American policy is uniquely hostile to families. Other wealthy countries guarantee paid parental leave and sick days and heavily subsidize early childhood care — to the tune of about $14,000 per year per child, on average. (The United States, by contrast, spends around $500 per child per year .) So it’s no wonder our birthrate has been in decline, with many people saying they’re having fewer children than they would like. Yet if you look closer at those other wealthy countries, that story doesn’...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 6 min
For a long time, the story about the world’s population was that it was growing too quickly. There were going to be too many humans, not enough resources, and that spelled disaster. But now the script has flipped. Fertility rates have declined dramatically, from about five children per woman 60 years ago to just over two today. About two-thirds of us now live in a country or area where fertility rates are below replacement level. And that has set off a new round of alarm, especially in certain q...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min
President Biden gave a raucous State of the Union speech last Thursday, offering his pitch for why he should be president for a second term. It’s the clearest picture we have yet of Biden’s campaign message for 2024. But while he listed off all kinds of proposals, it’s not as easy to parse what a second Biden term might actually look like. So I sat down with my editor Aaron Retica, who had a lot of questions for me about the speech itself and what Biden would be likely to accomplish if he got an...
Mar 12, 2024•1 hr 1 min
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it scrambled the landscape of abortion access in America, including in ways that one might not entirely expect. Many conservative states made the procedure essentially illegal — that part was predictable. But there’s also been this striking backlash in blue states, with many of them making historic efforts to expand abortion access, for both their residents and for women living in abortion-restricted states. And this has created all kinds of new bat...
Mar 08, 2024•58 min
Marilynne Robinson is one of the great living novelists. She has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal, and Barack Obama took time out of his presidency to interview her at length. Her fiction is suffused with a sense of holiness: Mundane images like laundry drying on a line seem to be illuminated by a divine force. Whether she’s telling the story of a pastor confronting his mortality in “Gilead” or two sisters coming of age in small-town Idaho in “Housekeeping,” her novels wrestl...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Joe Biden’s presidency has been dominated by two foreign policy crises: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The funding the United States has provided in those wars — billions to both Ukraine and Israel — has drawn backlash from both the right and the left. And now, as the conflicts move into new stages with no clear end game, Biden’s policies are increasingly drawing dissent from the center. Richard Haass is an icon of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. He served as the president of the Council o...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 3 min
We received thousands of questions in response to last week’s audio essay arguing that Democrats should consider choosing a candidate at August’s D.N.C. convention. Among them: Is there any chance Joe Biden would actually step down? Would an open convention be undemocratic? Is there another candidate who can bridge the progressive and moderate divide in the party? Doesn’t polling show other candidates losing to Donald Trump by even larger margins? Would a convention process leave Democrats enoug...
Feb 23, 2024•51 min
Last week on the show, I argued that the Democrats should pick their nominee at the Democratic National Convention in August. It’s an idea that sounds novel but is really old-fashioned. This is how most presidential nominees have been picked in American history. All the machinery to do it is still there; we just stopped using it. But Democrats may need a Plan B this year. And the first step is recognizing they have one. Elaine Kamarck literally wrote the book on how we choose presidential candid...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Biden is faltering and Democrats have no plan B. There is another path to winning in 2024 — and I think they should take it. But it would require them to embrace an old-fashioned approach to winning a campaign. Mentioned: The Lincoln Miracle by Edward Achorn If you have a question for the AMA, you can call 212-556-7300 and leave a voice message or email [email protected] with the subject line, “2024 AMA." You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show”...
Feb 16, 2024•25 min
For years, Agnes Callard has been on a mission to take ethical philosophy out of the ivory tower. She examines everyday human experiences — jockeying for status, navigating jealousy, marriage — with dazzling detail, publishing regularly in mainstream publications. And she tries to live by her philosophy, too, even if it violates social conventions, as many discovered when The New Yorker published a provocative profile of Callard last year. We recorded this conversation in May 2021, before the Ne...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 23 min
“If only we had a partner for peace.” That’s been the refrain in the Israel-Palestinian conflict for as long as I’ve followed it. But the truth is you don’t need just a partner — you need two partners able to deliver at the same time. So you could see it as a tragedy of history that Salam Fayyad joined the Palestinian Authority in 2002, at the height of the second intifada, just as Israeli society shifted hard to the right. A Western-educated economist, Fayyad is a technocrat at heart. And as th...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Around 40 percent of people who marry eventually get a divorce. Almost half of children are born to unmarried women. The number of close friends Americans report having has been on a steep decline since the 1990s, especially among men. Millions of us are growing old alone. We are living out a radical experiment in how we live, love, parent and age — and for many, it’s failing. That’s partial context, I think, for the recent burst of interest and media coverage of polyamory. People want more love...
Feb 06, 2024•59 min
Political analysts used to say that the Democratic Party was riding a demographic wave that would lead to an era of dominance. But that “coalition of the ascendant” never quite jelled. The party did benefit from a rise in nonwhite voters and college-educated professionals, but it has also shed voters without a college degree. All this has made the Democrats’ political math a lot more precarious. And it also poses a kind of spiritual problem for Democrats who see themselves as the party of the wo...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 9 min
If you’re a Democrat, how worried should you be right now? It’s strangely hard to answer that question. On the one hand, polls suggest Democrats should be very worried. President Biden looks weaker than he did as a candidate in 2020, and in matchups with Donald Trump, the election looks like a coin flip. On the other hand, Democrats staved off an expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. Biden has a strong record to run on, and Trump has a lot more baggage than he did in 2020. So, in an e...
