The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Tom Steyer has worked for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. He made his billions running a hedge fund for decades before moving into progressive activism on causes like democratization, climate change, and impeaching Donald Trump. Now, he is running for president of the United States. 

Steyer’s primary message on the campaign trial is that we need to get money, lobbyists and corporate influence out of politics. At the same time, he is the living embodiment of much of what he thinks is broken about our system. He used his wealth as a shortcut onto the presidential debate stage and, in doing so, essentially wrote the playbook for any future billionaire who decides they want a shot at winning the highest office in the land. 

So, is Steyer the solution to our dysfunctional politics -- or is he part of the problem? That question is a lot bigger than Steyer himself. It is about the kinds of people we think will best represent the interests of non-billionaires. It is about the sort of influence we think wealth should have in our society. It is about whether, in our current political moment, we want to trust the arsonists to put out the fires they helped create.

I’ll let you decide the answer.

Book recommendations:

The Holy Bible

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.

Also, we’ve announced more tour dates! Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for all the details.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Credits:

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

Producer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

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 The Why We’re Polarized book tour kicked off this week with a wonderful event at Sixth and I in Washington, DC. My conversation partner for this one was New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Our interview was great, and then the audience questions were so good we had to keep them in as well. We discuss:  

• Why things were far worse in the “golden age” of the 1950s and ’60s than they are today

• Why the key question isn’t so much “why are we polarized?” as “why weren’t we polarized?”

• Why “moderate” Republicans end up losing to conservatives

• Why demographic change is the core cleavage of American politics today

• How polarization makes bipartisanship irrational and political dysfunction the norm

• Why Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are not the causes of polarization but rather the most clear manifestations of it

• That more information doesn’t rescue politics

• Why America today is not functionally a democracy (and why I hate when people claim it is a “republic” to justify our current system)

• Why the most underrated divide in American politics is not that between left and right but between the informed and the uninformed

• Why we can’t reverse polarization and instead need to reform our political system so that it can function amid polarization

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

Also, we’ve announced more tour dates! Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for all the details.

My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“The bad days are back” wrote Batya Ungar-Sargon in the Forward in December, “Orthodox Jews are living through a new age of pogroms. This week, as we celebrated the Festival of Lights, there were no fewer than 10 anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area alone.” 

Antisemitism is occasionally called “the oldest hatred.” It thrums across continents and eras, finding new targets for old prejudices. But where, exactly, does it come from? Why is it such a hardy weed? And why does this era feel so thick with it? 

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of Antisemitism: Here and Now. We discuss the earliest forms, tropes, and rationales for antisemitism, and the cultural reasons for their persistence. Lipstadt explains the way right- and left-wing antisemitism differ, and examines the charges of antisemitism levied against some modern politicians, like Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. We talk about antisemitism in the age of social media and rising party polarization. And we talk about the convergence and divergence of antisemitism and anti-Zionism: what distinguishes a legitimate critique of Israel from an antisemitic slur towards it?

This episode airs on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s a reminder that the very worst days lie in living memory, in an age more similar our own than we like to admit. 

References: 

“Why No One Can Talk About The Attacks Against Orthodox Jews” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

Book recommendations: 

If This is Man by Primo Levi 

Still Alive by Ruth Kluger 

The Unwanted by Michael Dobbs

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide. (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a podcast episode literally years in the making. It’s an excerpt — the first anywhere — from my book Why We’re Polarized.

A core argument of the book is that identity is the central driver of political polarization. But to see how it works, we need a better theory of how identities form, what happens when they activate, and where they fit into our conflicts. We’ve been taught to only see identity politics in others. We need to see it in ourselves.

If you’re a longtime listener, this excerpt — like the broader book — will tie a lot of threads on this show together. If you’re a new listener, it’ll give you, I hope, a clearer way to understand a powerful driver of our politics and our lives. 

Why We’re Polarized comes out on January 28. You can order it, both in text and audiobook forms, at WhyWerePolarized.com.

Find the audio book on Audible.com

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With “reeducation" camps in China, religious disenfranchisement in India, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, street violence in Sri Lanka, mass shootings in New Zealand, the flourishing of far-right parties across Europe, and the mainstreaming of Islamophobia in America, there’s been a global surge in anti-Muslim bigotry — often supported by the full power and might of the state. It’s one of the most frightening and undercovered political stories of our time.

Mehdi Hasan is a senior writer for the Intercept, the host of the Deconstructed podcast, and the anchor of Al Jazeera’s Up Front. He’s done some of the best reporting on anti-Muslim prejudice and persecutions worldwide, covering everything from Narendra Modi’s rise in India to the treatment of Uighurs in China to the role that social media plays in amplifying anti-Muslim sentiment. We discuss all of that in this conversation, but we also try to answer some deeper questions: Why Muslims? Why now? What is the ideology that drives and justifies anti-Muslim bigotry? What are the political incentives that foster it?

Not everything in this conversation is easy to hear. But understanding the scope and scale of the war on Muslims is central to understanding the world we live in, the Orwellian nature of the Islamophobic narrative, and the resentments and traumas we’re inflicting on the future. 

Book recommendations:

The Fear of Islam by Todd H. Green 

The Enemy Within by Sayeeda Warsi 

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vox's Matt Yglesias and I unpack the debate that did, and didn't, happen.

Related reading:

"Joe Biden will never give up on the system" by Ezra Klein

"4 winners and 3 losers from the January Democratic debate" Vox Staff

"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein

"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias

"Joe Biden skates by again" by Matt Yglesias

"Elizabeth Warren’s new plan to reform bankruptcy law, explained" by Matt Yglesias

"The Third Rail of Calling ‘Sexism’ Warren tried not to talk about it." by Rebecca Traister

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed. But beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for.

I think there’s a reason for that. When Booker turns his politics turn outward, they lose clarity. He shies away from drawing bright lines, his answers double back to blur out potential offense. As a result, his arguments for a politics of radical love end up emphasizing his love in ways that obscure his radicalism. As admiring as I am of what Booker demands of himself, I often can’t tell what he’s asking of me.

In this conversation, I wanted Booker to risk my discomfort, not just his own. And in his answers, I think you can hear both the remarkable promise and power of Booker’s politics, and some of the challenges that ultimately led him to suspend his campaign.

References/Book recommendations:

Tightrope by Nicholas Kristof 

“Who Killed the Knapp Family” by Nicholas Kristof 

The Violence Inside Us by Chris Murphy 

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the way we often conflate two very distinct things when we assign political labels. The first is ideology, which describes our vision of a just society. The second is something less discussed but equally important: temperament. It describes how we approach social problems, how fast we think society can change, and how we understand the constraints upon us. 

