How the Texas Crisis Could Become Everyone's Crisis
Last week, freezing temperatures overwhelmed the Texas power grid, setting off rolling blackouts that left millions without power during an intense winter storm. But this story is a lot bigger than Te...
26 Feb 20211h 20min
A Radical Proposal for True Democracy
One thing I want to do on this show is give space to truly radical ideas, to expand the boundaries of our political and moral imaginations. And Hélène Landemore, a political scientist at Yale, has one...
23 Feb 202144min
What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World
George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Linc...
19 Feb 20211h 15min
What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America
“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Ra...
16 Feb 20211h 8min
The Senate Is Making a Mockery of Itself
The Senate is where Joe Biden’s agenda will live or die. More specifically, the intricacies of archaic Senate rules — the budget reconciliation process, the filibuster, the majority leader’s ability t...
12 Feb 20211h 9min
Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming...
9 Feb 202156min
An Appalled Republican Considers the Future of the G.O.P.
"I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society,” Yuval Levin told me. “I think it can only function in defense of them.”Levin is the dir...
5 Feb 20211h 25min
To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems
As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw t...
2 Feb 20211h 9min
