The Gray Area with Sean Illing8 Elo 2017

Sen. Michael Bennet on why this is a dismal, sociopathic era in Congress

Michael Bennet is an accidental senator. He was unexpectedly appointed to fill an open seat after Ken Salazar joined the Obama administration. He had never run for elected office before, or served in a legislative body. Perhaps that’s why he’s always, in my experience, been appropriately shocked by how the US Congress actually works. Since joining the Senate (and winning reelection in 2010 and 2016), Bennet has become one of its more effective members. He was part of the Gang of Eight that authored the immigration reform plan that passed the body, and he’s known for working well with both Republicans and Democrats. And yet, he is despairing over the state of the institution in which he serves. This is a conversation about why Congress is broken, and what broke it. We discuss money, partisanship, the media, the rules, the leadership, and much more. We talk about what Bennet thinks House of Cards gets right (hint: it’s the sociopathy) and whether President Trump’s antics are creating some hope of institutional renewal. There’s a lot of good stuff in this conversation, and I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice to say, if you care about the US Congress in this age — and you should — this is a discussion worth hearing. Books: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Adam Serwer on white political correctness

“What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth,” writes Adam Serwer, “but of power.” Serwer is a writer at the Atlantic, and he’s been looking at the identity politics and politica...

10 Joulu 201850min

Will Storr on why you are not yourself

“To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’.” That’s Will Storr, writing in his fantastic book Selfi...

6 Joulu 20181h 26min

How to be a better carnivore

Here are two things I believe. First, the way we treat the animals we kill for food is shameful. Second, only a tiny percentage of the population will go vegetarian or vegan and stay that way, at leas...

3 Joulu 201832min

Peter Beinart on anti-Semitism in America and illiberalism in Israel

This is a conversation I’ve been putting off, if I’m being honest. I can’t hold it from the safe space of journalistic distance. It’s about the strange, vulnerable space that many Jews, myself include...

29 Marras 20181h 26min

Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University and the co-founder of Heterodox University. His book The Righteous Mind, which describes the different moral frameworks that animate the left an...

26 Marras 20181h 51min

The Impact: Deportation without representation

For Thanksgiving listening, I have an episode of The Impact, from my Weeds co-host Sarah Kliff. The Impact is a show about how policy shapes our lives. This season, Sarah and her team are focusing on ...

22 Marras 201832min

Molly Ball on Nancy Pelosi’s future and Paul Ryan’s failure

The midterm elections are being interpreted almost entirely as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But it was also a referendum on Paul Ryan’s speakership, which drove Trump’s domestic policy agen...

19 Marras 20181h 3min

Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly...

15 Marras 20181h 50min