Although 12 candidates have entered the Republican presidential race so far, only Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is polling anywhere close to Donald Trump. What does DeSantis actually believe? How has he governed? And what case will he make to Republicans to vote for him over Trump? To answer those questions, I wanted to spend some time reading DeSantis in his own words. So I invited Carlos Lozada — the Pulitzer Prize-winning former book critic for The Washington Post, current Times Opinion column...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 6 min
“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships. G...
Jun 09, 2023•1 hr 10 min
My pitch for this episode is simple: Jennifer Pahlka has written one of the best policy books I’ve ever read. Pahlka served as deputy chief technology officer in the Obama White House, and she’s the founder and a former executive director of Code for America, a nonprofit that works to enhance government digital services. Over the course of her career, Pahlka has become obsessed with an area of policy that is too often ignored by policymakers: implementation. She was part of the effort to rescue ...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Some thoughts on how humans think, how economies grow and why the technologies we think will help so often hurt. Column: “ Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Mind ” by Ezra Klein Episode Recommendations: Maryanne Wolf on how reading shapes our brains Cal Newport on the problems with the way we work My A.M.A . on A.I. Gary Marcus on the limits of A.I. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Sh...
Jun 04, 2023•18 min
A lot about the world has changed since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The war itself has brought a number of surprises, from the tenacity of Ukraine’s resistance to the limits of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, competition between the United States and China has escalated into something resembling a new Cold War, India just surpassed China as the most populous country in the world and countries representing about two-thirds of the world’s population have chosen not to align themselve...
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 30 min
Today we’re bringing you an episode from the latest New York Times Opinion podcast, “ Matter of Opinion .” It’s a chat show, hosted by my colleagues Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen. Each week, they discuss an issue in the news, the culture or their own work and try to make sense of what is a weird and fascinating time to be alive. In this episode, the hosts take a tour of the 2024 Republican primary field to understand what it takes to survive in the present-day R...
May 30, 2023•33 min
Here’s a little experiment. Take a second to think about how you would fill in the blank in this sentence: “I am _____.” If you’re anything like me, the first descriptors that come to mind are personal attributes (like “curious” or “kind”) or identities (like “a journalist” or “a runner”). And if you answered that way, then I have some news for you: You are weird. I mean that in a very specific way. In social science, WEIRD is an acronym that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich an...
May 26, 2023•1 hr 12 min
The data is clear: Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide have spiked for American teenagers over the last decade. Last Friday’s episode with the psychologist Jean Twenge sifted through that data to uncover both the scale of the crisis and its possible causes. Today’s episode focuses on the experiences behind that data: the individuals who are struggling, and what we can do as friends, parents and a broader society to help them. Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist, the co-host o...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 9 min
We’re in the midst of a serious teen mental health crisis. The number of teenagers and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled between 2011 and 2021. The suicide rate for teenagers nearly doubled from 2007 to 2019, and tripled for 10- to 14-year- olds in particular. According to the C.D.C., nearly 25 percent of teenage girls made a suicide plan in 2021. What’s going on in the lives of teenagers that has produced such a startling uptick? Jean Twenge, a research psychologist and au...
May 19, 2023•1 hr 21 min
On Jan. 19, the United States officially hit its debt limit. In response, the Treasury Department began using accounting maneuvers known as “extraordinary measures” to continue paying the government’s obligations temporarily. But according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that money could run out as soon as June 1. If the United States hasn’t raised or suspended its borrowing cap, known as the debt ceiling, by then, America will default on its debt. But Republicans are currently refusing to r...
May 16, 2023•57 min
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the great living science fiction writers and one of the most astute observers of how planets look, feel and work. His Mars Trilogy imagined what it might be like for humans to settle on the red planet. His best-selling novel “ The Ministry for the Future ” is a masterful effort at envisioning what might happen to Earth in a future of unchecked climate change. Robinson has a rare command of both science and human nature, and his writing crystallizes how the two must...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 32 min
Here’s a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. This isn’t just habit hardening into dogma. It’s encoded into the way our brains change as we age. And it’s worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses play. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab; she’s also the author of over 100 ...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 1 min
On Monday, First Republic Bank folded before being sold by regulators to JPMorgan Chase. At the time, it was the 14th largest bank in the U.S. and it is the second-largest American bank by assets to ever collapse. The story of First Republic’s fall is similar to that of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature before it – the value of the bank’s assets began to plummet as the Fed raised interest rates to fight inflation, causing a crisis of confidence among investors and depositors. This is exactly the...
May 05, 2023•1 hr 26 min
In recent months, we’ve witnessed the rise of chatbots that can pass law and business school exams, artificial companions who’ve become best friends and lovers and music generators that produce remarkably humanlike songs . It’s hard to know how to process it all. But if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s this: The future — shaped by technologies like artificial intelligence — is going to be profoundly weird. It’s going to look, feel and function differently from the world we have grown to re...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 5 min
California is a land of contrasts. The state is home to staggering wealth, world-remaking tech companies, and some of the world’s boldest climate policy. It also has immense income inequality, arguably the worst housing crisis in the country, and the highest poverty rate in the nation when you factor in housing costs. The dysfunction of our national politics is often attributed to division and gridlock. But in California, Democrats are at the wheel. No Republican has held statewide office in ove...
