Join as you help us celebrate our 200th #WITHpod! In our recent Mailbag episode, we asked you all to send over clips sharing why you listen to WITHpod, where you listen and or what’s your favorite ep. We’re so overwhelmed with joy after hearing from so many of you across the country and world. Here’s a compilation our team put together for our special milestone. Cheers!
Since the U.S. withdrew its final troop from Afghanistan last summer, U.S. coverage of the country has also precipitously declined, even as the country faces a dire humanitarian emergency. So we thought it was time to do a gut check with one of the most prolific reporters on the topic. Award-winning journalist and author of “No Good Men Among The Living,” Anand Gopal, has covered global conflict and the Middle East for more than a decade. In 2021, his reporting took him to Helmand Province, the ...
Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated warfighters in history. From an early age, “The Fighting Quaker” played a pivotal role in America’s path to global power. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism and big business, declaring that he was a “racketeer for capitalism." Award-winning author Jonathan Katz writes about his life in a new book, “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire.” Katz joins to...
Time for our mailbag! Join as Chris and producers Tiffany Champion and Doni Holloway answer your questions and talk about what’s new on the pod. Chris also discusses which interview in 2021 stuck with him the most. And we share an exciting WITHpod milestone that we need your help to celebrate!
Late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “it’s hard not to have a big year at the Supreme Court.” With that in mind, we thought it would be good to do a gut check as 2022 promises to be one of the most important years in the Court’s history. We like doing new things here at WITHpod, so we’re excited to share our first crossover episode with the hosts of The Strict Scrutiny podcast, Chris’ wife Kate Shaw, and her co-hosts Melissa Murray, and Leah Litman. Between the possibility of Roe v. Wade ...
Congressman Jamie Raskin’s life was forever changed on Dec. 31, 2020 when his 25-year-old son Tommy died by suicide. Raskin writes about the loss of his beloved middle child in “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy,” a deeply personal memoir out January 2022. Nearly a week after losing his son, another tragedy occurred: the Jan. 6th insurrection at the Capitol. Shortly after, he writes, Speaker Pelosi “threw [him] a lifeline” when she asked him to lead the second impe...
It’s a special edition of our podcast: our first crossover episode with All In with Chris Hayes, which airs at 8pm weekdays on MSNBC. We’re sharing two full conversations, portions of which aired on All In, with two people at the forefront of one of the most important stories of the moment: the fight to save our democracy. Lucky for us, Bart Gellman, a correspondent for The Atlantic, and Sherrilyn Ifill, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, joined to walk through this very pivotal moment in our...
Fitness guru, writer and self-described “Swole Woman” Casey Johnston has written, “a lot of health content is focused on blowing smoke up you’re a** about jade eggs and vitamins and toxin-dispersing cellulite-curing silver-thread leggings.” But why? What makes lifting and working out seem so complicated? We’re constantly bombarded with get-fit-quick marketing perpetuated by “bros” who got fit overnight, but achieving real gains often just requires an incremental, consistent and methodical approa...
Non Fungible Tokens, known as NFTs, are the hottest craze in the cryptocurrency world. But what are they? With a multibillion-dollar market cap, why do people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases, millions for digitally stored avatars, pictures, art, GIFs, tokens (and the list goes on)? Kevin Roose covers NFTs, crypto, AI and social media as a columnist for The New York Times. In 2021, a PNG of his NYT column sold for over $500,000. He joins to discuss the value proposition of...
Statistics plays a role in virtually every facet of our lives. And throughout the pandemic, we’ve heard more stats than ever before, whether through headlines about Covid infection rates or vaccine effectiveness. But how are these figures calculated? How do we know when data is manipulated for nefarious reasons, and when it represents some true thing out there in the world? Lucky for us, Harvard Phd student Kareem Carr joined WITHpod for a heady conversation to break that and more down. Earlier ...
Hank Green has been on the leading edge of online content creation for more than a decade. He and his brother John created VidCon, the world’s largest video conference and have steadily built a wildly popular online community. You may know Hank as the host of science Crash Course videos, for his Vlogbrothers series, or his numerous other YouTube channels. We couldn’t think of a better person to help us understand where we’ve been, where we are, and where the future of online content is going. He...
Lawrence Bartley was just 17-years-old when he was charged and sentenced to 27 years to life following a movie theater shoot-out. Gunfire erupted after the group that he was with exchanged insults with another crew of moviegoers. According to the prosecutor, Lawrence’s bullet was the one that hit and killed an innocent 15-year-old boy. Filled with remorse and guilt, Lawrence used his time in prison to reckon with his past, while also finding his place in a rapidly changing society. His incarcera...
Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney has more than 100 credits as a producer, director and writer. Throughout his storied career, he’s been the driving force behind titles like “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Dirty Money,” a Netflix docuseries about corruption. Most recently, he ventured outside of the visual realm to direct Meltdown, a new series on Audible, about how we ended up with this version of America. The prolific director joined to talk about that, his creative process, why ...
Representative Ilhan Omar was just eight years old when her life turned upside down. After an armed compound attack, her family fled Mogadishu, and ultimately ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya. It was there that she experienced the reality that hundreds of millions of refugees worldwide endure. After an intense vetting and interview process, her family was eventually granted asylum in the U.S. and emigrated to Arlington, Virginia. In 2016, she was elected as a Minnesota House Representative, m...
