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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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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:28 — 35.4MB)

February 19, 2026
Bernie’s Journey

"A slowly dawning alternative."

We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:54 — 43.9MB)

February 5, 2026
George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife

"Be more of a person and less of a monolith."

We’re going off script out here in the afterlife, in the imagination of the triple-threat novelist George Saunders. He’s eminent as a writer of stories and novels, as a critical...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:50 — 63.0MB)

January 22, 2026
Pico Supreme

"Every scene of mine was one-on-one with Timmy Chalamet."

Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:12 — 48.4MB)

January 8, 2026
Age of Hemispheric Empires

"America Firsters like dominating Latin America."

We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:19 — 51.3MB)

November 26, 2025
A Thousand Years of Capitalism

"It's the most important fact about the world in which we live."

We’re talking about capitalism this time, trying to reckon the power of big money to shape—even rule—the human species. Capitalism is the one-word name given to a thousand-year-old force. It’s...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:30 — 52.9MB)

November 14, 2025
John Updike’s Vocation

"Always thinking about what he's gonna read, what he's gonna write."

We’re rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer. The Selected Letters of John Updike, just published, come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:02 — 72.9MB)

October 23, 2025
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope

"Whenever we talk about history, we're talking about stories."

Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil rights movement in our country. It’s a map of our...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:38 — 50.4MB)

October 9, 2025
Stress-Testing the Rule of Law

"A multi-front problem."

What is breaking down or what’s broken when the governor of Illinois says he’s being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump’s orders, or when the president...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:15 — 64.9MB)

September 25, 2025
Mrs. Dalloway at 100

"Capturing a collective consciousness."

Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:24 — 38.9MB)

September 11, 2025
Where Are the Intellectuals?

"Why is it that all these white people don't think of this as their struggle?"

We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley at UCLA, who has the nerve to ask: where have our thinkers gone in Trump time? Not the experts or the influencers,...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:37 — 66.8MB)

August 28, 2025
Russia and Ukraine in 2025

"The facts have changed."

We’re in the fourth summer of hot warfare between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a cruel and deadly war that doesn’t know how to stop. Anatol Lieven. Our guest to offer...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:09 — 57.9MB)

August 14, 2025
America, América

"You can't fully understand the United States without understanding Latin America."

We’re grappling with the prize historian Greg Grandin’s take on the making of the modern world. There’s a 600-page version in hard covers, but also a two-word version in his...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:56 — 65.9MB)

July 24, 2025
The Hard Work of Organizing

"We really had a failure of political imagination."

We’re retracing our steps out of the last bad-dream era in American life. Michael Ansara was in the thick of that struggle too, around war and justice. The Hard Work...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:03 — 55.1MB)

July 10, 2025
Occupied America

"It feels like resentment to me."

We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known over the decades as the storyteller we trust to observe...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:55 — 64.5MB)

June 26, 2025
Trump at War

"Donald Trump is the one who is untested."

We’re in the Orwellian aftermath of what President Trump has called his 12-day war in the Middle East. It’s over, he proclaimed on Monday. “Congratulations world,” he said on his...