Marcus Samuelsson is the Michelin-starred chef behind Harlem’s The Red Rooster an award-winning cookbook author,the winner of the first season of Top Chef: Masters, ;nd the host of No Passport Required, a new food and travel show from Eater and PBS. Samuelsson’s story is remarkable. He was born in Ethiopia to a mother who carried him and his sister 75 miles on foot to a hospital when all three of them were suffering from tuberculosis. Samuelsson’s mother died, but he and his sister survived and ...
Aug 13, 2018•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 145
During the 2016 campaign, Zeynep Tufekci was watching videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. But then, she writes, she "noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay' videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” And it wasn’t just Trump videos. Watching Hillary Clinton rallies got her "arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the at...
Aug 06, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 144
The question of whether President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election has consumed Washington since the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller special counsel in March 2017. But there's another question worth considering: the financial corruption swirling around Trump’s businesses, and now his administration. In any other White House, this would be the ongoing, constant story — the site of endless investigations and inquiries. And it still might be. We know Mueller is lookin...
Aug 02, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 143
We talk a lot on this podcast about the epic levels of political polarization and how much of our ongoing breakdown they explain. But what was American politics like before it was polarized? And what got us from there to here? Sam Rosenfeld is a political scientist at Colgate University and author of the book The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. I’ve read a lot of books on polarization, and Rosenfeld’s is the best I’ve seen at painting a picture of what American politics looke...
Jul 30, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 142
America is changing. A majority of infants are, for the first time in US history, nonwhite — and the rest of the population is expected to follow suit in the coming decades. The number of religiously affiliated Americans is at a record low, and the share of foreign-born residents is at a historically high level. What happens to a country amid this kind of demographic change and strain? What does it do to our politics, to our identities, to our worldview? I’ve come to believe that you can’t under...
Jul 23, 2018•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 141
For decades, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has been a lonely voice in the economics profession warning that the academics were getting this one wrong. Trade is not an unalloyed good; “globalization would deepen societal divisions, exacerbate distributional problems, and undermine domestic social bargains,” Rodrik warned. But few listened. The tendency to emphasize trade’s benefits while ignoring its costs created a massive political backlash. “Economists would have had a greater—and much more positive—i...
Jul 19, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 140
Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington’s most respected and powerful conservative think tanks. He’s also launching a new podcast, The Arthur Brooks Show, with Vox Media on the art and practice of disagreement. I’ve known Brooks for a while. And I disagree with him on, well, a lot — at least when it comes to American politics. And yet, those disagreements haven’t ended a years-long conversation between us on everything from management to spiritualit...
Jul 16, 2018•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 139
During my book leave, I took a social media sabbatical. No reading Facebook. No reading Twitter. And you know what? It was great. I felt able to think more clearly, and listen more closely, than had been true in years. I’m not sure that was all because of social media — I was also hanging back from much of the news — but I’m certain the blackout helped. The experience of coming back, and reopening myself to the feeds and the tweets and the algorithms, has been profound. It feels like, suddenly, ...
Jul 09, 2018•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 138
What have we actually learned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, and his administration’s efforts to cover those ties up? What role did Russia really play in the 2016 election? And what are special counsel Robert Mueller’s possible endgames — what can he really do, and when might he do it? In January, I had Lawfare’s Susan Hennessey on the podcast to guide me through the Trump-Russia case, and it’s one of the most helpful — and popular — episodes we’ve done. Now she’s back, and given how much ...
Jul 05, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 137
If 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had tipped the other way, President Hillary Clinton would’ve named both Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy’s replacements. But they didn’t. And now Donald Trump, in less than two years, will fill as many Supreme Court seats as Barack Obama did in eight. When news of Kennedy’s retirement came down, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to: Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s exceptional legal analyst, and host of the podcast Amicus. I can’t say our conv...
Jul 02, 2018•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 136
There’s been a lot of talk about the coming of majority-minority America — the point, projected for roughly 2045, when there will no longer be any racial or ethnic group that makes up a majority of the United States. But there are plenty of places in America where this has already happened. Los Angeles is one of them. LA has about 4 million people, making it more populous than 23 states, and a demography in rapid flux. Non-Hispanic whites make up about 30 percent of the population, while Hispani...
Jun 25, 2018•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 135
Ellen Pao had a rough 2015. She lost her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most powerful venture capital firms. She also stepped down as CEO of Reddit after a tumultuous tenure in which she came under withering criticism for, among other things, shutting down online communities devoted to shaming fat people and posting upskirt photos. A few short years later, Pao’s 2015 looks prophetic. Her fight against Kleiner Perkins presag...
Jun 18, 2018•57 min•Ep. 134
What accounts for the way most of us eat? What’s the ideology, the theory, behind our diets? And what happens when you stop believing in it? Over the past decade, I’ve been on a fitful journey toward veganism. At least, that’s the way I normally say it. That’s the polite way to say it. The truth is I’ve been on a fitful journey away from the idea that unnecessarily inflicting suffering and death on literally billions of beings that can feel pain is moral. And it’s been one of the most disorienti...
Jun 11, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 133
On May 7, Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow published a story in the New Yorker detailing New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s alleged history of sexually and psychologically terrorizing the women he dated. Hours later, Schneiderman stepped down. Schneiderman was only Mayer’s most recent investigation. Over the course of her career, she’s exposed America’s torture programs, the Koch brothers’ takeover of Republican Party politics, the role the reclusive Mercer family had in funding Donald Tru...
