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: 50:36 — 29.7MB)
, 2018
On Immigration & Internationalism
The shock of migrant kids-in-cages on our border with Mexico is surfacing tough questions if you’re willing to look back at our history and ahead to an emerging world disorder....
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 29.9MB)
May 3-9PM, 2018
A 19th Century Idea in a 21st Century World
A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois...
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: 50:16 — 59.9MB)
July 16, 2015, 2016
"What does it mean that black men are being shot in the back?"
In the time of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, the poet Claudia Rankine has been the lyric teller of our deepest hurt. Her new book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was a best-seller and something...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:00 — 29.8MB)
August 18, 2016, 2016
"The most dangerous characteristic you can have is intelligence."
You can hear the first part of our summer series, “Apocalypse Now?” here, and Part 2 here. We’ve come to the end of the end: our third and final apocalyptic...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 61.0MB)
August 11, 2016, 2016
"If you look back at the history of eugenics, it didn’t start with Hitler—it was a progressive reform!"
Our apocalypse series began one week ago with one grim vision of the future. What if our machines managed to take control of their own code? If they began to self-regulate, even...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 58.9MB)
August 4, 2016, 2016
What happens when our machines outsmart us?
This August, that summer-cinema experience of cataclysm and crash has escaped the theaters and invaded our everyday lives. The panic is real: about politics and economics, terrorism and temperature. So we’re taking a...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 29.2MB)
June 2, 2016, 2016
Amid worries of sexual violence on campus, are the kids all right?
For decades now, we’ve worried about an epidemic of sexual assault and un-safety at American colleges and universities. But there’s a question of whether, amid the familiar panic and new paperwork, we’ve...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 29.3MB)
, 2016
"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."
It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:41 — 29.5MB)
April 28, 2016, 2016
"I remember writing a poem that went, 'O life, when do you staht?' 'S-t-a-h-h-t.'"
This week, we’re tuning into the writer Eileen Myles. Born outside Boston in 1949, Myles is just now having an all-American moment. Myles has spent the last forty years as a queer and feminist...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:04 — 31.2MB)
April 14, 2016, 2016
Can capitalism (as we know it) survive in a time of crisis?
This year’s American electoral shakeup sends us looking for deeper economic tremors. Unemployment is down to 4.9%, even as discouraged workers are reentering the market and the average hourly wage...
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: 50:04 — 28.4MB)
December 10, 2015, 2015
What happened to America during our thirteen-year dry spell?
What do we remember about America’s thirteen-year war on alcohol at the end of the First World War? Hollywood reminds us of the glamor of both rum-runners and -drinkers, the psychopathic hubris of...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:58 — 29.0MB)
November 12, 2015, 2015
At Mizzou and Yale, is it the second civil rights movement yet?
What does the second civil rights movement look like? Is a new struggle for equality, in feelings as well as rights, afoot on American campuses? It seemed possible this week when frustrated...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:47 — 27.7MB)
September 24, 2015, 2015
Millions of working people need economic help. What would work?
To close out our series on work, produced in partnership with The Nation, we’re looking ahead to the big proposals and spiritual realignments that might spell a major change for...