The Ezra Klein Show - podcast cover

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinionwww.nytimes.com
Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike? Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Episodes

Sway: 'Fear and Panic Are Bedfellows' in Ukraine

Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at Sway about the war in Ukraine and the challenges of conflict-zone reporting. Clarissa Ward has had, as she puts it, a “long and very complicated relationship” with Russia. The chief international correspondent for CNN, she has had stints in Moscow since the beginning of her career, and has struggled to get a Russian visa since she investigated the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. But that hasn’t stopped her f...

May 10, 202243 min

Donald Trump Didn’t Hijack the G.O.P. He Understood It.

Right now, Republicans of all stripes — Ron DeSantis, J.D. Vance, Mike Pence, Glenn Youngkin — are trying to figure out how to channel the populist energies of Donald Trump into a winning political message. The struggle to achieve such a synthesis is the defining project on the American right today. Its outcome will determine the future of the Republican Party — and American politics. To understand what the post-Trump future of the G.O.P. will look like, it helps to have a clearer understanding ...

May 06, 20221 hr 23 min

The Argument: Why the G.O.P. Can't Stop Saying 'Gay'

Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at The Argument about Florida's “Don't Say Gay” bill and the broader wave of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, spurred by the political right, that is spreading across the country. According to the Human Rights Campaign , this year alone, more than 300 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills have been introduced in state legislatures. Why has this issue become a major focus of the Republican Party? And how is the way society treats individuals who identify as L.G.B....

May 03, 202239 min

Elon Musk Might Break Twitter. Maybe That's a Good Thing.

If Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter comes to fruition, the world’s richest person will own one of its most important communications platforms. Twitter might have a smaller user base than Facebook, Instagram and even Snapchat, but it shapes the dominant narratives in key industries like politics, media, finance and technology more than any other platform. Attention — particularly that of elite leaders in these industries — is a valuable resource, one that Twitter manages and trades in. Musk un...

Apr 29, 20221 hr 5 min

Putin May Not Like How He’s Changed Europe

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed Europe within a matter of weeks. A continent once fractured by the refugee crisis is now taking in millions of refugees. Countries such as Germany have made considerable pledges to increase military spending. The European Union said it would cut off Russian oil and gas “well before 2030” — a once unthinkable prospect. The European project seems more confident in itself than at any other time in recent history. But some European countries are a...

Apr 26, 20221 hr 10 min

Emily St. John Mandel on Time Travel, Parenting and the Apocalypse

“ Station Eleven ” by Emily St. John Mandel was published in 2014. That book imagined the world after a pandemic had wiped out, well, almost everyone. It’s a gorgeous novel with a particular emotional power: it helps you grieve a life you still have. But then came a real pandemic, not as lethal as the one Mandel imagined, but a shock nonetheless. And “Station Eleven” — already a beloved international best seller — found a second life. Mandel became known as a pandemic prophet. “Station Eleven” b...

Apr 22, 20221 hr

Can Democrats Turn Their 2022 Around?

With the midterms just over six months away, the electoral prospects for Democrats are looking bleak. President Biden’s approval rating is at 42 percent , around where Donald Trump’s was at this point in his presidency. Recent polls asking whether Americans want Republicans or Democrats in Congress found that Republicans are leading by about 2 percentage points. And with inflation spiking to its highest point in decades, Covid cases rising and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continuing to send econ...

Apr 19, 20221 hr 8 min

Best Of: This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma

“Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. “The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.” Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist by training, has been a pioneer in trauma research for decades now and leads the Trauma Research Foundation. His 2014 book “The Body Keeps the Score,” quickly became a touchstone on the topic. And altho...

Apr 15, 20221 hr 17 min

A Ukrainian Philosopher on What Putin Never Understood About Ukraine

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only getting more brutal: We’ve seen the bodies of civilians strewn in the streets in Bucha, the city of Mariupol almost leveled and, just a few days ago, a Russian missile attack on a crowded train station in Kramatorsk killing at least 50 people. The United Nations has confirmed 1,793 civilian deaths in Ukraine, though the actual number is thought to be far higher. Russia’s viciousness in this campaign makes Ukraine’s resilience all the more remarkable. Ukrainia...

Apr 12, 202248 min

Fiona Hill on Whether Ukraine Can Win — and What Happens if Russia Loses

The Russia-Ukraine war has changed considerably in recent weeks. Vladimir Putin is no longer talking explicitly about regime change in Ukraine. The Russian military has shifted its focus away from taking Kyiv and toward making territorial gains in Ukraine’s east. The prospect of an outright Ukrainian victory is no longer out of the question. And negotiations between the parties over a possible settlement appear to be making some progress. There’s been a darker turn as well: Over the weekend, ima...

