Videos

"American culture likes martyrs, not marchers." — David Masciotra, quoting Jesse Jackson A couple of days ago, a great American died. Jesse Jackson was 84. He was somebody. Even Donald Trump acknowledged the passing of "a good man"—which, as my guest today notes, Jackson probably wouldn't have appreciated. David Masciotra…

"It truly is becoming a desert right now for book publicists." — Bethanne Patrick A couple of weeks ago, there was an "absolute bloodbath" at The Washington Post with hundreds of workers laid off and the book section totally gutted. Ron Charles, the beloved fiction editor, is gone. So is…

"I'm much more likely to protest when I feel responsible—when violence is being done in my name." — Bruce Robbins As always, the media is full of stories about political protest. A Columbia University Gaza protester held by ICE claims to have been chained to her bed after a seizure.…

"We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people." — Emily Galvin Almanza Back in April 2024, we interviewed Thelton Henderson, one of the first African American federal judges in America. What disturbed me about our conversation was that even though Henderson grew up in…

"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare) Are we spiders or are we frogs? That's the existential question facing us humans after just another revolutionary week in AI technology. Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video the aspiring…

"She's a ten to me and that's the part that matters." — Paul Eastwick If it's Valentine's Day, we must be talking about love. Paul Eastwick studies attraction and relationships at UC Davis, and his new book Bonded by Evolution takes aim at the "old science" that treated romance like…

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène Landemore In February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landemore, has a new book entitled Politics Without Politicians arguing that politics…

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper Culpepper From Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully together. The Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper argues this is exactly the kind of…

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan Rauch Jonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump administration. Having previously settled on "semi-fascist," Rauch now argues that…

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott Eden In October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered on his own property in the redwoods — shot execution-style, hands bound.…