Episodes

At 85, the venerable Jeffrey Archer has lived through enough crises to stay calm and carry on whatever the stormy political weather. The best-selling author—who has sold 275 million books and, as a Conservative MP and party ...

History rarely repeats itself, especially speculative bubbles. As it becomes increasingly obvious that today’s AI bubble will dramatically burst, the real question is not when but how. What makes this boom profoundly differen...

Tom Brokaw famously described America’s World War II servicemen as the “Greatest Generation”. But according to the historian David Nasaw , the Americans who fought in the Second World War are better understood as The Wounded...

According to the platform economist Sangeet Paul Choudary , author of Reshuffle , today’s AI hype is a feature rather than a bug in Silicon Valley. It’s a deliberate mechanism to attract capital in an “attention-poor, capital...

It’s springtime for charlatans. At least according to Quico Toro, coauthor (with my old friend Moises Naim) of Charlatans , a new screed about how grifters, swindlers and hucksters are bamboozling the media, the markets and t...

Next Monday is Columbus Day. Or should it be Indigenous People’s Day? According to the historian Matthew Restall we should be celebrating both Columbus and Indigenous People on Monday. The author of the timely The Nine Lives ...

Last weekend, the English reggae band UB 40 played in the Orpheum in Los Angeles and included in the set their 1980 song “Tyler”. Tyler is guilty white judges said soWhat right do we got to say it’s not soTyler is guilty whit...

Just be yourself many career coaches tell us. But for the psychologist and entrepreneur Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic , the reverse is true. Don’t Be Yourself Chamorro-Premuzic advises in his new book, arguing that authenticity Is...

What unites America, it used to be said, is a common commitment to “freedom”. But in our disunited times, it's worth remembering that two incompatible versions of freedom have actually divided rather than brought the United ...

We’ve done a couple ( here and here ) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the ten...

One of the most painful lessons of the Kirk assassination is that conservatives are running rings around progressives in political mobilization - especially of young Americans. So how to make the left relevant in America agai...

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” were, of course, the closing words from Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown . But the point of Jeff Chang ’s new biography of Bruce Lee, Water Mirror Echo , is that by 1973, when Lee died, Asia...

Back in 1990, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur called Jim Fruchterman chose purpose over profit. In his new book, Technology for Good , Fruchterman explains how nonprofit leaders like him are using software and data to solve our...

It’s not exactly news that the Nazis didn’t like the Jews. But according to the Rutgers historian Jochen Hellbeck , author of World Enemy Number One , the Nazi obsession went so far as to believe that the Soviet Union was own...

The numbers are mind blowing. According to Roadkill authors Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay , cars have killed more people than both world wars combined. That’s how toxic our relationship with cars has been over the last centu...

It’s the $320,000 question both parents and students are asking themselves: Is that four-year liberal arts degree really worth it? According to Brandeis University President Arthur Levine, it’s a question they should, indeed,...

Some liberals might shake their virtuous heads and tut-tut disapprovingly. But, as the Brookings scholar William Galston argues, Donald Trump’s Old Testament politics of retribution has exposed the limitations of liberal thou...

“It’s happening. The question is whether it’s a dream or a nightmare. This week, OpenAI introduced Pulse , an AI assistant that knows what we want to do and think before we do. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare welcomes...

“What Trump is doing is not popular”. For the This Old Democracy podcaster and veteran Democratic activist Micah Sifry , that’s the good news of Trump’s sub-40% approval rate. The bad news, Sifry warns, is that the Dems remai...

Jacob Ward warned us. Back in January 2022, the Oakland-based tech journalist published The Loop , a warning about how AI is creating a world without choices. He even came on this show to warn about AI’s threat to humanity. T...

So where exactly is Trump’s America? According to the Brookings fellow Jonathan Rauch , the world’s largest economic, military and cultural power is “half way to Hungary” - the small, landlocked Central European country run b...

Donald Trump made his own controversial case against the United Nations at the UN today, lecturing world leaders that “the UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.” But he was beaten to this ant...

As the prize-winning author of Dreamland and The Least of Us , Sam Quinones is one of the most acclaimed authorities on America’s deadly drug epidemics. So it might seem a little surprising that his follow-up to these two bes...

I suspect both left and right have the Kimmel-Kirk story wrong. Rather than being about free speech versus hate speech, it’s actually the story of the end of the television era and the rise of open internet platforms like You...