Episodes

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 ...

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...