I joined my Times Opinion colleagues Ross Douthat and Michelle Cottle to discuss the debate — and what Democrats might do next. Mentioned: “ The Biden and Trump Weaknesses That Don’t Get Enough Attention ” by Ross Douthat “ Trump’s Bold Vision for America: Higher Prices! ” with Matthew Yglesias on The Ezra Klein Show “ Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden ” on The Ezra Klein Show “ Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work ” with Elaine Kamarck on The Ezra Klein Show Gretchen Whit...
Jun 28, 2024•51 min
Donald Trump has made inflation a central part of his campaign message. At his rallies, he rails against “the Biden inflation tax” and “crooked Joe’s inflation nightmare,” and promises that in a second Trump term, “inflation will be in full retreat.” But if you look at Trump’s actual policies, that wouldn’t be the case at all. Trump has a bold, ambitious agenda to make prices much, much higher. He’s proposing a 10 percent tariff on imported goods, and a 60 percent tariff on products from China. ...
Jun 21, 2024•1 hr 32 min
The biggest divide in our politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans, or even left and right. It’s between people who follow politics closely, and those who pay almost no attention to it. If you’re in the former camp — and if you’re reading this, you probably are — the latter camp can seem inscrutable. These people hardly ever look at political news. They hate discussing politics. But they do care about issues and candidates, and they often vote. As the 2024 election takes shape, this bloc...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 10 min
On Tuesday I got back from an eight-day trip to Israel and the West Bank. I happened to be there on the day that Benny Gantz resigned from the war cabinet and called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to schedule new elections, breaking the unity government that Israel had had since shortly after Oct. 7. There is no viable left wing in Israel right now. There is a coalition that Netanyahu leads stretching from right to far right and a coalition that Gantz leads stretching from center to right....
Jun 14, 2024•55 min
There’s something weird happening with the economy. On a personal level, most Americans say they’re doing pretty well right now. And according to the data, that’s true. Wages have gone up faster than inflation. Unemployment is low, the stock market is generally up so far this year, and people are buying more stuff. And yet in surveys, people keep saying the economy is bad. A recent Harris poll for The Guardian found that around half of Americans think the S. & P. 500 is down this year, and that ...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 32 min
After Donald Trump was convicted last week in his hush-money trial, Republican leaders wasted no time in rallying behind him. There was no chance the Republican Party was going to replace Trump as their nominee at this point. Trump has essentially taken over the G.O.P.; his daughter-in-law is even co-chair of the Republican National Committee. How did the Republican Party get so weak that it could fall victim to a hostile takeover? Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld are the authors of “ The Holl...
Jun 04, 2024•1 hr 6 min
The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed. D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are goin...
May 31, 2024•1 hr 12 min
A.I.-generated art has flooded the internet, and a lot of it is derivative, even boring or offensive. But what could it look like for artists to collaborate with A.I. systems in making art that is actually generative, challenging, transcendent? Holly Herndon offered one answer with her 2019 album “ PROTO .” Along with Mathew Dryhurst and the programmer Jules LaPlace, she built an A.I. called “Spawn” trained on human voices that adds an uncanny yet oddly personal layer to the music. Beyond her mu...
May 24, 2024•52 min
“The Jetsons” premiered in 1962. And based on the internal math of the show, George Jetson, the dad, was born in 2022. He’d be a toddler right now. And we are so far away from the world that show imagined. There were a lot of future-trippers in the 1960s, and most of them would be pretty disappointed by how that future turned out. So what happened? Why didn’t we build that future? The answer, I think, lies in the 1970s. I’ve been spending a lot of time studying that decade in my work, trying to ...
May 21, 2024•1 hr 1 min
The international legal system was created to prevent the atrocities of World War II from happening again. The United Nations partitioned historic Palestine to create the states of Israel and Palestine, but also left Palestinians with decades of false promises. The war in Gaza — and countless other conflicts, including those in Syria, Yemen and Ethiopia — shows how little power the U.N. and international law have to protect civilians in wartime. So what is international law actually for? Aslı Ü....
May 17, 2024•58 min
Drug policy feels very unsettled right now. The war on drugs was a failure. But so far, the war on the war on drugs hasn’t entirely been a success, either. Take Oregon. In 2020, it became the first state in the nation to decriminalize hard drugs. It was a paradigm shift — treating drug-users as patients rather than criminals — and advocates hoped it would be a model for the nation. But then there was a surge in overdoses and public backlash over open-air drug use. And last month, Oregon’s govern...
