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

After reading Zach Carter's intellectual biography of Keynes earlier this year, Tyler declared that the book would qualify "without reservation" as one of the best of the year. Tyler's assessment pr...

2 Dec 202054min

Jimmy Wales used to joke that choosing to build Wikipedia on a non-profit, non-advertising model was either the best or worst decision he ever made—but he doesn't joke about that anymore. "If you thin...

18 Nov 202057min

Edwidge Danticat left Haiti when she was 12, she says, but Haiti never left her. At 14 she began writing stories about the people and culture she loved, and now is an internationally acclaimed novelis...

4 Nov 202051min

Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Less known is that he is a...

21 Okt 202049min

Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described "conserva...

7 Okt 202053min

To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. "When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing...

22 Sep 20201h 1min

Matt Yglesias joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on his vision for a bigger, less politically polarized America outlined in his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger....

9 Sep 20201h 6min

Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020. Tyler credits Jason Furman's intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. F...

26 Aug 20201h 1min