David Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best selling books: Calypso, Theft By Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays On Ice, Barrel Fever… just to name a few. He’s also one of my favorite writers of all time. What makes Sedaris – who got his start on NPR back in 1992 with his, now famous, Santaland Diaries essay about the time he worked as a Christmas Elf at Macy’s – so mesmerizing and funny, is his ability to find something meaningful and true ...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Ro Khanna is a progressive congressman representing California's 17th District, the wealthiest Congressional district in the U.S. He's the Silicon Valley congressman, and his constituents are the coastal elites of the elites. But if you didn't know any of that, you might think Ro Khanna is a congressman from a place like Indiana. He wants to revitalize American industry, bring manufacturing back home, and really sound the alarm on who the digital revolution has left behind. In fact, when you hea...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 9 min
For the last month, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been all over the internet with his conspiratorial, antisemitic tirades. Most recently, he went on Alex Jones’ InfoWars show with White Nationalist Nick Fuentes and said things like, “I love Nazis” and “I see good things about Hitler.” Last month, there was also Kyrie Irving sharing a link to a video that claimed that blacks are the real Hebrews and the Holocaust didn’t happen. There was also the Black Hebrew Israelite march outside of Ba...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 44 min
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a polarizing figure. For some, he's the ultimate defender of the State of Israel, willing to do whatever he thinks it takes to protect the one Jewish state located in the most volatile region of the world. For others, Bibi symbolizes everything that's wrong with 21st century Israel: the state's rightward turn and its never ending conflict with the Palestinians. His supporters chant “Bibi, King of Israel!” at his rallies, while at protests, his enemies call hi...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr 7 min
A few months ago, I had writer Freddie deBoer on the podcast for an episode we called, “Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?” We talked about his experience living with severe bipolar disorder and the dangerous ways in which mental illness has gotten wrapped up in our growing cultural obsession with identity politics. It’s almost like sickness, he argued, has become chic. We spent some of the conversation talking critically about a New York Times article by writer Daniel Bergner about a movem...
Nov 23, 2022•1 hr 15 min
Last week, Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson from the Russians. It was one of the most stunning victories for Ukraine since the war began eight months ago. And yet, the road ahead is long and uncertain. Just this week, Putin unleashed a heavy bombardment of missiles across Ukraine, in an attempt to destroy Ukraine's energy infrastructure. The stakes of this war are already high for Ukraine, but they are made exponentially higher – for countries across the globe – because of the looming dang...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr 1 min
With inflation soaring, the worst crime wave in decades, and Biden’s approval rating at a pitiful 41%, everyone predicted last night’s midterm elections would be a bloodbath. It wasn’t. The red wave the Republicans were hoping for did not arrive. In fact, it was barely a red trickle. While results are still coming in, it looks like Republicans will narrowly win control of the House, and Democrats will remain in control of the Senate. What happened? Today, journalists Mary Katharine Ham, Josh Kra...
Nov 09, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Less than a week out from election day, and more than 20 million people have already cast their votes – a record number of early voters for a midterm election. But it isn’t so surprising when you consider the stakes: inflation at a 40-year high, economists saying we’re heading towards a recession, and the largest crime surge across America in decades. Just to name a few small issues voters may be thinking about. Midterms are typically hard for the party in power, but President Biden’s approval n...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 39 min
Over the past two years, the United States has experienced the largest crime surge in decades. Aggravated assaults went up. Shoplifting went up. Domestic violence went up. Homicides went up. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose 30%, the largest single year increase in recorded U.S. history. And yet, the most dominant voices in the last few years, are the ones that believe our attempts to mitigate crime have been too punitive, and that the solutions lie in less people in prison and less police on t...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Let’s talk about the state of men in America: For every 100 bachelor degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men; among men with only a high-school education, one in three is out of the labor force; mortality from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related illnesses are almost three times higher among men than women. The list goes on. The reality is that boys and men are falling behind. And we need to do something about it. So for today, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, on his...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 22 min
In a world where the personal has become political, and politics has swallowed everything, the stakes of changing your mind can feel really high. To change your mind is to risk betrayal – of your people, your culture, your tribe. But there may be nothing more important to a functioning democracy than to be able to influence each other, and be influenced ourselves, on the basis of conversation. So for today’s episode: the neuroscience of belief change. It’s an interview that aired last year on Th...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Last month, a 22 year old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Republic's so-called morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly. Three days later, on September 16th, she died in their custody. Her death ignited a movement, as Iranians took to the streets across the country to demand change, women cutting off their hair in public and lighting their hijabs on fire. The protesters, many of whom are teenagers, have been chanting: “women, life, and freedom...
