
Plain History: The Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Great Depression
The 1920s and the 2020s share a special kinship. One hundred years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of growth, technological splendor, and generational anxiety—a familiar cocktail (albeit, from ...
11 Apr 202550min

Trump’s Trade War Is Like Nothing America’s Ever Seen
Donald Trump's tariff plan has set global markets on fire. What are they for? What are they trying to accomplish? Fresh off his black-out-rage session on CNBC, Derek talks to Matthew Klein, the autho...
8 Apr 202557min

Trump’s Plan to Smash the Global Economic Order
Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global coalitions ripped apart. What sort of a world are ...
31 Mar 202554min

Plain History: The Gilded Age
Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s—was one ...
24 Mar 202559min

ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein
Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to accept a period of economic hardship. They say America...
17 Mar 20251h 19min

How Gen Z Sees the World
Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election, Gen Z shifted strongly to the right. They are le...
12 Mar 202557min

Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?
Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfec...
7 Mar 202547min

How AI Could Change the Future of Music
Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast co...
4 Mar 202557min






















