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THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 1, 2026
AI Apocalypse?

"A juvenility of moral imagination that is at the core of this."

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, 2018
Two Guys Walk Into a Summit in Singapore

Is This the Age of Disarmament?

From “fire and fury” to a “terrific relationship” in less than a year sound like a happy turn in the Trump-Kim dance around nukes and North Korea. Better news coming...
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, 2018
The Split Screen View in Jerusalem and Gaza

Fact and Fiction in Today's Israel-Palestine Conflict

One split screen wasn’t really enough for the asymmetries we’re looking at now, but there it was: Ivanka unveiling the Trump embassy plaque in Jerusalem, and 40 miles away, the...
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, 2018
Trump Goes Rogue In Iran

On the End of the JCPOA

Dropping out of the Iran nuclear deal has the feel of dropping into the John Bolton phase of the Trump era.  Trump in Full. Trump Extra. The theme is No...
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May 18, 2017
Lessons from Nixonland

"The whole environment has become much more oppressive."

Welcome back to Nixonland: After four decades, the Oval Office is once again the seat of empire, occupied by a paranoid pilot hellbent on an unremittingly personal fight, and no holds...
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May 11, 2017
JFK Turns 100

Portraits of a President

In John F. Kennedy’s hundredth birthday spring, we’re looking again at the family portrait we all know, by the painter Jamie Wyeth. His canvas summoned the late president as a ruddy sort of...
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, 2017
Stephen Kinzer: America’s Empire State of Mind

Why are we everywhere in the world, so often with guns drawn? The provocative reporter Stephen Kinzer has covered a number of our “regime-change” interventions in the world, from Guatemala...
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December 16, 2016
Post-Democracy in America

“Trump despises this constitutional order of liberal democracy.”

"Donald Trump is a post-democratic leader. The liberal democratic model—of which Obama was the last president—is completely dead."
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November 24, 2016
Swingin’ with Zadie Smith

"We have paid attention to ideas of identity rather than arguments of class."

Zadie Smith is the writer who likes to say she learns more from dancers – Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson, Baryshnikov, Beyoncé – than from writers and a young lifetime...
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October 6, 2016
The Cyber

"Once that weapon is out of the box, it can't be put back in."

Can a secret still be a secret if everybody knows about it? Top brass US intelligence officials, including former NSA director General Michael Hayden, seem to think so. “Stuxnet, no...
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September 29, 2016
‘Secular Rapture’: Trump and the American Dispossessed

"It’s almost a religious belief in the rapture, but a secular monetary version of it."

Working-class whites are now the reigning champs of pessimism in America.  No other group of working-class Americans — Black, Hispanic, or Asian — holds a more despairing, more dire outlook on...
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September 15, 2016, 2016
What Would Keynes Do?

What would the 20th century's greatest economist have to say about the 21st?

This election has been about everything but the economy, stupid (according to John Harwood of The New York Times). Americans are split right down the middle—48 to 48—on which candidate...
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September 8, 2016, 2016
Election 2016: Unreality T.V.

What's really going on, between reality TV and "the reality-based community"?

Barack Obama has kept his distance from this campaign, but he did intervene last month to remind Americans that they’re not voting to give someone a recording contract: “This is...
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July 31, 2016, 2016
Yanis Varoufakis’s Greek Tragedy

"Dignity ... is the last resort of a battered people, the last asset that one will die in order to preserve."

Before Brexit, of course, there was Grexit: the possibility, one year ago, that Greeks defying the will of E.U. bureaucrats bankers would fall right out of Europe. Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister...
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June 30, 2016, 2016
The Great British Break-Off

Whither Brexit, and what on earth happens next?

This week, we’re catching up on the split heard round the world. People laughed at Tory historian Niall Ferguson for warning that Brexit—Britain’s proposed exit from Europe—would be like his own divorce: a...
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June 23, 2016, 2016
Give ‘Em Hill?

What can you say about a woman like Hillary Clinton?

When almost everyone you know is scared to death at the prospect of The Donald as The President, it can feel like we’re barely thinking about his opposite number. She’s become...