Episodes

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...

We all have our roles. I’m the smug San Francisco intellectual and the Orlando-based Dr Chloe Carmichael is the fearlessly authentic psychologist. She’s also the author of Can I Say That?, a feisty defense of free speech in o...

A week is a long time in American politics. I did this interview with Alex Zakaras last week, before the midterms and Trump’s slide in the polls. But in spite of Mamdani’s victory earlier this week, the left still needs to fi...

If money is supposed to make you happy, then why do tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem so miserably angry? That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Silverman ’s new book, Gilded Rage , an ...

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds God Charles Murray , the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve , has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously ....

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and ...

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracy As American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFau l had a front row seat on Russia’s slide into autocracy. But in his new book, Auto...

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the future Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nob...

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe. Who isn’t afr...

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth. Happ...

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle. Seventeen years after PBS re...

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it. Four yea...

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci . In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution ,, Vinci argues that we must al...

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei , just shortlisted for the FT business...

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the making of the new right has less to do with original intelligence than with ti...

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? Not exactly, of course. But according to That Was The Week publisher, Keith ...

American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder today, they flee America in despair. In Seekers and...