Oct 07, 2022•1 hr
Today’s episode is borrowed from the feed of the great podcast The Fifth Column. Usually hosted by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, this episode, which aired in July of 2022, features Kmele and two guests who have become elder statesmen around the persistent issue of race in America: John McWhorter and Glenn Loury. Over the past few years McWhorter, Loury and Foster each have written, discussed and lectured exhaustively on anti-racism, the role race plays in America, and the chang...
Sep 28, 2022•53 min
Last year, The New York Times dropped a bombshell headline: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” As other outlets picked up the shocking story, marches, protests and riots erupted across Canada. One former Canadian minister called it Canada’s George Floyd moment. But according to my guest today, the bombshell story about a mass grave… wasn’t true. Today, a conversation with journalist Terry Glavin about “the year of the graves,” and what the mainstream medi...
Sep 22, 2022•56 min
Fifteen years ago, there was a lot of talk about the obesity epidemic. In 2008, Michelle Obama started a government program called “Let’s Move!” that sought to reduce childhood obesity. You might remember the First Lady teaming up with everyone from Beyonce to Big Bird to promote exercise and better eating habits. Unfortunately, the program was largely a failure. And the obesity statistics continued to rise. 74% of Americans today are either obese or overweight. And yet, we’re no longer talking ...
Sep 15, 2022•1 hr 34 min
If there is a headline to the past half-decade, it’s this: liberal democracy is under threat across the West and populist movements are on the march. There’s Brexit in the UK. There’s Viktor Orbán in Hungary. There’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And in the United States, of course, there’s Donald Trump. So today: a debate. Should we be fighting to preserve liberalism, the system that prizes our individual rights and the very foundation upon which America was built? Or is the system itself the probl...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 56 min
On November 9, 2016, the day after Trump was elected president, three students from Oberlin College were caught shoplifting wine from Gibson’s Bakery, a local staple that had been around for 137 years. Allyn Gibson, who was running the register that night, and who is white, called the cops on the three students, who were black. They fled, he chased them outside of the store, a brawl ensued and the three students were arrested. The next day, students, along with Oberlin administrators, began prot...
Sep 01, 2022•45 min
Attorney General William Barr is only the second person in American history to lead the Justice Department twice: first under President George HW Bush and then again, three decades later, under arguably the most divisive president we’ve ever had. Today, we talk about . . . all of it. Why he took the job in the first place; his time in the chaotic Trump White House; Russiagate; whether he regrets how he handled the Mueller investigation; and what finally pushed him to break away from the presiden...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 33 min
Larry Summers is one of the most important economists in the world. He’s been the chief economist at the World Bank. He was Treasury Secretary under President Clinton. He was director of the National Economic Council under Obama. And from 2001 to 2006 he was president of Harvard. But perhaps more than anything on his resume, the thing Summers is most well-known for is his willingness to speak his mind—even if it means being the skunk at the garden party, warning about inflation when everyone els...
Aug 18, 2022•1 hr 5 min
We live in a culture in which many people believe that words are violence. In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the first fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, and with Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old who stabbed the novelist in the neck on a stage in Western New York. Today, as Rushdie recovers from his injuries, reflections from Bari on the profound impact that the words are violence crowd has had on our culture. Learn more about your ad choices. V...