Apr 08, 202248 min

The Most Thorough Case Against Crypto I've Heard

The hype around cryptocurrencies has reached a fever pitch. There are Super Bowl ads for crypto companies featuring celebrities like Matt Damon and Larry David. The Staples Center in Los Angeles is now the Crypto.com Arena. And behind that hype is a distinct vision: a more decentralized economy where individuals have more autonomy over their finances, a grass-roots internet free of the not-so-invisible hand of Big Tech, and a cultural ecosystem where artists and musicians can fairly monetize the...

Apr 05, 20221 hr 22 min

Sanctioning Russia Is a Form of War. We Need to Treat It Like One.

The Russian political scientist Ilya Matveev recently described the impact of the West’s sanctions on his country as “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” He’s not exaggerating. Economists expect the Russian economy to contract by at least 15 percent of G.D.P. this year. Inflation is spiking. An exodus of Russian professionals is underway. Stories of shortages and long lines for basic consumer goods abound. The U.S. and its allies have turned to sanctions as a way of taking act...

Apr 01, 20221 hr 20 min

I Keep Hoping Larry Summers Is Wrong. What if He’s Not?

“There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation,” wrote Larry Summers in February 2021. A year later, the debate still rages over the first part of that sentence — the extent to which the American Rescue Plan is responsible for rising prices. But the rest of it is no longer in question: We’re currently experiencing the worst inflationary crisis in de...

Mar 29, 20221 hr 18 min

Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible

A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. The seductions and dangers of genetic engineering. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising culture permeating more and more of our lives. Atwood — the author of the Booker Prize-winning novels “ The Blind Assassin ” and “ The Testaments ,” as well as “ The Handmaid’s...

Mar 25, 20221 hr 8 min

How Energy Markets Are Shaping Putin’s Invasion — and the World

Nearly every dimension of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has been shaped by energy markets. Russia’s oil and gas exports have long been the foundation of its economy and geopolitical strength. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine — like his annexation of Crimea in 2014 — coincided with high energy prices. While Western sanctions have dealt a major blow to Russia’s financial system, European carve-outs for Russian oil and gas have kept hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to Moscow every d...

Mar 22, 20221 hr 3 min

A Realist Take on How the Russia-Ukraine War Could End

As we enter the fourth week of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many of the possible pathways this conflict could take are terrifying. A military quagmire that leads to protracted death and suffering. A Russian takeover of Kyiv and installation of a puppet government. An accidental strike on Polish or Romanian territory that draws America and the rest of NATO into war. Or, perhaps worst of all, a series of escalations that culminates in nuclear exchange. But one possibility carries a glimmer of hop...

Mar 18, 20221 hr 15 min

Timothy Snyder on the Myths That Blinded the West to Putin’s Plans

“Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I will call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done,” writes the Yale historian Timothy Snyder in his 2018 book, “ The Road to Unfreedom .” The central thesis of “The Road to Unfreedom” is that different understandings of the past, its myth...

Mar 15, 20221 hr 12 min

Masha Gessen on Putin’s 'Profoundly Anti-Modern’ Worldview

For Western audiences, the past few weeks have been a torrent of information about what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine. Daily updates of Russian military advances. Horrifying videos of buildings exploding and innocent civilians being killed. Announcements of increasingly severe economic sanctions and major corporate pullouts. Charts showing the collapse of the ruble. Story after story about the hardships facing the Russian economy. Most Russians, however, are living in an alternate reality. T...

Mar 11, 20221 hr 1 min

Fiona Hill on the War Putin Is Really Fighting

Vladimir Putin was looking for a swift invasion that would halt Ukraine’s drift toward the West, reveal NATO’s fractures and weaknesses and solidify Russia as a global power. In response, the West threatened moderate sanctions, but ultimately showed little interest in stepping between Russia and Ukraine. Then came the war, and everything changed. Russia’s invasion met with valiant Ukrainian resistance. President Volodymyr Zelensky became an international hero. NATO countries unified behind a tru...

Mar 08, 202259 min

Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

“Russia’s utterly unprovoked, unjustifiable, immoral invasion of Ukraine would seem to mark the end of an era,” writes Fareed Zakaria, “one that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.” Many of us, myself included, grew up in that era. We came of age in a unipolar world, dominated by a single country whose military, economic, even cultural, hegemony remained largely uncontested. That world was by no means free of violence. But the great power conflict that had defined the lived experienc...

Mar 04, 20221 hr 6 min

Can the West Stop Russia by Strangling its Economy?

