In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and weve been talking ever since. ...

Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation m

For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching wor

Were in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben. We catch him packing, in Vermont, for whats far from his first climate rodeo in New York.

Were in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what ...

Theres a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. Its roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the re

Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a ...

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. Shes the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what were going ..

In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph ONeill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of th

In a forlorn Fourth of July week, in the pit of an unpresidential, anti-presidential campaign year, 2024, we welcome back John Kaag, who writes history with a philosophical flair, never more colorful