THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 1, 2026
"A juvenility of moral imagination that is at the core of this."
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:54 — 28.1MB)
, 2018
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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:53 — 28.5MB)
, 2018
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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:50 — 28.6MB)
, 2018
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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:57 — 28.8MB)
November 24, 2016
"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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:58 — 30.1MB)
October 6, 2016
"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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:54 — 28.6MB)
September 15, 2016, 2016
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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:58 — 45.8MB)
July 31, 2016, 2016
"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...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:11 — 28.9MB)
April 21, 2016, 2016
We're seeing "a war on the global wanderings of the unverified self."
What makes a border in 2016? And how is it, on an earth supposedly flattened by free markets and liberal values, that the walls around us seem higher than ever before? From the big-data border of the EU to Donald...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 22.9MB)
March 24, 2016, 2016
What do we have to learn from the lost world of Germany between the wars?
Pundits from Glenn Beck to Roger Cohen and Chris Hedges have one other discouraged democracy on their minds this election year. They’re thinking of the German government that rose as a fresh democracy in 1919 but failed — amid...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 29.3MB)
February 11, 2016, 2016
Who decides what you can and can't vote against?
This week, the third in a series on our democracy in 2016, we’re discussing what you can’t change with a vote — at least for now. Change is the electoral mood...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:02 — 30.2MB)
October 22, 2015, 2015
Were we wrong to stay out of the worst humanitarian disaster of the decade?
Syria has been burning now for four years — with millions displaced into Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, more than 250,000 dead, and no end in sight. In March of 2014, Stephen Walt,...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:40 — 36.6MB)
September 22, 2015, 2015
Ronald Reagan: who was that masked man?
“He’s still winking at us,” Thomas Mallon says of our 40th president. Ronald Reagan’s essential quality (as official biographer Edmund Morris discovered with some embarrassment) was being “ungraspable.” In Finale,...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:02 — 30.3MB)
August 20, 2015, 2015
How would you vote on Obama's Iran deal?
When reps return from Labor Day break, Congress has nine days to scuttle President Obama’s no-nukes bet on Iran. The president has momentum and 29 physicists on his side, but...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:01 — 29.8MB)
July 23, 2015, 2015
What's the deal with the United States and Iran?
After two years, three “final” deadlines and a cabinet-level bike wreck, we have a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Tehran, Boston, and the Security Council chamber it...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:09 — 68.5MB)
January 15, 2015, 2015
Êtes-vous Charlie Hebdo?
The story of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo has gone everywhere in the past week: into meditations on free speech and blasphemy, into declarations of cultural and actual war, and high-wire geopolitics. It’s a fresh attack, meaning high...