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, the editor-in-chief of the public policy journal National Affairs, and the author of the upcoming book A Time to Build. Levin is one of the most thoughtful articulators of both conservative temperament and ideology. And, perhaps for that reason, his is one of the most important criticisms of what the conservative movement has become today.

There’s a lot in this conversation, in part because Levin’s book speaks to mine in interesting ways, but among the topics we discuss are: 

• The conservative view of human nature
• Why the conservative temperament is increasingly diverging from the conservative movement
• What theories of American politics get wrong about the reality of American life
• The case Levin makes to socialists
• How economic debates are often moral debates in disguise
• Levin’s rebuttal to my book 
• The crucial difference between “formative” and “performative” social institutions
• Why the most fundamental problems in American life are cultural, not economic
• Why Levin thinks the New York Times should not allow its journalists to be on Twitter
• Whether we can restore trust in our institutions without changing the incentives and systems that surround them

There’s a lot Levin and I disagree on, but there are few people I learn as much from in disagreement as I learn from him.

Book recommendations:

Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville 

The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet 

Statecraft as Soulcraft by George Will 

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

David French on “The Great White Culture War"

George Will makes the conservative case against democracy

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Introducing season 3 of The Impact!

The 2020 candidates have some bold ideas to tackle some of our country's biggest problems, like climate change, the opioid crisis, and unaffordable health care. A lot of their proposals have been tried before, so, in a sense, the results are in. 

This season, The Impact has those stories: how the big ideas from 2020 candidates succeeded — or failed — in other places, or at other times. What can Sen. Elizabeth Warren's proposal to fight the opioid crisis learn from what the US did to fight the AIDS epidemic? How did Germany — an industrial powerhouse that invented the automobile — manage to implement a Green New Deal? How did public health insurance change Taiwan?

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

On this special preview:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running for president with a plan to fight the opioid epidemic. Her legislation would dramatically expand access to addiction treatment and overdose prevention, and it would cost $100 billion over 10 years. Addiction experts agree that this is the kind of money the United States needs to fight the opioid crisis. But it’s a really expensive idea, to help a deeply stigmatized population. How would a President Warren get this through Congress? 

It’s been done before, with the legislation Warren is using as a blueprint for her proposal. In 1990, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, the first national coordinated response to the AIDS crisis. In the decades since, the federal government has dedicated billions of dollars to the fight against AIDS, and it’s revolutionized care for people with this once-deadly disease. 

But by the time President George H.W. Bush signed the bill into law, hundreds of thousands of people in the US already had HIV/AIDS, and tens of thousands had died. 

In this episode, Vox's Jillian Weinberger explores how an epidemic begins, and how it ends. We look at what it took to get the federal government to finally act on AIDS, and what that means for Warren’s plan to fight the opioid crisis, today. 

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“Socialism” is simultaneously one of the most commonly used and most confusing terms in American politics. Does being a socialist mean advocating for the complete abolition of capitalism, markets, and private property? Does it mean supporting a higher tax rate, Medicare-for-all, and Sen. Bernie Sanders? Or does it simply mean a deep hatred of systemic injustice and the institutions that perpetuate it? 

In his new book Why You Should be a Socialist Nathan J Robinson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Current Affairs magazine, attempts to shed light on these questions. In his writing, Robinson distinguishes between a “socialist economy” (think collective ownership, worker cooperatives, single-payer health care) and what he calls a “socialist ethic": a deep sense of moral outrage that animates agents of radical change. This distinction may sound like a dodge, but I think Robinson gets at something here that — while hard to understand from the outside — is crucial to understanding today's left politics. We also discuss: 

- The central role of democracy to the socialist worldview

- What it means to be a “libertarian socialist”

- What Robinson's socialist utopia would look like 

- Why so many socialists have turned on Sen. Elizabeth Warren in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders 

- Robinson’s special loathing for South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg

- What he believes Sanders’s “political revolution” would look like

- The lessons of Jeremy Corbyn

- Whether the deep difference between liberals and socialists is temperament 

- Why “public vs. private” is often a false choice

- The challenge of economic growth 

And much more. 

Book recommendations:

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

The Anarchist FAQ by Ian McKay 

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

 If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

Leftists vs. Liberals with Elizabeth Bruenig

Matt Bruenig’s case for single-payer health care

Why my politics are bad with Bhaskar Sunkara

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 2010s witnessed a sharp uptick in nonviolent resistance movements all across the globe. Over the course of the last decade we’ve seen record numbers of popular protests, grassroots campaigns, and civic demonstrations advancing causes that range from toppling dictatorial regimes to ending factory farming to advancing a Green New Deal.  

So, I thought it would be fitting to kick off 2020 by bringing on Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard specializing in nonviolent resistance. At the beginning of this decade Chenoweth co-authored Why Civil Resistance Works, a landmark study showing that nonviolent movements are twice as effective as violent ones. Since then, she has written dozens of papers on what factors make successful movements successful, why global protests are becoming more and more common, how social media has affected resistance movements and much more. 

But Chenoweth doesn’t only study nonviolent movements from an academic perspective; she also advises nonviolent movement leaders around the world (including former EK Show guests Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement and Wayne Hsiung of Direct Action Everywhere) to help them be as effective and strategic as possible in carrying out their goals. This on-the-ground experience combined with a big-picture, academic view of nonviolent resistance makes her perspective essential for understanding one of the most important phenomena of the last decade -- and, in all likelihood, the next one.

References:

"How social media helps dictators" by Erica Chenoweth

"Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works" by Erica Chenoweth

Book recommendations:

These Truths by Jill Lepore

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like:

Varshini Prakash on the Sunrise Movement's plan to save humanity

When doing the right thing makes you a criminal (with Wayne Hsiung)

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineer- Cynthia Gil

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s here. The final AMA of 2019. Among the questions you asked:

- If you believe that changing someone's mind about a topic, any topic is difficult, how do you function as a journalist?

- What’s your opinion on capitalism?

- What have you learned about yourself since being a dad that has surprised you the most?

- You talk a lot about polarization. But it seems your audience leans liberal. So how do you reconcile that?

- Do you believe in free will?

- What’s your take on the left/liberal divide?

- Red wine or white wine?

- We know 2020 will come down to a small collection of swing states. Shouldn’t the Democrats just run whichever candidate will be strongest in those states?

- What’s with Vox and NBER papers?

- What would get journalists to leave Twitter?

- What happens if Trump loses the election but refuses to leave office?