Apr 28, 2023•1 hr 19 min
On Monday, Fox News abruptly announced that the network and its star primetime host, Tucker Carlson, “have agreed to part ways” after more than a decade. The announcement came less than a week after Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit that prominently featured Carlson’s show and its role in spreading misinformation about the 2020 election. The news is just the latest instantiation of a broader story: In recent years, the Republican Party has morphed from a coherent instituti...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 23 min
According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, 14.3 percent of Americans — nearly 50 million people — were living in poverty in December. The scale of poverty in the U.S. dwarfs that of most of our peer countries. And it raises the question: Why does so much poverty persist in one of the richest countries in the world? For the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, the answer is simple: Poverty is a policy choice. It persists because we allow it to. And we allow it ...
Apr 21, 2023•1 hr 17 min
It’s impossible to deny that the U.S. has a serious loneliness problem. One 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. That was a full two years before the Covid pandemic. And Americans appear to be getting lonelier over time: From 1990 to 2021, there was a 25 percentage point decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends. Young peo...
Apr 18, 2023•1 hr 15 min
America today faces a crisis of governance. In the face of numerous challenges — from climate change, to housing shortages, to pandemics — our institutions struggle to act quickly and decisively. Democratic processes often get captured by special interests or paralyzed by polarization. And, in response, public faith in government has reached a new low. For the political philosopher Danielle Allen, this crisis requires a complete transformation of our democratic institutions. “Representation as d...
Apr 14, 2023•1 hr 4 min
In October, the White House released a 70-plus-page document called the “ Blueprint for an A.I. Bill of Rights .” The document’s ambition was sweeping. It called for the right for individuals to “opt out” from automated systems in favor of human ones, the right to a clear explanation as to why a given A.I. system made the decision it did, and the right for the public to give input on how A.I. systems are developed and deployed. For the most part, the blueprint isn’t enforceable by law. But if it...
Apr 11, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Typically when we put out a call for audience questions, there’s no single topic that dominates. This time was different. The questions we received were overwhelmingly focused on artificial intelligence: Do A.I. systems pose an existential threat to humanity? Will robots take our jobs? How could these machines potentially make our lives — and the lives of our children — better? So I asked the show’s senior editor, Roge Karma, to join me to talk through them. We also discuss my mixed feelings abo...
Apr 07, 2023•1 hr 3 min
“We rarely think about chips, yet they’ve created the modern world,” writes the historian Chris Miller. He’s not exaggerating. Semiconductors don’t just power our phones and computers; they also enable our cars, planes and home appliances to function. They are essential to everything from developing advanced military equipment to training artificial intelligence systems. Chips are the foundation of modern economic prosperity, military strength and geopolitical power. But semiconductors are also ...
Apr 04, 2023•58 min
In last November's midterm elections, voters placed the Republican Party in charge of the House of Representatives. In 2024, it’s very possible that Republicans will take over the Senate as well and voters will elect Donald Trump — or someone like him — as president. But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots; a party founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second-highest number of seats i...
Mar 31, 2023•1 hr 31 min
Donald Trump’s legal troubles are mounting. A Manhattan grand jury investigation into the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels could soon make Trump the first former American president ever to be criminally indicted. But the Manhattan case isn’t the only source of legal risk for Trump. In Georgia, the Fulton County district attorney is considering criminal charges for Trump’s efforts to influence the 2020 election, and the Department of Justice is investigating his role in the Jan. 6 riots and t...
Mar 28, 2023•58 min
It’s been two weeks since the Silicon Valley Bank run, and we’re still feeling the ripple effects — not just at banks like Signature, First Republic and Credit Suisse, which are definitely taking a beating. Across the industry, too, banks are on edge, and regulators are rushing to keep the system together. Every financial crisis is different. And every financial crisis is the same. Assets that a lot of people thought were safe — mortgage-backed securities in the 2008 crisis and long-term Treasur...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 3 min
OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor, GPT-3.5, on a variety of tasks. GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled around in the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT, up from GPT-3.5’s 40th percentile. And on the advanced sommelier theory test, GPT-4 performed better than 77 percent of test-takers. (It’s predecessor hovered around 46 percent.) These are...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 34 min
This is something a bit different: Not an interview, but a commentary of my own. We’ve done a lot of shows on A.I. of late, and there are more to come. On Tuesday, GPT-4 was released, and its capabilities are stunning, and in some cases, chilling. More on that in Tuesday’s episode. But I wanted to take a moment to talk through my own views on A.I. and how I’ve arrived at them. I’ve come to believe that we’re in a potentially brief interregnum before the pace of change accelerates to a rate that ...
Mar 19, 2023•16 min
Last Friday, in the largest bank failure since 2008, Silicon Valley Bank failed. Banks fail all the time. But unless it’s a big or highly-connected bank, most of us don’t pay much attention. That’s because at the average bank, about half of all accounts are F.D.I.C.-insured. That means, if a typical bank fails, the F.D.I.C. will step in and pay every depositor back up to $250,000. But Silicon Valley Bank was not a typical bank. It seems that only around a single digit percentage of accounts were...
Mar 16, 2023•59 min
In just a few years, the narrative on China has almost completely flipped. The dominant sentiments in America had been awe, envy and a kind of fear. China’s growth seemed relentless. Its manufacturing prowess was lapping ours. It weathered the pandemic without the mass death seen in the West. It could build housing and transit and infrastructure at a speed we could no longer even imagine. And then, as 2022 ticked over to 2023, things changed. China’s real estate bubble popped. Its Zero Covid pol...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 20 min
In 1972, when Congress passed Title IX to tackle gender equity in education, men were 13 percentage points more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than women; today women are 15 points more likely to do so than men. The median real hourly wage for working men is lower today than it was in the 1970s. And men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” from overdose or suicide. These are just a sample of the array of dizzying statistics that suffuse Richard Reeves’s book “ Of Boys and...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 58 min
