Episodes

“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 That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare dismissed because it failed to define AI. 2. A media company: OpenAI bought the streaming show TBPN for hundreds of millions of dollars in a move that is akin to Lenin starting Pravda. 3. Marshall McLuhan: Ezra Klein visited Silicon V...

“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 Edelman — one of the few remaining members of the Bobby Kennedy braintrust. Edelman was a close Kennedy aide from just after JFK’s assassination through the 1968 presidential campaign. He watched Bobby find himself after his brother’s death — grow from a man defined by servin...

“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 of an American story than Bob Dylan, whose second act may be more memorable than his first. Robert Polito — poet, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer, and former director of creative writing at the New School — has written what may be the (anti) definitive ...

“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 feast for all of humanity. Today, Dimitri Elias Léger asks whether God is watching. His new novel, Death of the Soccer God , is a fictional reimagining of the most famous goal in American World Cup history — scored in 1950 by a non-American. Joe Gaëtjens was a half-German, half-...

“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. The FT columnist Simon Kuper has measured his in World Cups. His new book, World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments , is the Kuper story told through the nine tournaments he attended as a journalist — from Italy 1990 to Qatar 2022. World Cup Fever is as irresistib...

“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 Arkansas-based Dr. Margaret Rutherford explains what happens in our FOMO age when the devil wins. Her subject is what she calls the “perfectly hidden depression” of today’s Instagrammable types. Perfectionism rates are going up, Rutherford warns. And so, not uncoincidentally, a...

“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel Smith Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith ’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions . Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the category of emotions that are supposed to shame us. The things that bore us most — raising children, long...

“We can survive. Can we thrive? That’s a different question.” — Corey Nathan Robert Mueller died last week. Educated at Princeton, this Vietnam veteran won a Purple Heart and then enjoyed decades of public service under presidents of both parties. But the current president celebrated Mueller’s death. Such are the vagaries of American history. In contrast, Corey Nathan — host of the Talking Politics and Religion Without Killing Each Other podcast — isn’t celebrating Robert Mueller’s death. Nathan...

“Happiness is a rare commodity. There’s a lot of fuel for the claim that unhappiness is caused by some software, when in fact the roots of unhappiness are way deeper than that.” — Keith Teare If it’s not warfare in Iran, then it’s lawfare in California. Out here in Silicon Valley, it’s been a week dominated by two trials of big tech. First, Meta and YouTube were found liable for designing products that addict children. While the young female social media victims hugged outside the Los Angeles co...

“Why does someone need to be the first trillionaire? The damage it’s doing just to get to that level is extreme.” — Glen Galaich Excessive wealth disorder. It sounds like a disease — which, at least according to Glen Galaich — CEO of the Stupski Foundation and author of Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, it is. There’s $2 trillion sitting in American charitable accounts Galaich says, mostly invested in hedge funds and real estate. Foundations are legally required to distribute only 5% a year —...

“Friction is what brings us together. If we were never able to communicate in real space, we would not truly learn what it is to be human.” — Stephen Balkam Is social media a drug? In what the Financial Times called a landmark case, Facebook (Meta) and YouTube (Google) have been found guilty of designing their products to be addictive to kids. Is this a big tobacco moment? the tut-tutting New York Times asked. In contrast, the free market Wall Street Journal called it a shakedown. So what to mak...

“The shortest distance between you and me is a story.” — Colum McCann In 1932, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking if humanity could cure its “lust for hatred.” Freud said no. Mankind’s instinct for death and destruction could not be eliminated. That said, the Viennese doctor went on, the desire to end war should never be abandoned. What was needed was a “mythology of the instincts” and a “community of feeling.” In other words: a story. The book sold 2,000 copies. By 1933, the Nazis ha...

“What conclusion do you draw if you see a system that continues to grow more powerful despite failing at the things it says it’s going to accomplish?” — Jacob Siegel Jacob Siegel grew up in Brooklyn, studied history at Boston University, enlisted in the US Army after September 11, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, as an intelligence officer, he had the latest drones, sensors, Palantir databases, and predictive models at his fingertips — but still couldn’t get a coherent answer ...