All this, plus you get to hear from the mysterious Jeff Geld…

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer, Editor, Guest Interviewer - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

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Here, at the end of the year, I wanted to share one of my favorite episodes of 2019 with you.

Earlier this year, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” The second was Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article on “workism.”

The two pieces speak to each other in interesting ways, and to some questions I had been reflecting on as my own relationship to work changes. So I asked the authors to join me for a conversation about what happens when work becomes an identity, capitalism becomes a religion, and productivity becomes the way we measure human value. The conversation exceeded even the high hopes I had for it. Enjoy this one.

Book recommendations:

Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris

White: Essays on Race and Culture by Richard Dyer

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Engineers - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Roberts is an energy and climate writer at Vox and a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He started as his career covering climate science and clean energy technology, but -- for reasons we discuss here -- he now writes just as much about political psychology, media ecosystems, political institutions, and how they intersect with climate change. We cover a lot in this conversation, including:

• “Tribal epistemology,” and why it’s crucial to climate paralysis 
• How the GOP went from the party of cap-and-trade to the party of climate denial 
• Why the right and left-wing media ecosystem’s diverged so dramatically
• What today’s climate activists get right about our politics that their predecessors got wrong
• The carbon tax dead-end
• How nuclear energy became so divisive
• The conflicting moral and social visions at the heart of the climate movement 
• Why it is impossible to separate technological innovation from the policy ecosystem that shapes it 
• Whether climate change really is an “existential” threat 
• What climate change will mean for the world’s poor

References:

Dave Roberts on America's "epistemic crisis."

Book recommendations:

Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

"State of the Species" by Charles C. Mann

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most analyses of how to “solve” climate change start from a single, crucial assumption: that carbon emissions and global warming are inextricably linked. Geoengineering is a set of technologies and ideas with the potential to shatter that link. 

Can we use them? Should we? Could they be used in concert with other solutions, or would simply opening the door drain support from those ideas? Even if we did want to deploy geoengineering, who would govern its use? And is mucking with the earth at this level more dangerous than climate change itself — which may, ultimately, be the choice we face?

Jane Flegal is a geoengineering expert at Arizona State University and a program officer at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust. She’s able to parse this debate with an unusual level of clarity, fairness, and rigor. This isn’t an argument for or against geoengineering. It’s a way to think about it, and that turns out to be a way to think about the climate change problem as a whole.

Book recommendations:

The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton

Experiment Earth by Jack Stilgoe

Frontiers of Illusion by Daniel Sarewitz 

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Cynthia Gil & Ed Cuervo

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The climate series is back! The reason for the delay is that I wanted to make sure that this episode was next up in the series. Once you start listening, you’ll understand why. 

So far, we’ve spent the series talking about the problem we're facing and what the world will ultimately look like if we fail. Today’s conversation is different: It is about what it will take to solve climate change and what kind of world we can build if we succeed. 

Saul Griffith is an inventor, a MacArthur genius fellow, and the founder and CEO of Otherlab, a high-tech research and development company on the frontlines of trying to imagine our clean energy future. Griffith and his team were contracted by the Department of Energy to track and visualize the entirety of America’s energy flows — and as a result, he knows the US energy system better than just about anyone on this planet. Griffith is also clearer than anyone else I’ve found on the paths to decarbonization, and how to navigate them.

Most conversations about climate change are pretty depressing. This conversation is not. We have the tools we need to decarbonize. What’s more, decarbonizing doesn’t mean accepting a future of less — it can mean a more awesome, humane, technologically rich, and socially inspiring future for us all. This conversation is about a vision of decarbonization that is genuinely awesome, and how we can actually get there.

References:

Otherlab's diagram of US energy flows

Griffith's piece on paths to decarbonization

Book recommendations:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman

The Extinction Rebellion Handbook

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

The first batch of stops for my book tour is up! Get tickets at http://www.whywerepolarized.com

Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s cliché to call podcasts wide-ranging. But this conversation, with Nobel-prize winning economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, really is. A sample of what we discuss:

- How economists mucked up the climate debate

- What a Democratic president should pass first

- The politics and policy of Medicare-for-all

- Krugman’s three-part test to determine whether a program needs to be paid for (don’t miss this!)

- Why Pete Buttigieg is wrong on tuition-free college 

- Why Andrew Yang is wrong on automation

- What the Obama administration got wrong, and right, in the financial crisis

- The means-testing vs. universal program debate is a false dichotomy 

- What it would take to revitalize the economies of middle and rural America

- The productivity puzzle

- The antitrust problem

- Geographic inequality

- Whether elite or mass opinion is the key constraint on policy ambition

- Path dependence in social welfare states

- Whether private insurers should exist 

And much more. Don’t miss this one.

References:

Krugman's upcoming book, Arguing with Zombies

Book recommendations:

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume 

Plagues and Peoples by William McNeil 

Collected essays of George Orwell

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After creating and running Parks and Recreation and writing for The Office, Michael Schur decided he wanted to create a sitcom about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What does it mean to be a good person? That’s how The Good Place was born.

Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he recruited Pamela Hieronymi, a professor at UCLA specializing in the subjects of moral responsibility, psychology, and free will, to join the show as a “consulting philosopher” — surely a first in sitcom history.

I wanted to bring Shur and Hieronymi onto the show because The Good Place should not exist. Moral philosophy is traditionally the stuff of obscure academic journals and undergraduate seminars, not popular television. Yet, three-and-a-half seasons on, The Good Place is not only one of the funniest sitcoms on TV, it has popularized academic philosophy in an unprecedented fashion and put forward its own highly sophisticated moral vision.

This is a conversation about how and why The Good Place exists and what it reflects about The Odd Place in which we actually live. Unlike a lot of conversations about moral philosophy, this one is a lot of fun.

References:

Dylan Matthews' brilliant profile on The Good Place

Dylan Matthews on why he donated his kidney

Book recommendations:

Michael Schur:

Ordinary Vices by Judith N. Shklar

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré 

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Pamela Hieronymi:

What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon

Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre

Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel

New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Submit questions for our upcoming "Ask Me Anything" at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For most of his life, Wayne Hsiung was a typical overachiever. He attended the University of Chicago, started his PhD in Economics, became a law professor at Northwestern, was mentored by Cass Sunstein. But then, something snapped. In the midst of a deep, overwhelming depression, Hsiung visited a slaughterhouse and was radicalized by the immense suffering he saw. He now faces decades in prison for rescuing sick, injured animals from slaughterhouses.

