Episodes

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thinking about today’s AI revolution. The right questions are about the three Cs: ...

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis , our current interesting times are actually a curse for businesses seeking stab...

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle , co-author of The Soccer 100. For Horncastle, Italian football presents a fascinating paradox: a nation celebrate...

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capitalism published this week by the Harvard historian Sven Beckert . Entitled ...

In The Soccer 100 , the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its most boring—at least as a man. For Michael Cox , a contributor to The Soccer...

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100 , The Athletic’s new book ranking football’s hundred greatest players, the answer is Messi. But the Nor...

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Pos t op-ed as well as his new book, Peak Human . What we can learn from history’s great civilizations, Norberg arg...

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the supposedly “abundant” AI future being built in Silicon Valley. So where is this abu...

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the reactionary MAGA politics of resentment that is currently ascendant. It’s this ...

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta , author of The Devil’s Castle , a history of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. According to Antonetta, p...

On November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. A hundred years later, Bobby might matter more than ever. Chris Matthews , longtime host of MSNBC’s “Hardball”, is already the author of one b...

25 movies and 0 hits: it’s been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it’s actually been a pretty strong quarter in terms of movie quality. From Paul Thoma...

It’s the ultimate financial nightmare. Kristin Collier , a young student in Minnesota, woke up one morning to discover that her mother had taken out $200,000 in Kristin’s name. Collier tells this story in What Debt Demands , ...

There are those who ask why so many Americans speak Spanish. But according to the Latino media entrepreneur and historian Javier Marin , you might as well ask why so many Americans speak English. Over the last half century, t...

The big news in Silicon Valley this week of a supposedly orchestrated “Panic Campaign” against AI. According to the researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt , the campaign about the apocalyptical inevitability of AI is being driven by do...

“Predictions are hard,” Yogi Berra once quipped, “especially about the future”. Yes they are. But in today’s AI boom/bubble, how exactly can we predict the future? According to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Aman Verjee , ...

America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, whose new book, The Case for American Powe...

We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar . In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new histor...

The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale . Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. As William Hartung...

Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale , is increasingly self-evident. As the j...

How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson , the answer involves both pigeons and polyamory. As she argues in her brand new book, K in: The Future of Family , Joh...

Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a top corporate lawyer, Philip K. Howard has made a second career out of criticizing the invasion of law into American society. In books like T...

My neologism-du-jour i s “enstatification”. It’s what is happening in MAGA America with Trump’s Gaucho-style swaggering into the economy and his reversal to autarky and a back-to-the-future Monroe Doctrine. With the growth o...

One big story captures all six books selected by the Financial Times for their short list of best business books of 2025. As the FT’s Senior Business Writer, Andrew Hill , notes, it’s the story of the shift in global economic...