Aug 16, 2022•16 min
Tim Scott is a rare bird: He is the only black Republican in the Senate. But the quality that makes him arguably more unique at the moment is his optimism. Much of that optimism comes from his own story. Scott’s grandfather picked cotton in the segregated south. He never learned to read or write. Within two generations, without money or connections, his grandson became a U.S. senator from South Carolina. Scott is frustrated at all the pessimism, including from inside his own party— and he’s frus...
Aug 10, 2022•57 min
It’s hard to think of an invention that has been more transformative to women than the birth control pill. Suddenly, American women possessed a power that women never before in history had: They could control when they got pregnant. They could have sex like . . . men. The pill—and the profound legal, political and cultural changes that the sexual revolution and feminism ushered in—liberated women. Those movements have allowed women to lead lives that literally were not possible beforehand. But h...
Aug 03, 2022•1 hr 35 min
There is no organization that’s done more to fight for freedom of speech on American campuses over the past 20 years than FIRE, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. If you care deeply about the First Amendment and a robust culture of free speech, FIRE is the kind of organization you hope will go out of business. Unfortunately, as our friend Andrew Sullivan has perfectly put it, we all live on campus now. As the culture of campus has become the culture of the country—one in which id...
Jul 27, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Denying the outcome of elections has become alarmingly popular these days. In one corner, Democrats are claiming that gerrymandering has made our elections illegitimate, that the Senate is anti-Democratic and so is the Supreme Court. The White House Press Secretary has claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. In the other corner, a majority or close to a majority of Republicans (depending on what polls you look at) believe that Trump was cheated out of a fair election in ...
Jul 20, 2022•1 hr 30 min
There’s a tried-and-true playbook for comedians who want to make it big: hit the road, get in front of as many audiences as possible, and try to grab the attention of the TV executives who decide which comics are lucky enough to get a special. But Andrew Schulz and his generation of comics has something those guys didn’t: The internet. In 2018, one of Schulz’s self-published specials went to number one across Apple Music, Google Play and Amazon. That led to sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hal...
Jul 15, 2022•1 hr 5 min
In Bari’s view, Freddie deBoer is one of the best writers in the country. It’s not because she always agrees with him. Hardly. Freddie is a self-described Marxist. What she appreciates about him is that he is unflinching about criticizing “his side.” Freddie is one of the most trenchant critics of what he calls “Social Justice Politics”—which he argues distracts the left from the real issue of class. He is also unflinching in his views about mental illness and the way it is being glorified in ou...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 28 min
There are nearly 4000 universities in the U.S.. Many of them have billions of dollars in endowments and histories that go back to well before the country's founding. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that it would be a bit ridiculous to try and compete with those Goliaths. But that's exactly what the new University of Austin or UATX is doing. The premise, of course, is simple, and it goes like this. While the brand name schools have the money, they no longer have the mission. They have fundament...
Jul 07, 2022•45 min
No writer stokes more consistent envy among Common Sense editors than Walter Kirn. Two of his essays from last year—The Bullshit and The Power and the Silence—got our vote for the best of 2021. But we never miss anything he writes. You might know Kirn’s name from his novels, including “Up in the Air” and “Blood Will Out.” We hope you’ll love his debut piece for us as much as we do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 04, 2022•16 min
With everything going on here at home you can be forgiven for not focusing on what’s going on in Mariupol or Hong Kong. But what’s going on in those faraway places has a profound impact on us. For evidence of that truth, look no further than Wuhan. Or at the current price of gas. The point is that there is little distinction between domestic and foreign politics. If you are the world’s superpower—and at least for now we still appear to be—they are profoundly connected. That’s the case former CIA...
Jul 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Few decisions could inspire so much anger and sadness in one group of Americans—and so much joy and relief in another—than last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Depending on where you sit, the Court just rolled back women’s rights by 50 years, or corrected an egregious instance of judicial overreach. Today, a deep and honest conversation about the Dobbs decision with two women–both mothers–who represent the pro-choice and pro-life sides of this debate. Katherine Mang...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 31 min