Hsiung is the founder of Direct Action Everywhere, an organization best known for conducting public, open rescues of animals too sick for slaughter. These rescues are, in many cases, illegal, and Hsiung and his fellow activists are risking years of imprisonment. But the sacrifice is the point: Hsiung and his colleagues are trying to highlight the sickness of a society that criminalizes doing what any child would recognize as the right thing to do.

In our conversation, I wanted to understand a simple question: How did he get here? What leads someone with a safe, comfortable life to risk everything for a cause? What does society look like to him now, knowing what he faces? And the big question: Is Hsiung the weird one? Or is it all of us — who see so much suffering and injustice and simply go about our lives — who have lost our way?

References:

New York Times story on a DxE rescue mission

Video of the mission to save Lily the piglet

Book recommendations:

Everything is Obvious by Duncan J. Watts 

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Grit by Angela Duckworth

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Jeremy Dalmas

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine you’re walking to work. You see a child drowning in a lake. You’re about to jump in and save her when you realize you’re wearing your best suit, and the rescue will end up costing hundreds in dry cleaning bills. Should you still save the child?

Of course you should. But this simple thought experiment, taken seriously, has radical implications for how you live your life.

It comes from Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save, one of the most influential modern works of ethical philosophy. Singer is perhaps the most influential public intellectual of my lifetime. His book Animal Liberation helped build America’s animal rights movement. His work helped create the effective altruism movement.

In Singer’s hands, the questions that motivate a moral life are startlingly simple. But if you take them seriously, living morally is very, very hard. And the way most of us are living, right now — well, we’re letting a lot of children drown. What happens if we force ourselves to recognize that fact? What does it demand of us?

That’s the topic of my conversation with Singer. We also discuss the differences between ethical philosophy and religion, why moral reasoning is a social act, the ethics of caring most about those closest to you, The Good Place, AI risk, open borders, where our obligations to others end, why Singer wouldn’t have become a philosopher if he’d been an effective altruist in his youth, and much more.

Book recommendations:

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

On What Matters by Derek Parfit

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

To read Peter SInger's book please visit www.thelifeyoucansave.org

To learn more about effective altruism, visit Vox's Future Perfect

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Thanksgiving! Please enjoy a re-air episode from April 2018 with Lilliana Mason.

Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 years ago, but now that they’re here, they change the way we see each other, the way we engage in politics, and the way politics absorbs other — previously non-political —spheres of our culture. In making her case, Mason offers one of the best primers I’ve read on how little it takes to activate a sense of group identity in human beings, and how far-reaching the cognitive and social implications are once that group identity takes hold. I don’t want to spoil our discussion here, but suffice to say that her recounting of the “minimal group paradigm” experiments is not to be missed. This is the kind of research that will change not just how you think about the world, but how you think about yourself. Mason’s book is, I think, one of the most important published this year, and this conversation gave me a lens on our political discord that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. If you want to understand the kind of identity politics that’s driving America in 2018, you should listen in.

Books recommendations:

Ideology in America by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson 

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 

The Power by Naomi Alderman

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gretchen McCulloch is a self-described “internet linguist,” host of the podcast Lingthusiasm, and author of the recent book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. In it, she demonstrates that the way we've come to speak on the internet -- from emojis to exclamation points -- is not random or arbitrary, but part of a broader attempt to make our written communication more vibrant, meaningful, and, genuinely human. Far from ‘ruining’ the written English language, internet-speak, McCulloch argues, is revolutionizing language in unprecedented, and ultimately positive, ways.

We discuss why I feel bad if I don't use enough exclamation points (or use too many), why postcards are the pre-internet predecessors to Instagram, how emojis act as written equivalents of our body language, why sarcasm is like a “linguistic trust fall,” the meaning of “Ok boomer” and much more.

Book recommendations:

It’s Complicated:The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd 

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

danah boyd on why fake news is so easy to believe

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yancey Strickler is the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and he’s just released a new book, This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World. In Strickler’s telling, our society has been so thoroughly captured by the value-system of financial maximization, that we don’t even view it as such. Kickstarter was an affront to that value-system, a way that groups could fund ideas outside of the realm of profit. And this new book is trying to dig deeper into that worldview, unveil its fallibility, and offer an alternative way of imagining our society.

So, in this conversation we talk about profit and the economy, but also about climate change, the founding story of Kickstarter, what makes great fiction so great, Alan Moore’s notion of the “idea space,” the bizarre way that Strickler went about writing his book, and much more.

Book recommendations:

Time Loops by Eric Wargo 

Value and Ethics in Economics by Elizabeth Anderson 

Dune by Frank Herbert 

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs

Edward Norton’s theory of mind, movies, and power

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Cynthia Gil & Chris Shurtleff

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’ve wanted to have Dave Eggers on the show for a while now. Eggers has not only written a vast range of books (a deeply ironic personal memoir, a heartwarming novel about a Sudanese refugee, a futuristic story about a tech dystopia) but he's also founded the national tutoring nonprofit 826 Valencia, started the literary magazine McSweeney’s, co-authored the screenplay of Where the Wild Things Are, and much more. I’m fascinated by people who are able to do a variety of wildly different things, all successfully. Dave Eggers is one of those people. 

So, we start this conversation by discussing Eggers’s life’s work, his recent book The Captain and the Glory, and Donald Trump. But then — somewhere around the halfway point — the conversation transforms into something I can only describe as, well, therapeutic. Eggers doesn’t own a smartphone or have wifi in his house, and hearing the way he talks about the internet, social media, and our relationship to them put me in a sort of quasi-meditation state that I can’t describe adequately with words.

This one is a little strange, but it may just make your day. It certainly made mine.

Book recommendations:

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton 

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

If you enjoyed this episode, you may like:

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

Cal Newport on doing Deep Work and escaping social media

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Cynthia Gil

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're anything like me, this episode will make you think about the way you shop, learn, eat, parent, and exercise in a whole new way.

My guest today is Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California whose most recent book The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class documents the rise of a new, unprecedented elite class in the United States. Previously, the elite classes differentiated themselves from the rest by purchasing expensive material goods like flashy clothes and expensive cars. But, for reasons we get into, today’s elite is different: We signify our class position by reading the New Yorker, acquiring elite college degrees, buying organic food, breastfeeding our children, and, of course, listening to podcasts like this one.

These activities may seem completely innocent — perhaps even enlightened. Yet, as we discuss here, they simultaneously shore up inequality, erode social mobility, and create an ever-more stratified society — all without most of us even noticing. This is a conversation that implicates us all, and, for that very reason, it is well worth grappling with.

