Vox's Worldly host Zack Beauchamp talks with author and New Statesman editor Emily Tamkin about the life and legacy of George Soros. How did a Hungarian billionaire philanthropist become the No. 1 boogeyman of right-wing nationalist movements on both sides of the Atlantic? They unpack the meaning of the smear campaign against him, and the inherent contradictions of a wealthy man trying to use his influence to make societies more democratic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....
Apr 01, 2021•59 min
Unexplainable is a new podcast from Vox about everything we don’t know. Each week, the team look at the most fascinating unanswered questions in science and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Learn more: vox.com/unexplainable Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unexplainable/id1554578197 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0PhoePNItwrXBnmAEZgYmt?si=Y3-2TFfDT8qHkfxMjrJL2g Learn more about your ad ...
Mar 27, 2021•28 min
Aarti Shahani, NPR journalist and host of WBEZ podcast Art of Power, talks with investigative journalist and author Alfredo Corchado about the US-Mexico border. Trump's actions created a new urgency for the political establishment to better understand the border, and Biden's challenges there continue to grow. Corchado, a former child farmworker and a Mexican-American with identities on both sides of the border wall, discusses the reality, politics, history, and future of the border. Learn more a...
Mar 25, 2021•57 min
Vox's Sigal Samuel talks with the author of Wintering, Katherine May, about the lessons we can learn during life's darkest seasons. They talk about our long collective pandemic winter, about how times of retreat can allow for personal and political transformation, and about how we might carry new wisdom with us as we emerge into spring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Vox's Sean Illing talks with the author of The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee, about the costs of racism in America — for everyone. They discuss what we all lose by buying into the zero-sum paradigm that progress for some has to come at the expense of others, and why the left needs to reframe the country's race problem and persuade the other side with a more compelling story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mar 11, 2021•55 min
Vox book critic Constance Grady talks with Vox gender identities reporter and novelist Anna North about Anna's new book Outlawed. They discuss creating an alternative history, reimagining the Western, and having fun with the usually fraught topics of gender and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Mar 04, 2021•51 min
The Undefeated's culture critic Soraya Nadia McDonald talks with Emmy Award-winning television writer and producer Cord Jefferson. They discuss the transition from journalism to TV, delving into Jefferson's move from Gawker to writing for hit shows like Succession, The Good Place, and Watchmen. They also touch on what needs to change about TV writer's rooms, and what our current era of streaming giants and tech barons means for news and pop culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...
Feb 25, 2021•54 min
Vox's Sean Illing talks about the the little-known history of psychedelics and spirituality in the Western world with Brian Muraresku, author of The Immortality Key. What role did psychedelic drugs play in the rise and spread of Christianity — and could they save the church today? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Feb 18, 2021•54 min
NPR journalist, memoirist, and host of the upcoming WBEZ podcast The Art of Power Aarti Shahani talks with Cecilia Muñoz, a former aide to Obama and part of Biden's transition team. It's a conversation about immigration policy reform and the challenges ahead for President Biden — and for a country wrestling with changing demographics, racism, and its history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Vox's Dylan Matthews talks with author and Revolutions podcaster Mike Duncan about what history can tell us about the insurrection at the US Capitol. Is America experiencing a true moment of revolution? So many republics throughout history have crumbled - could this one be next? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Feb 04, 2021•47 min
Vox's Sean Illing talks to Yale professor and author Jason Stanley about why American democracy provides such fertile soil for fascism, how Donald Trump demonstrated how easy it was for our country to flirt with a fascist future and what we can do about it. Correction 2/1: Professor Stanley suggested in this conversation that West Virginia declined to expand the Medicaid option in 2013. In fact, the state did expand the program and has gradually added enrollment since 2013. Learn more about your...
Jan 28, 2021•46 min
Ezra Klein is joined by Evan Osnos, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now to discuss our new president. President Biden has been in national politics for almost five decades. And so, people tend to understand the era of Joe Biden they encountered first — the centrist Senate dealmaker, or the overconfident foreign policy hand, or the meme-able vice president, or the grieving, grave father. But Biden, more so than most politicians, ch...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Vox columnist Anne Helen Petersen talks with sociologist Rachel Sherman about her research into the anxieties of wealthy people and their desire to be seen as "middle class." Sherman's work exposes the flawed stories we tell ourselves about who qualifies as middle class and who qualifies as "good" in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jan 21, 2021•50 min
Recode’s Peter Kafka speaks with New York Times’s Tech columnist Kevin Roose about big tech’s power and responsibility - and whether it is going to have accountability. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jan 18, 2021•30 min
New York magazine's Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi spent the past four years covering the Trump White House. In this inaugural episode of Vox Conversations, Nuzzi talks to guest host Sam Sanders, host of NPR's It’s Been a Minute, about the perils of anonymous sourcing, some unexpected job hazards (self-loathing), and why Trump didn’t ultimately create, but instead activated, the crowd of insurgents that breached the Capitol last week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices...