Jun 04, 2018•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 132
The racial wealth gap is where past injustice compounds into present inequality. When I asked Ta-Nehisi Coates, on this show, what would prove to him that white supremacy was over in this country, he pointed to the closing of the racial wealth gap. The numbers here are startling. In 2016, the median white family in America had $171,000 in wealth. The median black family had just $17,400. Put differently, for every dollar in wealth the average white family has, the average black family has a dime...
May 28, 2018•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 131
Headlining any conversation with Tyler Cowen is difficult. This one, for instance, covers how to write a book, single-payer health care, political correctness, loneliness, the expanding Overton window, the tech backlash, technological innovation, the case for American optimism, how to change our cultural assumptions about race, and much more. But if there is a theme, it calls back to Cowen’s fascinating 2017 book, The Complacent Class. There, Cowen argued that contrary to the widespread belief t...
May 21, 2018•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 130
This is perhaps the most literal title I’ve given a conversation on this podcast. This is a discussion about how to expand your mind — how to expand the connections it makes, the experiences it’s open to, the sensory information it absorbs. And, more than that, this is a conversation about recognizing that our minds are narrower than we think, that there is a lot we’re filtering out and pruning away and outright ignoring. You know Michael Pollan’s work. He wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, perhaps t...
May 14, 2018•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 129
In a February 2017 column, David Brooks wrote about "the Fallows Question, which I unfurl at dinner parties: If you could move to the place on earth where history is most importantly being made right now, where would you go?” The Fallows question is based on the life and work of Jim and Deborah Fallows. Jim is a national correspondent at the Atlantic; Deborah is a writer and linguist. When Japan looked like the future, they moved there to watch it happen; when software was eating the world, they...
May 07, 2018•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 128
It’s time to talk about the damn emails — and the way the media covered them. Amy Chozick reported on Hillary Clinton for a decade. She was there as Clinton’s campaign fell short in the 2008 Democratic primaries. And as the New York Times’s lead reporter on the Clinton campaign in 2016, she was there as Clinton seemed certain to win in 2016 — and there on that night in November when she lost. Her new book, Chasing Hillary, is a memoir of these years and that reporting. In it, Chozick reflects on...
May 03, 2018•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 127
Yes, identity politics is breaking our country. But it’s not identity politics as we’re used to thinking about it. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason traces the construction of our partisan “mega-identities”: identities that fuse party affiliation to ideology, race, religion, gender, sexuality, geography, and more. These mega-identities didn’t exist 50 or even 30 years ago, but now that they’re here, they change the way we see each other, the way we engage in ...
Apr 30, 2018•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 126
Yascha Mounk’s new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, is perhaps the year’s scariest read. In it, Mounk argues that “liberal democracy, the unique mix of individual rights and popular rule that has long characterized most governments in North America and Western Europe, is coming apart at its seams. In its stead, we are seeing the rise of illiberal democracy, or democracy without rights, and undemocratic liberalism, or rights without democracy.” It’s...
Apr 23, 2018•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 125
Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of you even wrote in to say it had changed your career path and you were now reorienting towards humanitarian work and crisis response. Now, Vox Media, in partnership with the IRC, is launching Displaced, a podcast about the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises and the people whose lives they upe...
Apr 20, 2018•58 min•Ep. 124
“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In his new book, Lost Connections, Hari advances an argument both radical and obvious: Depression and anxiety are more than just chemical imbalances in the brain. They are the result of our social environments, our relationships, our political contexts — our lives, in short. Hari, who has struggled with ...
Apr 16, 2018•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 123
Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s book emerged from a viral op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2014, amid the backlash to the Ferguson, Missouri, protests. She writes: "The operative question seemed to be whether African Americans were justified in their rage, even if that rage manifested itself in the most destructive, nonsensical ways. Again and again, across Am...
Apr 12, 2018•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 122
There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray about a year ago. In that interview, the two argued that African-Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the impli...
Apr 09, 2018•2 hr 14 min•Ep. 121
It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartphone addiction. Wall Street has noticed: the company has lost almost $100 billion in market cap in recent weeks. Behind Facebook’s hard year is a collision between the company’s values, ambitions, business model, and mindboggling scale. Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, has long held that the comp...
Apr 02, 2018•52 min•Ep. 120
Mitch Landrieu is the white mayor of New Orleans, and he wants America to talk about race. Landrieu is the author of the new book, In The Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. The statues he refers to are Confederate war memorials, four of which he controversially took down in May of 2017. "These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said, in a spee...
Mar 26, 2018•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 119
Melinda Gates is the co-founder and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the United States. With more than $40 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation works on a dizzying array of issues, from eradicating polio to feeding the world to treating HIV to stopping climate change to reforming the US education system. Gates has also been working, in recent years, on increasing diversity in the technology industry. “If you [only] have products created by w...
Mar 19, 2018•56 min•Ep. 118
Want to know why we can’t make any progress on the guns debate? Because this isn’t a debate over policy. It’s a debate over identity. After last month’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I remembered a book Evan Osnos recommended on this show, called Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by Jennifer Carlson. Carlson, a sociologist, realized that her discipline had missed a major social transformation: that Americans weren’t just buying guns for hu...
Mar 12, 2018•55 min•Ep. 117
When you’re sitting in front of Rep. Joe Kennedy, it’s clear that you’re sitting in front of a Kennedy. The face, the jawline — it’s all uncannily familiar. But Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is rising in a changed Democratic Party. In the 1950s, the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote was about 7 percent. In 2012, it was about 44 percent — and that number is ticking upward. Kennedy is navigating it smoothly. Tapped to give the Democratic response to the State of the Union — and y...
Mar 05, 2018•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 116