Book recommendations:

Just Kids by Patti Smith

 Art Worlds by Howard S. Becker

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like:

When meritocracy wins, everybody loses

Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

What a smarter Trumpism would sound like

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Jeff Geld

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andrew Marantz is a writer at the New Yorker who, for years, has been deeply immersed in the world of conservative trolls, alt-right social media personalities, and online conspiracy theorists. His most recent book Antisocial has been viewed as a brilliant ethnography of the bizarre universe that is the alt-right. 

But I’m interested in it for a different reason: Somehow, these folks have figured out how to manipulate the social media ecosystem that frames our political discourse. Thus, they represent an important window into understanding how that ecosystem functions, who it advantages, and where it dramatically falls short. We discuss:

- Why Mark Zuckerberg’s defenses of Facebook so obviously fail

- Where the conversation about “free speech” in America went completely off the rails

- How alt-right personality Mike Cernovich cracked social media algorithms to influence the 2016 news cycle

- What Marantz calls the “primary laws of social media mechanics” and how they can be manipulated to bring out the worst in human nature

- Why conflict has become the primary way to garner attention and influence online while more constructive social interactions remain in obscurity

- How a kid from a progressive, upper-middle-class family became one of the nation’s leading neo-Nazis

- The role the social justice left plays in fomenting online extremism

And much more.

Book recommendations:

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty 

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Due to a technical glitch this interview with Edward Norton did not find it’s way into most people’s feeds. If you were able to download the first one this is indeed the exact same interview, but if you missed it please give a listen and enjoy - we had a lot of fun with this one.

You’ve heard of Edward Norton. He’s starred in critically acclaimed films like American History X, Fight Club, and Birdman, been nominated for multiple Academy Awards, and, most recently, wrote, directed, and starred in Motherless Brooklyn, a film about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome who ends up taking on the most corrupt and powerful forces in New York City politics.

Motherless Brooklyn, as it happens, is one of my all-time favorite books.

And so this conversation was an unexpected pleasure. In addition to a joint love of Motherless Brooklyn, Norton and I share an unusual number of interests: Meditation, the uncontrollable nature of the mind, the difficulty of solving problems by thinking about them, the psychology of power, media analytics, cultural ideas of heroism, thwarted masculinity in politics, Ralph Nader, and more.

It’s rare that I think a conversation could’ve gone for hours more. But it’s true for this one.

References:

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

This Could Be Our Future by Yancey Strickler

Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch 

 *The world according to Ralph Nader*

Book recommendations:

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan 

Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Buddhism without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor

If you like this episode, check out:

What Buddhism got right about the human brain

You will love this conversation with Jaron Lanier, but I can’t describe it

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Jeff Geld

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to Reset from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episodes were Can A.I. Tech You To Write Better and Quantum Supremacy, WTF.

If you enjoyed these episodes, subscribe to Reset for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app to get new episodes every week.

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Michael Lind is a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the co-founder of the New America Foundation, and an important contributor to American Affairs, a journal originally created to imagine a more Trumpist conservatism.

Lind is by no means a supporter of Trump. But, for decades now, he has been developing a coherent intellectual worldview around many of the same issues that Trump intuited, however crudely, during his campaign. He’s one of the intellectuals that the nationalist conservatives trying to imagine a Trumpism after Trump tell me they read most closely.

There are three big pieces of Lind’s thought that I think help to illuminate this era. One is his idea of the “new class war,” which builds a deep cultural component into class identity and maps much better onto populist resentment. The next is his approach to China, which has long been skeptical of Washington’s optimistic consensus. And the third is his insistence that political conflicts — be they class wars or partisan ones — don’t end in victories, they end in “settlements.”

References:

"The New Class War" by Michael Lind

"The Return of Geoeconomics" by Michael Lind

"Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise" by Michael Lind

"Donald Trump, the Perfect Populist" by Michael Lind

Book recommendations:

The Machiavellian Defender’s of Freedom by James Burnham 

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to episode 2 of our climate cluster. The more I prepared for this series, the more I realize there was a big blue gap in my understanding of climate change.

Oceans cover 70% of the earth, absorb 93% of the heat from the sun, and capture 30% of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forty percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of the coast, and half a billion people rely on oceans as their primary food source. As go the oceans, so goes humanity.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is the founder of the Urban Ocean Lab and the Ocean Collectiv, she’s held positions at the NOAA and the EPA, and was named by Outside Magazine as the most influential marine biologist of our time. And she’s able to do something a lot of people aren’t: communicate not just the science of climate change from the ocean perspective, but the role oceans play in the human story.

This is not a dry, complex disquisition on climate science. This is a vivid tour of the way oceans shape our lives, and the costs and consequences of reshaping them.

Book Recommendations:

Eat like a Fish by Bren Smith 

Water in Plain Sight by Judith D. Schwartz

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Ernie Erdat

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the first episode of our climate cluster. This isn’t a series about whether “the science is real” on climate change. This is a series about what the science says — and what it means for our lives, our politics, and our future.

I suspect I’m like a lot of people in that I accept that climate change is bad. What I struggle with is how bad. Is it an existential threat that eclipses all else? One of many serious problems politics must somehow address?

I wanted to kick off the series with someone who knows the science cold. Kate Marvel is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Applied Physics and Mathematics. But Marvel isn’t just a leading climate scientist. She’s also unique in her focus on the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, about climate change, and how they end up structuring our decisions. We discuss:

- How a climate model actually works

- Why this is the good place

- Why there is so much variation in climate scientists’ predictions about global temperature increases

- Why global warming is only one piece of the much larger problem of climate change

- Why a hotter planet is more conducive to natural disasters

- The frightening differences between a world that experiences a 2°C temperature increase as opposed to a 5°C temperature increase

- Whether the threat of climate change requires solutions that break the boundaries of conventional politics

- The underlying stories that animate much of the climate debate

- Whether the planet can sustain continued economic growth

- What it means to “live morally” amid climate change

And much more...

Book recommendations:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Annihilation by Jeff Vendermeer

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Ernie Erdat

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Neoliberalism” is one of the most confusing phrases in political discourse today. The term is often used to describe the market fundamentalism of thinkers like Milton Friedman and Frederich Hayek or politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, critics often place more progressive figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and even Elizabeth Warren under the neoliberal banner. This raises an important question: what the hell is neoliberalism?