May 10, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Ultimately, the Gaza war protests sweeping campuses are about influencing Israeli politics. The protesters want to use economic divestment, American pressure and policy, and a broad sense of international outrage to change the decisions being made by Israeli leaders. So I wanted to know what it’s like to watch these protests from Israel. What are Israelis seeing? What do they make of them? Ari Shavit is an Israeli journalist and the author of “ My Promised Land ,” the best book I’ve read about I...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 5 min
A decade ago, I was feeling pretty pessimistic about climate change. The politics of mitigating global warming just seemed impossible: asking people to make sacrifices, or countries to slow their development, and delay dreams of better, more prosperous lives. But the world today looks different. The costs of solar and wind power have plummeted. Same for electric batteries. And a new politics is starting to take hold: that maybe we can invest and invent and build our way out of this crisis. But s...
Apr 30, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 1
Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “ The Satanic Verses ,” made him the target of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who denounced the book as blasphemous and issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. Rushdie spent years trying to escape the shadow the fatwa cast on him, and for some time, he thought he succeeded. But in 2022, an assailant attacked him onstage at a speaking engagement in western New York and nearly killed him. “I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already wri...
Apr 26, 2024•1 hr
In our recent series on artificial intelligence, I kept returning to a thought: This technology might be able to churn out content faster than we can, but we still need a human mind to sift through the dross and figure out what’s good. In other words, A.I. is going to turn more of us into editors. But editing is a peculiar skill. It’s hard to test for, or teach, or even describe. But it’s the crucial step in the creative process that takes work that’s decent and can turn it into something great....
Apr 23, 2024•54 min
There is so much we need to build right now. The housing crunch has spread across the country; by one estimate, we’re a few million units short . And we also need a huge build-out of renewable energy infrastructure — at a scale some experts compare to the construction of the Interstate highway system. And yet, we’re not seeing anything close to the level of building that we need — even in the blue states and cities where housing tends to be more expensive and where politicians and voters purport...
Apr 16, 2024•49 min
Back in 2018, Dario Amodei worked at OpenAI. And looking at one of its first A.I. models, he wondered: What would happen as you fed an artificial intelligence more and more data? He and his colleagues decided to study it, and they found that the A.I. didn’t just get better with more data; it got better exponentially. The curve of the A.I.’s capabilities rose slowly at first and then shot up like a hockey stick. Amodei is now the chief executive of his own A.I. company, Anthropic, which recently ...
Apr 12, 2024•1 hr 32 min
The internet is in decay. Do a Google search, and there are so many websites now filled with slapdash content contorted just to rank highly in the algorithm. Facebook, YouTube, X and TikTok all used to feel more fun and surprising. And all these once-great media companies have been folding or shedding staff members, unable to find a business model that works. And into this weakened internet came the flood of A.I.-generated junk. There’s been a surge of spammy news sites filled with A.I.-generate...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 26 min
There’s something of a paradox that has defined my experience with artificial intelligence in this particular moment. It’s clear we’re witnessing the advent of a wildly powerful technology, one that could transform the economy and the way we think about art and creativity and the value of human work itself. At the same time, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job. So I wanted to understand what I’m missing and get some tips for how I could incorporate A.I. b...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Donald Trump can seem like a political anomaly. You sometimes hear people describe his connection with his base in quasi-mystical terms. But really, Trump is an example of an archetype — the right-wing populist showman — that recurs across time and place. There’s Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Boris Johnson in Britain, Javier Milei in Argentina. And there’s a long lineage of this type in the United States too. So why is there this consistent demand for this kind of political figure? And why does this...
Mar 29, 2024•1 hr 18 min
We’ll be back on Friday with a new episode. In the meantime, we wanted to share one of our favorite recent episodes from our sister podcast, “ Matter of Opinion .” Why does the economy look so good to economists but feel so bad to voters? The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman joins the hosts on “Matter of Opinion” to discuss why inflation, interest rates and wages aren’t in line with voters’ perception of the economy. Then, they debate with Paul how big of an influence the economy will be on...
Mar 26, 2024•36 min
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