“If the regime doesn’t lose, it wins.” — Soli Özel It was just past midnight in Istanbul when I reached Soli Özel . The Pentagon had just announced it was deploying 3,000 soldiers — the 82nd Airborne — to the Gulf. Özel — professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, columnist, and one of the most trusted analysts of Middle Eastern politics — is blunt. This might, he warns, be America’s Suez moment. In 1956, Britain and France — two spent imperial powers that refused to accept th...

“The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view that you hold.” — Julia Minson In a sneak preview of the 2028 Presidential election, Andy Beshear called JD Vance the most arrogant politician in America. Vance’s spokesperson fires back that Beshear is chasing headlines. Just another disagreeable day in American public life. So how can we make conversation more civil? How to disagree more agreeably? In her new book (out today) How to D...

“AI is a theft of knowledge. I can’t believe we as a society allowed this.” — Noam Cohen Ten years ago, Noam Cohen came on the show to ask if it was “Too Late to Save the Internet from Itself?” Back then, this early Silicon Valley critic was a New York Times writer. He was, as it turns out, a “premature anti-technologist” — Cohen’s phrase, borrowed from the premature antifascists who were called communist for opposing Hitler before it was fashionable. We should have listened to him. Now a freela...

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly) Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans . I’m sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello’s definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig leaf. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did, he reminds us, was cov...

“Washington and Hamilton were governed by Willing.” — John Adams, 1813 Thomas Willing voted against the Declaration of Independence. He was the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, the largest merchant trader in North America, an Anglican slave trader printing money. So he saw little reason to declare independence from Britain. Especially since the renegades — the poor Scots-Irish Presbyterians flooding into the country, the MAGA people of their day — had no love of wealthy aristocrats like himself. ...

“I don’t know if any rational person ever became a billionaire running a disruptive company.” — Keith Teare Is capitalism by permission of democracy, or is democracy by permission of capitalism? That’s the question Keith Teare and I have been circling for a while on our weekly tech roundup, and this week it triggered a full-blown discussion of our 21st century economic and political fate. Earlier this week, Vinod Khosla — one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists — posted on X ...

“We do not exist without nature — unless Silicon Valley figures something out in their bunkers.” — Natalie Kyriacou Forget the Middle East for a moment. Or rather, don’t — because today’s petroleum war is an environmental catastrophe, perhaps even an ecocide. Militaries are the largest source of emissions on the planet. Trump uses Iran’s oil fields as a bargaining chip while assassinating its leaders, as if the price of petroleum is more important than human life (which it clearly is to him). Na...

“Nobody’s reality is more or less real.” — Kevin Ashton It’s the chicken and egg question. What came first: stories or language? For Kevin Ashton , the answer is stories. In his new book, The Story of Stories , Ashton argues that rather than inventing stories with language, we invented language to tell stories. Stories, for Ashton, predate language. They are what makes us human. 300,000 years ago, Ashton argues, humans sat around night fires needing to talk about things they couldn’t point to — ...

“I don’t like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I’m losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion Most of us can’t remember our spouse’s phone number. We barely know our own. We haven’t read a physical map in years. Some of us don’t even know what a map is. Such is the impoverishment of mental life in our digital age. Nelson Dellis , unlike most of us, is a rich man — at least mentally. He can memorise a shuffled deck of 52 cards in ...

“If we don’t fight, then what are we doing?” — Jeff Boyd How do you write fiction about contemporary America when reality itself is stranger than fiction? A country in which “alternative facts” is policy rather than satire. Where “truth” has been nationalized. Jeff Boyd , an acclaimed young American novelist, sees fiction as refuge. For both writer and reader, it gets us inside the heads of people who both inflict and endure pain. And it enables the senseless to make sense. The news cycle can’t ...

“Had another nation done this, we would regard this as an act of war.” — Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University Forget Iran for a moment. I asked Brandeis President Arthur Levine whether the Trump administration has gone to war with the American university. He paused diplomatically. “Going to war is a very restrictive term,” he answered. Then added: “Had another nation done this, we would regard this as an act of war.” From the president of Brandeis, that’s not a metaphorical dodge. He ...