I decided to bring on two guests today to help us answer that question. Wendy Brown is a professor of political theory at UC Berkeley, author of Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, and one of the foremost critics of neoliberalism, not only as a set of economic policies but a “governing rationality” that infects almost all aspects of our existence. Noah Smith is an economist, a columnist at Bloomberg, and is known for his robust defenses of some (though not all) neoliberal positions, which earned him the prestigious title of Chief Neoliberal Shill of 2018. We discuss:

- The differences between neoliberal theory and “actually existing neoliberalism”

- Neoliberalism as not only a set of economic policies but a form of “public reason” that influences our very conception of what it means to be human

- How neoliberal thought came to dominate almost every aspect of our lives

- Whether neoliberalism is an inherently anti-democratic project

- The relationship between neoliberal economic policies and traditional morality

- The differences between New Deal liberalism and Obama-era neoliberalism

- Whether a growth-driven economic model is compatible with our planet's ecological limits

Book recommendations:

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

Law Without Future by Jack Jackson

Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean

My book is available for pre-order! You can find it at www.EzraKlein.com.

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

You can subscribe to Ezra's new podcast Impeachment, explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineer - Topher Routh

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey EK Show listeners! Something different today. The first episode of my new podcast: Impeachment, Explained.

This was the week of confessions. Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a Trump administration quid quo pro with Ukraine, with cameras rolling. EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland confirmed that President Trump made Rudy Giuliani the hinge of America’s Ukraine policy. And then the administration announced that the location for the upcoming G7 summit: Trump’s own resort in Doral, Florida. We break down the three stories that mattered most in impeachment this week.

And then we dig into the four words that will shape the entire impeachment fight: “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” What did they mean when they were added to the Constitution? How have they been interpreted through American history? And do Trump’s acts qualify?

Listen to the first episode here, and subscribe to Impeachment, Explained, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app to get stay updated on this story every week.

References:

"Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution’s Impeachment Power" by Gene Healy

"The case for normalizing impeachment" by Ezra Klein

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Engineers - Malachi Broadus & Jeremey Dalmas

Theme music composed by Jon Natchez

Special thanks to Liz Nelson

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do you feel right now? Excited to listen to your favorite podcast? Anxious about the state of American politics? Annoyed by my use of rhetorical questions?

These questions seem pretty straightforward. But as my guest today, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, points out there is a lot more to emotion than meets the mind.

Barrett is a superstar in her field. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and has received various prestigious awards for her pioneering research on emotion. Her most recent book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain argues that emotions are not biologically hardwired into our brains but constructed by our minds. In other words, we don’t merely feel emotions — we actively create them.

Barrett’s work has potentially radical implications. If we take her theory seriously, it follows that the ways we think about our daily emotional states, diagnose illnesses, interact with friends, raise our children, and experience reality all need some serious adjusting, if not complete rethinking.

If you enjoyed this episode, you should check out:

A mind-expanding conversation with Michael Pollan

The cognitive cost of poverty (with Sendhil Mullainathan)

Will Storr on why you are not yourself 

A mind-bending, reality-warping conversation with John Higgs

Book recommendations: 

Naming the Mind by Kurt Danzinger 

The Island of Knowledge by Marcelo Gleiser 

The Accidental Species by Henry Gee

Sense and Nonsense by Kevin L. Laland

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

Subscribe to Impeachment, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts, or your favorite podcast app to get stay updated on this story every week.

Credits:

Producer and Editor - Jeff Geld

Researcher - Roge Karma

Recording engineer - Cynthia Gil

Field engineer - Joseph Fridman

The Ezra Klein Show is a production of the Vox Media Podcast Network

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In his brilliant 2014 book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Soviet-born TV producer turned journalist Peter Pomerantsev described 21st-century Russia as a political anomaly. He wrote about “a new type of authoritarianism” that waged war on reality by peddling conspiracy theories, disregarding the notion of truth, and framing all political opposition as the enemy of the people.

Sound familiar?

Upon leaving Russia, Pomerantsev found that the world around him had been infected with the same post-truth disease he had diagnosed in Moscow. The war against reality had spread across the globe, from London and Washington, DC, to Mexico City and Manila, Philippines. All over the place, the same values that had once defined liberal democracy — free speech, pluralism, the open exchange of ideas — were now being used to undermine it. This development became the centerpiece of his dizzying new book This is Not Propaganda, and it is the focal point of our conversation. We discuss:

- How information went from being the tool of dissidents to the tool of authoritarians

- Why Russia developed modern, post-truth politics first

- The tactics that spin doctors and troll farms use to warp our sense of reality

- How the end of the Cold War triggered a global descent into relativist chaos

- How liberal democratic values like free speech and pluralism are being used to undermine liberal democracy

- Why “all politics is now about creating identity”

- Whether it is possible to organize the internet democratically

- Why the informational chaos of digital politics is much worse outside the US

- The worst butchering of a guest’s name in the show’s history

And much more. Taking a step back from our current moment, American politics is now dominated by the internal machinations of the post-Soviet political systems Pomerantsev specializes in understanding. To see our politics clearly requires seeing their politics clearly.

References:

For a Left Populism by Chantal Mouffe

On Populist Reason by Ernest Laclau

Book recommendations:

The Asthenic Syndrome by Kira Muratova (film)

History becomes Form by Boris Groys

If you enjoyed this conversation, you may also like:

Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance

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As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Vivek Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans wanted to talk to him about the most was loneliness.

Loneliness isn’t simply painful, it’s lethal. Several meta-studies have found the mortality risk associated with loneliness is higher than that of obesity and equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. So, Murthy decided to label loneliness a public health “epidemic,” a term that medical professionals don’t throw around lightly.

Murthy’s advocacy has changed the national discourse around loneliness. However, this isn’t a conversation simply about loneliness as a public health problem: It is about loneliness as a deeply painful lived experience — one that both Murthy and I are all too familiar with.

There’s a lot in this conversation. Murthy’s explanation of how loneliness acts on the body is worth the time, all on its own. It’ll change how you see the relationship between social experience and physical health. But the broader message here is deeper: You are not alone in your loneliness. None of us are. And the best thing we can do is, often, helping someone else out of the very pit we’re in.

References:

Ezra's conversation with Johann Hari on the causes of depression

Murthy's article that called loneliness an "epidemic"

KFF/Economist poll of loneliness in US, UK and Japan

Book recommendations:

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albolm

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

Dear Madam President by Jennifer Palmieri

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Racism is one of the most morally charged words in the English language. It is typically understood as a form of deep inner prejudice — something that people actively feel and consciously express. My guest today, Ibram X. Kendi, wants to redefine racism. He defines the idea simply: support for policies that widen racial inequality.

