent systems—"agent sw...

What kind of leadership can hold a fractured democracy together? About the Guest Stephen Schlesinger is an American historian, author, and foreign policy analyst. The son of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—Pulitzer Prize–winning histo...

A man was convicted by his own heartbeat — and that's just the beginning of our digital dystopia. About the Guest Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and a national expert on...

An anti-fascist spy handed American officials evidence of murderous intent from a Nazi planning server — and they declined to act. About the Guest Christopher Mathias is a journalist covering the far right, formerly a senior ...

Can meat save the planet? That’s the paradoxical promise of the longtime vegan activist Bruce Friedrich , founder of the Good Food Institute. In his new book , Meat , Friedrich argues that plant-based and cultivated meat can ...

There’s something absurdly Strangelovian about the American quest for a perfect weapon. As Jeffrey Stern warns in The Warhead , his new history of The Paveway, the first “smart” bomb, weapons are always, like their human engi...

Why did Nixon trigger a remarkable cultural American renaissance while Trump has generated an avalanche of social media bluster, but few great movies, songs or novels? For Silicon Valley critic Jon Taplin , the problem isn’t ...

Is AI going through an adolescent crisis, even it’s still just a toddler? There certainly seems to be a lot of adolescent angst amongst our new AI overlords like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his latest essay , appropriately...

When asked what his parents did, Atlantic CEO and competitive marathoner Nicholas Thompson had a stock response. "My mother's an art historian at Babson," he would answer, "my father runs a male brothel in Bali." Thompson's n...

According to our favorite literary reviewer, Bethanne Patrick, these are the seven books that “will really matter” in 2026: * Land by Maggie O’Farrell — The Hamnet author returns with a luminous novel set in 1865 Ireland, two...

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett , co-editor of a new...

New books are like London buses. You wait and wait and then a handful comes at the same time. Take, for example, histories of the New York City vigilante Bernie Goetz. Last week, we featured the CNN legal analyst Elliott Will...

This is the final conversation from DLD. And the most optimistic - at least from a European perspective. John Thornhill , the FT’s Innovation Editor and founder of Sifted , has a quite different take on Europe’s tech scene fr...

For media moguls, we are living, to borrow from Dickens, in the best and worst of times. As Nicholas Thompson confessed to me at DLD, The Atlantic CEO is simultaneously “excited” and “terrified” by the power of AI to revoluti...