Jan 14, 2021•47 min
How do you feel right now? Excited to listen to your favorite podcast? Anxious about the state of American politics? Annoyed by my use of rhetorical questions? These questions seem pretty straightforward. But as my guest today, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, points out there is a lot more to emotion than meets the mind. Barrett is a superstar in her field. She’s a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospit...
Jan 07, 2021•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 396
You often hear that eating animals is natural. And it is. But not the way we do it. The industrial animal agriculture system is a technological marvel. It relies on engineering broiler chickens that grow almost seven times as quickly as they would naturally, and that could never survive in the wild. It relies on pumping a majority of all the antibiotics used in the United States into farm animals to stop the die-offs that overcrowding would otherwise cause. A list like this could go on endlessly...
Jan 04, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 395
After creating and running Parks and Recreation and writing for The Office, Michael Schur decided he wanted to create a sitcom about one of the most fundamental questions of human existence: What does it mean to be a good person? That’s how NBC's The Good Place was born. Soon into the show’s writing, Schur realized he was in way over his head. The question of human morality is one of the most complicated and hotly contested subjects of all time. He needed someone to help him out. So, he recruite...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 394
Michael Lewis needs little introduction. He’s the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, The Fifth Risk. He’s the host of the new podcast “Against the Rules.” He’s a master at making seemingly boring topics — baseball statistics, government bureaucrats, collateralized debt obligations — riveting. So how does he do it? What I wanted to do in this conversation was understand Lewis’s process. How does he choose his topics? How does he find his characters? How does he get ...
Dec 28, 2020•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 393
It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this conversation with Tracy K. Smith was that kind of episode. Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning for it t...
Dec 24, 2020•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 392
As strange as it is to write, this is my last podcast here at Vox. In January, I'll be starting at the New York Times as a columnist on the opinion page, doing a reported column on policy and launching an interview podcast. Meanwhile, Vox will be building something new and better atop this show's DNA in this feed. In this episode, I wanted to reflect on the almost five years I’ve spent doing this show. This project has changed my work, and my life, in unexpected ways. So here are the four lesson...
Dec 21, 2020•42 min•Ep. 391
This conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen in fall 2019 is one of my all-time favorites. Allen directs Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She’s a political theorist, a philosopher, the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project, and the co-chair of a two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which just this year released “Our Common Purpose,” a report with more than 30 recommendations on how to reform American d...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 390
On November 3, as the country fixated on the incoming presidential election results, voters in Oregon approved a seemingly innocuous ballot measure with revolutionary potential. Proposition 109, which passed with 56 percent of the vote (the same margin by which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the state), legalizes the use of psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, in supervised therapeutic settings. Multiple studies have found that use of psilocybin in a medical c...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 389
Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroscientist and primatologist. He’s the author of a slew of important books on human biology and behavior, including most recently Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. But it’s an older book he wrote that forms the basis for this conversation. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky works through how a stress response that evolved for fast, fight-or-flight situations on the savannah continuously wears on our bodies and brains in modern life. But ...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 388
It’s often said that Joe Biden has an instinct for finding the political center — that of his party, and that of the country. To understand how Biden has changed, and how he might govern, we need to understand how the ideological context of American politics is changing, and why. Felicia Wong is the President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank that has done some of the best work on the way the ideological firmament of politics is shifting. Wong believes that the set of ...
Dec 07, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 387
There are few conversations I’ve had on this show that are quite as relevant to our current political moment as this one with Princeton political scientist Frances Lee. Joe Biden will occupy the White House come January, but pending the results of two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, Democrats either won’t control the Senate at all or will face a 50-50 split. In either case, an important question looms large over the incoming administration: Will Republican senators negotiate with Biden in go...
Dec 03, 2020•59 min•Ep. 386
If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Best known for the Mars trilogy, Robinson is one of the greatest living science fiction writers. And in recent years, he's become the greatest writers of what people now call cli-fi — climate fiction. The name is a bit of a misnomer: Climate fiction is less fictitious speculation than an attempt to envision a near future that we are likely to inha...
Nov 30, 2020•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 385
Happy Thanksgiving! We will be back next week with brand new episodes, but on a day when so many of us are thinking about love and relationships I wanted to share an episode that has changed the way I think about those topics in a profound way. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California Berkeley. She’s published more than 100 journal articles and half a dozen books, including most recently The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Chil...
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 384
At the holidays, I wanted to share some of my favorite episodes of the show with you (we’ll be back next week with brand new episodes). My conversation with Vivek Murthy tops that list, and it has particular force this Thanksgiving, when so many are alone on a day when connection means so much. As US surgeon general from 2014 to 2017, Murthy visited communities across the United States to talk about issues like addiction, obesity, and mental illness. But he found that what Americans wanted to ta...
Nov 23, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 383
Donald Trump has built his presidency on top of racial dog whistles, xenophobic rhetoric, and anti-immigrant policies. A core belief among liberals was that this strategy would help Trump with whites but almost certainly hurt him with Latinos, and people of color more broadly. Then the opposite happened: In 2020, Trump gained considerable support among voters of color, particularly Latinos, relative to the 2016 election. What happened? Ian Haney López is a legal scholar at UC Berkeley and the au...
Nov 19, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 382