Kendi is a professor of African-American Studies and director of the Antiracist Policy Center at American University. His National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning argued that racist policies beget racist ideas, not the other way around. His new book, How to Be an Antiracist, is a continuation of that project. It focuses on racism as a structural ecosystem that black people face, not a prejudice that white people feel.

The implications of this redefinition are far-reaching. Are you a racist if you loathe people who aren’t of your race but don’t want to pass policy on it? Are you a racist if you tried to narrow racial inequality but your program backfired?

In this conversation, we map the boundaries of Kendi’s definition and its implications. We discuss his admission that he “used to be racist most of the time,” his argument against racial integration, whether it’s giving too much power to policy to blame it for all racial inequality, whether the word “racist” is too charged for the more nuanced conversations we need to have, the meta-philosophy behind African-American studies, and much more.

Book recommendations:

Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts

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Malcolm Gladwell’s work is nothing short of an intellectual adventure.

Sometimes, as in his podcast Revisionist History, he takes something small and mundane — a hockey statistic, a semicolon, a verbal tic — and draws a broad, sweeping conclusion that shatters your worldview.

Other times, as in his new book Talking to Strangers, he takes something big and contentious — the death of Sandra Bland, the wrongful conviction of Amanda Knox, the ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff — and produces insights that challenge conventional wisdom, leaving you wondering how you missed what he saw all along.

In either case, once you’ve experienced what Gladwell has to say, you can never see things in quite the same way again.

This conversation is an adventure of its own. We cover everything from the secrets behind Gladwell’s creative process to the basic social ingredient that undergirds all of modern society to the story of how an entire field office of the CIA got infiltrated by Cuban spies — and what that teaches us about human nature.

So, tune in and be a part of this adventure with us.

Books recommendations:

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran by Andrew Scott Cooper

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Danielle Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, and a philosopher, and the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project. I talk about democracy a lot on this show, but it’s her life’s work.

I've tried a bunch of different descriptions here, but they fail the conversation. I loved this one. Don’t make me cheapen it by describing it. Just download it.

References:

Talking to Strangers by Danielle Allen

"Building a Good Jobs Economy" by Dani Rodrik and Charles Sabel

Book recommendations:

"Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell

"What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" by Ralph Ellison

Men in Dark Times by Hannah Arendt

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Samantha Power reported from the killing fields of Bosnia. She watched a genocide that could’ve been stopped years earlier grind on amidst international indifference. What she saw there led to A Problem From Hell, her Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of why the world permits genocide to happen. She emerged as a fierce critic of America’s morally lax foreign policy, a position that led to a friendship with Barack Obama, and then a series of top jobs in his administration, culminating in ambassador to the UN. Power’s new book, The Education of an Idealist, is a memoir of this journey.

It is rare that an outspoken critic of the foreign policy establishment becomes so powerful within it. But that’s what makes Power’s career, and the lessons she learned, so interesting. In this conversation we discuss:

- What causes ordinary people to participate in genocide

- Why policymakers so often fail to respond to genocide before it is too late

- Whether foreign policy decisions are too restrained by the overreaches and mistakes of the previous generation

- Power’s reflections on Libya, Syria, South Sudan, and more

- How the US’s inconsistent moral stances undermine its strategic interests

- The blurry line between morality and strategy in foreign policy

- How the next administration should handle US relationships with China and Russia.

- The case for being “unreasonable,” even as a policymaker

And much more. This conversation is weedsy at times, but in a way that I think is telling: It’s a window into the agonizing complexity and impossible choices that define foreign policymaking.

Book recommendations:

Switch by the Heath Brothers

The Abandonment of the Jews by David S. Wyman

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

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In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits argues that meritocracy — a system set-up to expand opportunity, reduce inequality and end aristocracy — has become exactly what it was set up to combat: a mechanism for intergenerational wealth transfer that leaves everyone worse off in the process.

Markovits isn’t only challenging a system; he is challenging the system that I (and probably most of you) have been part of for our entire lives. For better or worse, Meritocracy is the water we swim in. We implicitly accept its values, practices, arguments, and assumptions because they govern our everyday lives.

This interview was a chance for me to exit the water. Maybe it will be for you as well.

Book recommendations:

The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young

The Race between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

"Technical Change, Inequality, and The Labor Market" (article) by Daron Acemoglu

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“The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones “it has been borne on the backs of black resistance.”

Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist at the New York Times Magazine, the winner of MacArthur Genius Grant (among countless other awards), and, most recently, the creator of the New York Times’ 1619 project, which explores the ways slavery shaped America.

As Hannah-Jones points out, no group in American history has more to teach us about what it means to live out the practice of democracy, in its most difficult and graceful form, than African-Americans. We also discuss:

- The economics of slavery, and the role of the cotton gin

- Why it took a civil war to end slavery in America, but not elsewhere

- What it means to love a country that doesn’t love you back

- Whether busing worked

- Why Southern schools are the most racially integrated in the US

- The long-term effects of school integration

- Whether class-based policies can solve racial inequity

- What America can learn from Cuba

- Whether racism blocked social democracy in America

- Whether any presidential candidates has a serious school integration plan

- Why housing and education segregation are so rarely discussed by politicians

- Why Hannah-Jones dislikes “gifted and talented” programs in school

And much more.

References:

Hannah-Jones' opening essay of the 1619 project

Hannah-Jones' essay on choosing a school for her daughter

Book recommendations:

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 W.E.B. DuBois

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

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I’m not usually a fanboy on this podcast, but this episode is the exception.

I love the web-comic XKCD. I’ve had prints of it hanging in my house for years. It’s nerdy and humane, curious and kind. And every so often, it’s explosively, crazily creative, in ways that leave me floored. Like the Hugo-award winning “Time,” a 3,099 frame animation that unspooled every hour for over four months. Or the book Thing Explainer, which used only the 1,000 most common words in the English language to explain some of the hardest ideas in the world.

XKCD is the work of one person, Randall Munroe, and I’ve wanted to talk with him for years. Now he’s out with a new book, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, and I got my chance. The episode covers:

- The simple places Munroe draws inspiration for his ideas

- The fact that scientists still don’t know how lightning works or why ice is slippery

- How pedantry kills creativity

- Why aliens probably build suspension bridges like we do

- The superpower of refusing to be embarrassed by what you don’t know

- How to retain a sense of wonder as you age

- Whether the water of Niagra Falls can fit through a straw

- How to dig a hole

- How a priest in 1590 intuited dozens of scientific discoveries centuries before they were officially discovered

- And, most importantly, the best book recommendations I think I’ve ever heard on the show

This one was a pleasure.