The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigration to the United States. And while not necessarily appreciated at the time, it inaugurated a sea change in American society, setting the nation on the course towards multicultural democracy. Asian Americans now represent the fastest growing demographic group in the country, and yet the category itself feels insufficient for the sheer scope of experiences, backgrounds and cultures it encompasses. What ...
TV weathermen often show up as among the most trusted members of the media and almost no one on earth is as good at it or as well-known as Al Roker. Born to a working-class family in Queens, Roker found his way into TV and then meteorology and has become one of the more prominent voices in the country on the totalizing effects of climate change. In addition to being on the Today Show, he’s also the author of more than ten books, including his latest one, “You Look So Much Better in Person,” and ...
39-year-old India Walton found herself thrust into the national spotlight when she defeated four-term incumbent Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown in the June primary. It was an unusual win: Walton had never held elected office, and Brown isn’t letting go of his seat without a fight. Following the stunning upset, the current mayor launched a write-in campaign, and many of the state Democratic establishment have refused to endorse Walton, who describes herself as a democratic socialist. Recently, New York...
Life has been anything but easy for 20-year-old Dasani Coates. Named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyn’s gentrification, her story has been featured in five front pages of the New York Times. Together with her siblings, Dasani has had to persevere in an environment riddled with stark inequality, hunger, violence, drug addiction and homelessness. She’s not alone. There’s nearly 1.38 million homeless schoolchildren in the United States. About one in 12 live in New York City. We often ...
Since 2017, a high-tech form of colonization has been rapidly growing in Xinjiang, China. As many as 1.5 million Muslim Uyghurs have vanished into high-security camps and factories. The Chinese regime describes these sites as “vocational education and training centers” that are utilized to counter terrorism. But what actually goes on inside of these internment camps? That’s the subject of Darren Byler’s new book, “In The Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony.” In it, Byler draws on a decade of r...
Time for a fun one, America's favorite fighting Frenchman. You may have seen streets, parks, and subway stations that include the name Lafayette, but may not know much about the man other than the show-stopping performance of Daveed Diggs, who played Lafayette in Hamilton. The actual Marquis de Lafayette was born in France to immense wealth and privilege, allowing him to mingle in the most elite circles of the time. He shipped off to the US colonies to find his fortune and endeared himself to Ge...
Note: Some listeners may find the sensitive content discussed in this episode disturbing. Who is complicit in some of society’s dirtiest work? If you grill a steak, someone somewhere had to butcher the cow under brutal working conditions. Our twenty year war on terror has been fought much the same way, with a relatively small group of our fellow Americans doing difficult, morally fraught work that allows huge majorities of Americans to live in blissful ignorance. In “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs a...
In “The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage,” journalist Jonathan Cohn writes about the battle over healthcare and takes readers into the impetus for, history of, and current state of the Affordable Care Act. He joins to discuss what’s missing, inflection points, the role of bipartisanship, and what the ACA means for Americans trying to navigate an increasingly complex system.
In President Biden's vision of a greener future, half of all new cars sold in 2030 will be electric. As fossil fuel usage continues to take a toll on the environment, the need for cleaner transportation is more important now than ever. Bloomberg Auto & Tech reporter Dana Hull has spent more than a decade covering EVs. The California-based journalist remembers when skeptics believed that Tesla wouldn’t survive. Now, other major automakers are trying to play catch up. She joins to talk about progr...
Civil rights attorney and author Alexandra Brodsky has spent her entire career focusing closely on ways institutions can best address sexual harms. Her work is the subject of “Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash,” a book published in August 2021. She joins to talk about the importance of treating both victims and the accused fairly, the Biden administration’s response to Title IX, and what’s ahead as institutions seek to address sexua...
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman joins to discuss catalysts for the War on Terror, inflection points, recent developments in Kabul, and the role of U.S. hegemony in continued global combat. Ackerman also talks about his new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” which tells the story of how the weaponized bigotry that fueled the war on terror after 9/11 created the conditions for Trumpism and increased threats to American democracy.
Grammy award-winning musician Ani DiFranco joins for an enlightening conversation about her creative process, how she’s pivoted during the pandemic, and what’s enabled her to keep making music after so many years.
Note: This conversation was recorded on July 27th, 2021, before the latest news in Kabul. Recognized around the globe for her research on corruption, Sarah Chayes has seen her fair share of corruption at play. She also had frontline experience in Afghanistan during the events leading up to the country’s collapse. The anti-corruption activist witnessed incidents that ultimately contributed to the United States’ recent withdrawal. Chayes’ career has led her from reporting in Paris for NPR and cove...
Producer Tiffany Champion is back with a post-quarantine vibe check on the WITHpod inbox! In this backstage glimpse of the podcast, hear how Chris Hayes prepares for interviews, which recent episode got the biggest response from listeners, and find out about the exciting changes happening on the show!
Why is the housing market so hot right now? From the pandemic-induced influx of people working remotely to our collective obsession with cruising Zillow (it’s not just us, right?), Bloomberg Opinion columnist Justin Fox discusses why some parts of the country are seeing housing prices sky rocket.