Jan 25, 2024•1 hr 9 min
It’s been just over 100 days since Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the costs of the war are staggering. In polling from late fall, 64 percent of Gazans reported that a family member had been killed or injured. Nearly two million Gazans — almost the entire population — have been displaced from their homes, and analysis of satellite imagery reveals that about half the buildings in the Gaza Strip have probably been destroyed or damaged. Israel believes that more than 100 hostages are being held capti...
Jan 19, 2024•1 hr 8 min
The fact that Donald Trump is the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination in 2024 has created a chasm in our politics. In the past, Democrats and Republicans at least understood why members of the other party liked their chosen candidates. Most conservatives weren’t confused why liberals liked Barack Obama, and vice versa for George W. Bush. But for a lot of Democrats, it feels impossible to imagine why anyone would cast a vote for Trump. And as a result, the two parties don’t just feel hostile t...
Jan 16, 2024•48 min
There’s this incredible dissonance at the center of our politics right now. On the one hand, all the polling suggests that Donald Trump is about to win Iowa Republican caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. He seems overwhelmingly likely to be his party’s nominee, and so possibly our next president. On the other hand, he could be constitutionally disqualified from taking office. Colorado and Maine concluded as much, and tossed him off their ballots. And now the Supreme Court is poised to take o...
Jan 12, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Being on the internet just doesn’t feel as fun anymore. As more of our digital life is driven by algorithms, it’s become a lot easier to find movies or TV shows or music that fits our preferences pretty well. But it feels harder to find things that are strange and surprising — the kinds of culture that help you, as an individual, develop your own sense of taste. This can be a fuzzy thing to talk about. But Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written a whole book on it, the forthco...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 2 min
I’m convinced that attention is the most important human faculty. Your life, after all, is just the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to. And we lament our attention issues all the time: how distracted we are, how drained we feel, how hard it is to stay focused or present. And yet, while there’s no shortage of advice on how to improve our sleep hygiene, or spending, or physical fitness, there’s hardly any good information about how to build and replenish our capacity for paying atten...
Jan 05, 2024•57 min
“We rarely think about chips, yet they’ve created the modern world,” writes the historian Chris Miller. He’s not exaggerating. Semiconductors power everything from our phones and computers to cars, planes, advanced military equipment, and A.I. systems. Chips are the foundation of modern economic prosperity, military strength and geopolitical power. This conversation with Chris Miller, author of “ Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, ” was recorded back in April. But we w...
Dec 26, 2023•58 min
The holidays are one of the most social times of the year, filled with parties and family get-togethers. Many of us see friends and loved ones who we barely — or never — saw all year. Maybe we resolve to stay in better touch in the new year. But then somehow, once again, life gets in the way. This is not an accident. More and more people are living lives that feel lonelier and more socially isolated than they want them to be. And that’s largely because of social structures we’ve chosen — witting...
Dec 22, 2023•1 hr 15 min
It’s become something of a tradition on “The Ezra Klein Show” to end the year with an “Ask Me Anything” episode. So as 2023 comes to a close, I sat down with our new senior editor, Claire Gordon, to answer listeners’ questions about everything from the Israel-Hamas war to my thoughts on parenting. We discuss whether the war in Gaza has affected my relationships with family members and friends; what I think about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; whether the Democrats should have vo...
Dec 19, 2023•56 min
India is known as a country of paradoxes, and a new one has recently emerged. At the same time that the country is poised to become a major global player — with a booming economy and a population that recently surpassed China’s — its democracy is showing signs of decay. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his administration have silenced critics and independent institutions. India’s social media discourse has turned increasingly right wing and hostile to Muslims. And Canada and the United States ha...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Before Oct. 7, Israel appeared to many to be sliding into a “one-state reality,” where it had functional control over Gaza and the West Bank, but the Palestinians who lived there were denied full rights. In 2021, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel published a report warning that this was a catastrophe — for Israel’s security, its democratic values, its international standing, and its very soul. And they argued that there was another way, that even wit...
Dec 08, 2023•59 min
Here are two thoughts I believe need to be held at once: Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 was heinous, murderous and unforgivable, and that makes it more, not less, important to try to understand what Hamas is, how it sees itself and how it presents itself to Palestinians. Tareq Baconi is the author of “ Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance ,” one of the best books on Hamas’s rise and recent history. He’s done extensive work interviewing members of Hamas and mapping the o...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several days later. But that drama isn’t actually the most important thing going on in the A.I. world, which hasn’t slowed down over the past year, even as people are still discovering ChatGPT for the first time and reckoning with all of its implication...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 10 min
Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American consumed about 34 gigabytes of information a day. Undoubtedly, that number would be even higher today. But what are we actually getting from this huge influx of information? How is it affecting our memo...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 10 min
It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is cruel fantasy. But it wasn’t always. Peace efforts in the Middle East have been tried over and over again. It is not a history without breakthroughs. There was a time when a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt would have been unthinkable. But that agreement lives alongside ...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 10 min
This is a conversation about the relationship between Jewishness and the Jewish State. About believing some aspects of Israel have become indefensible and also believing that Israel itself must be defended. About what it means when a religion built on the lessons of exile creates a state that inflicts exile on others. About the ugly, recurrent reality of antisemitism. You know, the easy stuff. In these past few months, I’ve been moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous, which have managed to h...
Nov 17, 2023•57 min
A New York Times and Siena College poll released Nov. 5 showed Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six key swing states, with a notable jump in support among nonwhite and young voters. In response, Democrats freaked out. But then two days later, voters across the country actually went to the polls, and Democrats and Democratic-associated policy did pretty well. In Kentucky, Andy Beshear held the governorship. Democrats took back the House of Delegates in Virginia. And Ohio voted for an...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 5 min
