The Gray Area with Sean Illing6 Juni 2017

Masha Gessen offers a plausible Trump-Russia theory

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of, among other books, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Since the election, she has been analyzing Donald Trump through the lens of Russian politics and personalities in a series of viral essays in the New York Review of Books. But as the Trump campaign's relationship with Russia has evolved into a dominant storyline of his presidency, Gessen has grown skeptical. She thinks the left has been overwhelmed by conspiratorial thinking on Russia. That doesn't mean, she hastens to say, that there is no conspiracy. But there is also wishful thinking, and lazy thinking, and a hope that the normal mechanisms of politics can be bypassed."For more than six months now, Russia has served as a crutch for the American imagination," Gessen wrote. "It is used to explain how Trump could have happened to us, and it is also called upon to give us hope. When the Russian conspiracy behind Trump is finally fully exposed, our national nightmare will be over."In this podcast, Gessen and I talk about all things Trump and Russia. I ask her for both the plausible and sinister explanations for the many meetings and mysteries that surround Trump's associates. We talk about the ways Trump is and isn't like Putin, how studying autocracies has helped her interpret this moment in American politics, the psychology of Jared Kushner, and much more. Enjoy!Books:Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear WitnessTimothy Snyder, On Tyranny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(764)

The contradictions of wokeness

What does it mean to be “woke”? It's become a catch-all term to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. So anytime you venture into an argument about “woken...

13 Apr 53min

How to forgive yourself

It’s easy to forgive other people because you don’t have to live inside their head. Forgiving yourself is different and much, much harder. Sean Illing is joined by philosopher Myisha Cherry to talk a...

10 Apr 41min

The revolution will be memed

Kalle Lasn has been trying to jam consumer culture for decades. Now he thinks that was only the beginning. Sean talks with the Adbusters founder about advertising, culture jamming, meme warfare, surv...

6 Apr 48min

How we standardized music

The Gray Area is taking a short break this week — but we’ve got something special for you. We’re dropping an episode from one of our favorite podcasts, Unexplainable. In it, host Emily Siner explores...

3 Apr 29min

Why humans need to matter

Why do humans have this deep need to feel like we matter? Sean Illing talks with the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein about why “mattering” is not the same thing as being important, how the hunger for ...

30 Mars 47min

A brief update on the AI apocalypse

Something is definitely happening in the AI world, but how seriously should we take it? Is this another hype cycle or a genuine inflection point? Sean Illing talks with journalist Kelsey Piper (forme...

27 Mars 36min

Consciousness is a mystery

What is consciousness, really? We don’t know. Scientists aren’t sure. Philosophers can’t agree. All we have is the fact that it feels like something to be you right now. Beyond that, human consciousn...

16 Mars 39min

The end of world order as we know it

Venezuela. Greenland. Iran. Things have been moving so quickly that we weren't even at war with Iran when we recorded this episode of The Gray Area with Sean Illing. It’s only March, but it’s been a ...

13 Mars 35min