Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar

Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world's most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria's Boko Haram t...

3 Sep 202554min

David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward edge of the leftward te...

20 Aug 20251h 10min

In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of s...

13 Aug 20251h 3min

Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America's nuclear doctrine: madness. It's madness that any single person has six minutes to decide the fate of civilization, madness that we've built weapons cap...

6 Aug 202557min

Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style typical of academia. As...

23 Jul 20251h 7min

David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez's storied contemporary-music ...

9 Jul 202559min

Austan Goolsbee is one of Tyler Cowen's favorite economists—not because they always agree, but because Goolsbee embodies what it means to think like an economist. Whether he's analyzing productivity s...

25 Jun 202558min

Most people who leave Wall Street after twenty years either retire or find another way to make a lot of money. Chris Arnade chose to walk through cities most travelers never truly see. What emerged fr...

18 Jun 202558min