Episodes

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle , author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberalism’s official obituary, so he’s quite comfortable with a post neoliberal w...

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described as the...

Could Trump woo the upcoming 2026 World Cup and subvert the world’s most beloved sport for his own ugly ends? Not according to Simon Kuper , the Anglo-Dutch-French football writer whose adventures at the last nine World Cups ...

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic , the World Bank’s former lead research economist, it’s capitalism with a nationalist face. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation , Milanovic argues tha...

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, as the...

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche , that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered . The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already ar...

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick ’s take on the best books of 2025. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Times bo...

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ c hief economics commen...

“If they want to put on my tombstone ‘The Last Idealist’, that’s fine,” the iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) American journalist Ray Suarez tells me. But even Suarez’s idealism was tested by Trump’s America in 2025....

So what does the latest Time Warner brouhaha tell us about the state of America? According to Daniel Bessner , host of the American Prestige podcast, it reflects the imminent death of Hollywood itself. Having written a recent...

It’s been quite a week in tech. The Australian social media ban, the Netflix vs Paramount fight over Warner Bros & the Disney-OpenAI deal. That Was The Week’ s Keith Teare and I try to explain all this in the broader context ...

Mount Rushmore, with its images of four Presidents carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota, is America’s most identifiable monument. It might also be its most monumental contradiction — which is saying a lot, given the co...

George Packer is one of the most celebrated non-fiction writers on contemporary America. So why, in his new book The Emergency , has he turned to fiction? You’d think, after all, that MAGA America’s surrealism would be an id...

The CNN anchor Carol Lin was on air on September 11, 2001 when the first plane hit the tower. So, in that now seemingly distant broadcast media age, she was the world’s first television journalist to break the news. But as Li...

Jessica was the good Mitford sister. The English aristocrat who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, then came to America and dedicated her life to social justice. According to her biographer Carla Kaplan, Mitford...

The American economy is a numbers game and those numbers are becoming more and more unfair. “30 years ago, if you were born in the bottom 25th percentile of wealth, you had about a 25% chance of dying in the top 25th percenti...

Numbers often tell the story best. Yesterday, we discussed today’s 95/5 reality in which 5% of Americans control 95% of the wealth. Today, in our conversation with Patrick Markee , author of Placeless , the key number is 2%....

Forget Pareto’s 80/20 rule. What AI is doing is producing a new rule in which 5% of society captures 95% of the value of this revolution. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare calls this the “Great Compression”, describing ...

Is the idea of “progress” the propaganda of the ruling class? Yes, according to Samuel Miller McDonald , author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy it . McDonald traces this “narrative fo...

They certainly are an odd couple. Silicon Valley veterans Dave McClure and Aman Verjee have been friends and business partners for 25 years — first at PayPal, then at 500 Startups, and now at Practical Venture Capital. Yet th...

If you think the American Dream is dead, then you probably don’t know the story of Lu Zhang . Born in Mongolia and educated in China, Zhang came to Stanford as a graduate student, struck it rich as a young tech entrepreneur a...

We all know about the broken American Dream. But according to the American-based China scholar Minxin Pei , China’s dream is equally broken. In his new book, The Broken China Dream , Pie argues that the party-centric reforms ...

For P eter Wehner , American politics is a tale of two Kellys. On the one hand, there’s the moral resistance of Arizona Senator Mark Kelly to what appears to be the gratuitous violence of American forces overseas. On the othe...

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he ...