References:

Jimmy Carter's Voyager letter

Book recommendations:

Natural and Moral History of the Indies by José de Acosta

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan (and others)

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I’m careful about inviting politicians onto this podcast. Too often, questions go unanswered, and frustrated emails flood my inbox. So I only bring on candidates now if there’s a conversation directly related to themes of this show.

In this case, there is.

There’s a quiet moral radicalism powering Julián Castro’s presidential campaign. Laced through his policy agenda are proposals to decriminalize the movements of undocumented immigrants, to involve the homeless in housing policy, to establish American obligations to those displaced by climate change, to protect animals from human cruelty.

This is an agenda to expand the moral circle. To redefine who counts in the “we” of American politics.

I asked Castro if this wasn’t all a step too far, if Democrats didn’t need to play it safer to eject Trump from office in 2020. This broader moral vision, he replied, “is not just trying to backfill the negative. It gives people a positive purpose that they can reach for. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

This is a candidate interview worth hearing.

Book recommendations:

Influence by Robert Cialdini

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

Read the transcript of this interview here

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Imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to be an animal rights activist. Tens of billions of animals are being tortured and slaughtered every year. It is, to you, a rolling horror. But to the people you love, the world you live in — it’s normal. You’re the weird one.

So what do you do? How do you engage, politically and personally, when so few see what you see?

Leah Garcés is the Executive President of Mercy for Animals and the author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry ,which documents her journey to reduce the suffering of chickens by building coalitions with none other than well… industrial chicken farmers.

I wanted Garcés on the show because her story is about more than animal suffering. It’s about the core question of politics: the choice we face, every day, between condemnation and compromise. Whether your issue is health care or climate or civil rights or abortion or taxes or foreign policy, you’re faced daily with people working for a world you find repellent. What do you do when they’re the majority and you’re the minority? How do you maintain your own morality when the system itself is sick? When do you draw bright lines, and when do you erase the lines you’ve spent your life drawing?

This conversation gets uncomfortable at times — the realities of factory farming are not easy to face. But, trust me, you will want to stick with it. Garcés offers an extraordinary lesson in the daily practice of politics, one worth hearing even if it’s not ultimately your path.

Book recommendations:

Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard

Big Chicken by Maryn McKenna

Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey by Joe Hutto   

Read the transcript of this interview here

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like:

The Green Pill

Bruce Friedrich on how technology will reduce animal suffering

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Hello everyone. I'm Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism (Ezra will be back from vacation next week).

"Antiracism… is now a new and increasingly dominant religion” writes John McWhorter, “it is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus.”

McWhorter is a Professor of English at Columbia University, a contributing editor to The Atlantic, and an outspoken critic of what he calls “third-wave antiracism.” He believes that our increasingly religious national discourse around race -- with its focus on “safe spaces,” “wokeness” and “white privilege” -- is not only wrongheaded, but even dangerous.

But McWhorter isn't that easy to pin down. He acknowledges racism’s pernicious effects on communities of color, but believes that while we are busy calling out individual racism, we are ignoring the issues that most impact black lives: an endless War on Drugs, an unequal education system, and attacks on reproductive and voting rights.

In this conversation, we explore what terms like “woke” and “diversity” actually mean, the types of issues that really do impact black communities, the legacy of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the potential virtues of virtue signaling, why The Phantom Menace was (objectively) a terrible movie and much more.

I hope y’all have as much fun with this conversation as I did.

References:

John's essay "The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World"

Book recommendations:

A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

Follow Jane on Twitter @cjane87

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Hello, everybody! I'm Jane Coaston, senior politics reporter at Vox with a focus on conservatism.

Today, I'm speaking with Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for the Atlantic, who has been navigating the fractious divides within the conservative movement since long before 2016.

Friedersdorf is extremely hard to pin down. His intellectual hero is Friedrich Hayek and he believes the Supreme Court “ought to thwart the will of democratic and legislative majorities.” He’s also staunchly anti-war, an outspoken critic of police brutality, and has even occasionally praised Bernie Sanders.

This is what makes Friedersdorf so interesting to talk to: He doesn't fall neatly along partisan lines. We discuss a lot here: the importance of police reform; the way the term “racism” is used and misused in American politics; the future of the GOP; and what it means to be politically homeless in Trump's America.

References:

"A question for conservatives: what if the left was right on race?" by Jane Coaston, Vox

"What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism" by Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic

Book recommendations:

The Authoritarian Dynamic by Karen Stenner

Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch

The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich A. Hayek

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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I don’t usually begin interviews with the question “who the hell are you?” But, then again, not every guest is John Higgs.

I fell into Higgs’s work by accident. An offhand recommendation of his book on the KLF, a British band that burnt a million pounds but couldn’t explain why they did it. What’s unusual is that I’ve not quite been able to climb back out of it. Higgs’s work is reality-warping. Once you put on his lenses, it’s hard to take them back off.

At the center of Higgs’s strange, brilliant books — his heterodox history of the 20th century, his biography of Timothy Leary, his tour of “metamodernism” — is a single, urgent question: How do we understand the world around us even as advances in physics, psychology, art, pharmacology, and philosophy shatter our frames of reference?

This conversation takes some wild turns, but trying to describe it would do it a disservice. Just trust me on this one. It’s good to mess with your reality every once in awhile.

References:

John Higgs’s conversation with Alan Moore

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Book Recommendations:

The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent

Cosmic Trigger I by Robert Anton Wilson

From Hell by Alan Moore

Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.com

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The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict,” she became obsessed with five intersecting problems: “First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale."

Yeah, me too.

What sets Tolentino’s work apart, though, is that it’s not about the internet — it’s about how people are living their real, everyday lives in the age of the internet. This is a conversation about what happens when technology combines with the most powerful forces of human psychology to transform the nature of human interaction itself. It’s about how we construct and express our core sense of self, and what that’s doing to who we really are.

References:

The art of attention (with Jenny Odell)

Book Recommendations:

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of multiple books, including most recently How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of the term “identity politics” back to its very first use.

“Since 1977,” she writes, “that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators.” Taylor’s intellectual history is driven by more than curiosity: it’s part of a larger vision that views racism and our contemporary economic system as inextricably linked.

This is a conversation full of tough questions. What constitutes identity politics? When is it inclusive, and when is it exclusive? Is racism a function of capitalism or is it constant across economic systems? How did Barack Obama’s presidency lead to Donald Trump’s? What can stop future Democrats from running into the very same institutional strongholds that plagued Obama?

Book recommendations:

Black Reconstruction by W.E.B DuBois

Selected poems of John Wieners

Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis

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