There’s the Russia-Ukraine war that’s easy to follow in the news right now. We can watch Russian bombs falling on Ukraine, see Russian tanks smoking on the side of the road, hear from Ukrainian resistance fighters livestreaming their desperate defense. But there’s another theater to this war that’s harder to see, but may well decide the outcome: the economic war that West is waging on Russia. Europe and the United States initially responded with a limited set of sanctions but then expanded them ...

Mar 01, 20221 hr 35 min

A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

When we play Monopoly or basketball, we know we are playing a game. The stakes are low. The rules are silly. The point system is arbitrary. But what if life is full of games — ones with much higher stakes — that we don’t even realize we’re playing? According to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, games and gamified systems are everywhere in modern life. Social media applies the lure of a points-based scoring system to the complex act of communication. Fitness apps convert the joy and beauty of physic...

Feb 25, 20221 hr 13 min

Best Of: Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This.

We were promised, with the internet, a productivity revolution. We were told that we’d get more done, in less time, with less stress. Instead, we got always-on communication, the dissolution of the boundaries between work and home, the feeling of constantly being behind, lackluster productivity numbers, and, to be fair, reaction GIFs. What went wrong? Cal Newport is a computer scientist at Georgetown and the author of books trying to figure that out. At the center of his work is the idea that th...

Feb 22, 202254 min

A Critique of Government That Liberals Need to Hear

Government is a bureaucratic, slow-moving institution. It’s too easily captured by special interests. It’s often incapable of acting at the speed and scale our problems demand. And when it does act, it can make things worse. Look no further than the Food and Drug Administration’s slowness to approve rapid coronavirus tests or major cities’ inability to build new housing and public transit or Congress’s failure to pass basic voting rights legislation. This criticism is typically weaponized as an ...

Feb 18, 20221 hr 17 min

Relationships Are Hard. This Unusual Parenting Theory Can Help.

This is one of those episodes I feel I need to sell. Because on one level, it’s about an unusual theory of parenting known by the acronym RIE — for the nonprofit group Resources for Infant Educarers, which promotes its principles — that I’ve become interested in. But this isn’t a parenting podcast, and I know many of you don’t have young kids. The reason I’m doing this episode is that I think there’s something bigger here. RIE is centered on the idea that infants and toddlers are whole people wo...

Feb 15, 20221 hr

It's Not Your Fault You Can't Pay Attention. Here's Why.

“The sensation of being alive in the early 21st century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention — to focus — was cracking and breaking,” writes Johann Hari in his new book, “Stolen Focus.” Later he says, “It felt like our civilization had been covered with itching powder and we spent our time twitching and twerking our minds, unable to simply give attention to things that matter.” Same. Attention is the most precious resource we have — it’s the window through which we experience...

Feb 11, 20221 hr 6 min

What the Heck Is Going on With the U.S. Economy?

Should we be celebrating a Biden boom? Lamenting inflation and its consequences? Both? We know how to talk about booms, like the ’90s. We know how to talk about busts, like after the financial crisis. We know how to talk about stagnation. What we don’t know how to talk about is contradictory extremes coexisting together. But that’s the economy we have right now. And a lot rides on figuring out how to balance those extremes. Because if we solve inflation while killing the labor market, we’ll have...

Feb 08, 20221 hr

Let’s Talk About How Truly Bizarre Our Supreme Court Is

“Getting race wrong early has led courts to get everything else wrong since,” writes Jamal Greene. But he probably doesn’t mean what you think he means. Greene is a professor at Columbia Law School, and his book “How Rights Went Wrong” is filled with examples of just how bizarre American Supreme Court outcomes have become. An information processing company claims the right to sell its patients’ data to drug companies — it wins. A group of San Antonio parents whose children attend a school with n...

Feb 04, 20221 hr 7 min

Democrats Chase Shiny Objects. Here's How to Build Real Power.

There’s good reason to worry about the future of democracy, and little reason to believe Democrats have a viable plan for protecting it. They built their strategy around passing a major suite of voting reforms and protections through Congress, and a few weeks back, their whole agenda collapsed in the face of the filibuster. So what now? Is there a Plan B for protecting democracy? Yes. But it begins with realizing that there is no national solution in a country that administers elections at the s...

Feb 01, 20221 hr 5 min

Learning to Listen to the Voices Only You Hear

The world has gotten louder, even when we’re alone. A day spent in isolation can still mean a day buffeted by the voices on social media and the news, on podcasts, in emails and text messages. Objects have also gotten louder: through the advertisements that follow us around the web, the endless scroll of merchandise available on internet shopping sites and in the plentiful aisles of superstores. What happens when you really start listening to all these voices? What happens when you can’t stop he...

Jan 25, 202259 min
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