The Great Enshittening
Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads....
20 Okt 202547min
America chose violence. Now what?
Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about ho...
13 Okt 202558min
What's worth remembering?
We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true...
6 Okt 202558min
Why TikTok matters
This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and w...
29 Sep 20251h 3min
The sun will save us
Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect. That’s be...
22 Sep 202547min
How much free speech is too much?
Free speech is often treated as a timeless and sacred right. But what if it’s more myth than reality? This week, Sean is joined by historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? They tra...
15 Sep 202554min
Imagine there's no billionaires
How much money is too much? In today’s episode, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns tells Sean that we need to cap the amount of wealth a person can accumulate. They talk about how extreme inequalit...
1 Sep 202553min
America's lawyers vs. China's engineers
America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever. Meanwhile, China seems to have no trouble at all: high-speed rails, solar panels, electric ...
25 Aug 202551min
