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: 38:27 — 52.9MB)
September 17, 2026
"I did not write it in a panic."
We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:24 — 31.2MB)
September 10, 2026
"They were so overcome by this performance. It's amazing."
We’re savoring a glorious story we thought we knew in the long ordeal of racial justice in America. It was the singer Marian Anderson’s moment in 1939, after the Daughters...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:39 — 50.4MB)
August 6, 2026
A "blockbuster version of Moby-Dick" with "moral qualms about the whaling industry."
We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:59 — 74.2MB)
July 17, 2026
"The common denominator in the world."
We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:24 — 56.9MB)
July 9, 2026
"Our games show us a kind of democracy that our own democratic institutions are not achieving."
We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:25 — 47.3MB)
June 18, 2026
"Not only are we the Hollywood of sports, we're the Paris of sports."
We’re in a sort of watch party for a season when World Cup soccer, championship basketball, sports of every kind, all seem to run deeper, more believable, much better played...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:39 — 68.3MB)
June 11, 2026
"Nothing worse than violence, I would say."
We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:19 — 31.2MB)
May 28, 2026
"So much of the history of the 20th-century left is the history of Jewish rebels."
We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:19 — 76.0MB)
May 14, 2026
"The tech lord still kind of needs the old-fashioned politician."
We’re talking about the new magic of money, or Musk-ism, as our guests call it. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff are historians of different sorts—historians of the future. Oddly enough,...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:39 — 55.9MB)
April 22, 2026
"The new pope is a pope of peace."
We’re tuning in on the Pope and the President in what can sound like a historic showdown. Are we in the first rounds of an epic struggle between church and...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:07 — 64.8MB)
April 15, 2026
"Asking these black athletes to do something that you're not asking of anybody else."
It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think you know the Jackie Robinson story, think again...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:52 — 56.2MB)
April 2, 2026
"Can the state put any limits on federal power?"
In 1854, when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was captured in Boston and returned in chains to slave-owners in Virginia, despite riotous resistance on the dock in Boston, Henry David...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:15 — 52.6MB)
March 26, 2026
"The real rupture moment."
Who remembers Bernie Goetz? Who remembers his victims? Or was Bernie Goetz the victim—the subway shooter who, back in 1984, fired at four black teenagers in a crowded subway car...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:15 — 32.3MB)
March 19, 2026
"Trump's minimal commitments . . . have actually lowered the barriers to war."
How should we see the Israeli-American War on Iran? How should we understand it, or maybe even escape it? The writer and historian Daniel Immerwahr is our guest, with the...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:28 — 51.5MB)
March 10, 2026
"We're in the hands of a madman."
I must say, among all the wise people commenting on this world’s situation, I honor Jeffrey Sachs especially for being relentless on the dangers out there, going back to the...