The Gray Area with Sean Illing6 Kesä 2017

Masha Gessen offers a plausible Trump-Russia theory

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of, among other books, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Since the election, she has been analyzing Donald Trump through the lens of Russian politics and personalities in a series of viral essays in the New York Review of Books. But as the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia has evolved into a dominant storyline of his presidency, Gessen has grown skeptical. She thinks the left has been overwhelmed by conspiratorial thinking on Russia. That doesn't mean, she hastens to say, that there is no conspiracy. But there is also wishful thinking, and lazy thinking, and a hope that the normal mechanisms of politics can be bypassed."For more than six months now, Russia has served as a crutch for the American imagination," Gessen wrote. "It is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over."In this podcast, Gessen and I talk about all things Trump and Russia. I ask her for both the plausible and sinister explanations for the many meetings and mysteries that surround Trump's associates. We talk about the ways Trump is and isn't like Putin, how studying autocracies has helped her interpret this moment in American politics, the psychology of Jared Kushner, and much more. Enjoy!Books:Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear WitnessTimothy Snyder, On Tyranny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Jessica Valenti on honesty, internet trolls, and modern feminism

Jessica Valenti is the founder of Feministing, a columnist at the Guardian, and the author of the new book "Sex Object." She's also a friend from the early days of blogging. In this podcast, we talk a...

14 Kesä 20161h 11min

Moby on how cheap rent leads to great art

Moby's new memoir, Porcelain, is a great read for policy wonks. Really.It's less a history of music than a history of New York in the 80s and 90s, and a reflection on how density, crime, racial and se...

7 Kesä 201658min

Secretary of Labor (and maybe VP?) Tom Perez

Tom Perez is President Obama's Secretary of Labor. He is also, according to the New York Times, on Hillary Clinton's shortlist for the vice presidency.I spoke with Perez about his path to the Labor De...

31 Touko 20161h 7min

Andrew Sullivan on quitting blogging, fearing political correctness, and Donald Trump

Last year, Andrew Sullivan quit blogging — the medium he had done so much to create. And you know what? He was pretty damn happy about it. He was taking walks, meditating, exercising, reading, and gen...

24 Touko 20161h 54min

Alice Rivlin, queen of Washington's budget wonks

There is no budget wonk in Washington with a resume as thick as Alice Rivlin's. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office. She was the director of President Bill Clinton's Offic...

17 Touko 201658min

Arianna Huffington on sleep, death, and social media

Arianna Huffington is, of course, the editor and namesake of the Huffington Post, one of the true juggernauts of the new media world. But her path to that position has been a winding one. She was a pr...

10 Touko 20161h 24min

Robert Reich on supporting Bernie Sanders, dating Hillary Clinton, and fighting inequality

You could fill a podcast just reciting Robert Reich's biography. Rhodes Scholar. Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork. Director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission under Cart...

3 Touko 20161h 42min

Bruce Friedrich on how technology will reduce animal suffering

When I first met Bruce Friedrich, he was running PETA's awareness campaigns. Yeah, those campaigns — the ones where naked people stuffed themselves in saran wrap and cages, and where wounded chickens ...

26 Huhti 20161h 17min