Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By siftin...
15 Apr 1h 1min
Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness
Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution! Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French...
1 Apr 59min
Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the countr...
25 Mars 1h 4min
Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new ...
18 Mars 49min
Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English
Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's co...
4 Mars 59min
Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires
When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy e...
18 Feb 53min
Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929
Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remark...
4 Feb 56min
Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts
Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christiani...
21 Jan 59min
