Episodes

We live in transitional times. "The old is dead and the new cannot be born—this is the time of monsters," Antonio Gramsci famously wrote. But today, as the West declines and the East rises, these may equally be times for midd...

For Jason Pack , presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (or, ...

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, ...

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. ...

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan , these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza...

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier , Putin i...

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy , America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ide...

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%....