Some Americans who grew up identifying with Roseanne have found themselves alienated by Roseanne Barr’s outspoken devotion to President Trump. Many of Kanye West’s fans revolted after he tweeted out an image of himself wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. Pop culture will probably always mirror the divides playing out in society. But when social divides are more massive than they’ve been in generations, does all our entertainment become a litmus test for our political beliefs? Links - “Bill...
May 04, 2018•57 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast “We are a president-obsessed nation, so much so that we undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy,” writes John Dickerson in his May cover story in The Atlantic. “No one man—or woman—can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens.” Have we heaped so much upon the president that the job has become impossible? Is Trump testing the office in valuable ways? And if the presidency is broken, how do we fix it? Links - "The Hardest Job in the World" (John Di...
Apr 27, 2018•52 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Long the crossroads of civilizations, Syria has now spent seven years as the proxy warzone of great powers. With over half a million dead and millions more displaced, the conflict is now “arguably the world’s largest humanitarian disaster since World War II,” writes Andrew Tabler in The Atlantic. “The Syrian Civil War now threatens to morph into the Syria War—a regional conflagration which seems likely to burn for a generation. And civilians are cursed to live it, and die in it, every day.” How ...
Apr 20, 2018•50 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast In her new book Futureface, Alex Wagner writes that “immigration raises into relief some of our most basic existential questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? And in that way, it’s inextricably tied to an exploration of American identity.” In the book, Alex explores her own American identity – daughter of a Burmese immigrant mother and a small-town Irish Catholic father – and asks how true the stories we grow up with really are. Along with co-hosts Matt and Jeff, Alex is joined by The Atlantic’s...
Apr 13, 2018•52 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast As Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer recently wrote, Facebook “is currently embroiled in the worst crisis of trust in its 14-year history.” This week, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Congress for the first time. It’s not clear whether Congress will seek to exert more regulatory control over the company, even after revelations that as many as 87 million people unwittingly had their Facebook data given to the political firm Cambridge Analytica, which may have used so...
Apr 13, 2018•44 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast “Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far that gamble has paid off,” writes David Frum in his new book Trumpocracy. Along with The Atlantic's Global Editor Kathy Gilsinan, David joins to explain how President Trump has undermined our most important institutions. What does democracy around the world look like when the leader of the free world is less interested in it himself? Links - Trumpocracy (David Frum, 2018) - “Saudi ...
Apr 06, 2018•50 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast In his last speech, known to history as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. began by remarking on the introduction he’d been given by his friend, Ralph Abernathy. “As I listened to ... his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself,” King said modestly, “I wondered who he was talking about.” The facsimile of King that America would fashion after his assassination—saintly pacifist, stranger to controversy, beloved by all—might have provoked something well ...
Mar 30, 2018•56 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast The family is where the forces that are driving Americans farther apart—political polarization, generational divides, class stratification, Facebook fights—literally hit home. Economic, ideological, and technological shifts pose uncertain consequences for what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the basic social unit of American life.” And not even a burgeoning industry of experts can tell parents what to do. “Parents are now more anxious than ever about their children,” writes Paula Fass in The Atl...
Mar 23, 2018•48 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast “Politicians from both parties publicly worship the solemn dignity of entrepreneurship and small businesses. But by the numbers, America has become the land of the big and the home of the consolidated,” writes The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their institutions, the nation seems to now look to corporations for positive action. Can big business be a force for good or only a force for profit? Does their very size pose a threat? If corporations can be peopl...
Mar 16, 2018•47 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Discarding the limits on a leader's time in office is a classic autocrat's move. So when Xi Jinping began to clear a path for an indefinite term as China's president, he dimmed many once-bright hopes that he would speed the nation's path toward a new era of openness and reform. For James Fallows,The Atlantic's national correspondent, it was a sad vindication of a warning he issued two years ago in the magazine, of “China’s Great Leap Backward.” As the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Ira...
Mar 09, 2018•50 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast Moviegoers across America are filling theaters to see, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes it, “a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.” Wakanda, the setting of Marvel’s blockbuster film Black Panther, is suddenly everywhere, which means people the world over are seeing something that’s never had this widespread an audience: Afrofuturism. “Blockbusters rarely challenge consensus, and Disney blockbusters even less so,” Van...
Mar 02, 2018•53 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast After Rick Magnis, a Texas judge, reviewed the evidence in Benjamine Spencer’s case, he recommended a new trial for Spencer “on the grounds of actual innocence.” But Texas’s highest criminal court took the rare step of rejecting the judge’s ruling. Why? Because Spencer did not meet the state’s “Herculean” standard of unassailable proof, such as DNA, that would remove all doubts of his innocence. According to the judge who wrote the opinion denying Spencer a new trial, this standard has kept inno...
Feb 23, 2018•58 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast In part one of our three-part series "No Way Out," Barbara Bradley Hagerty told the story of how Benjamine Spencer was convicted for the murder of Jeffrey Young, and how much of the evidence that led to that conviction has fallen apart under scrutiny. But if Spencer did not kill him, who else could have? And if the evidence does point to another assailant, is that enough to free Spencer? In this episode, part two of three, Barbara explores an alternate theory of the crime. She talks with two fri...
Feb 20, 2018•26 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast In 1987, Jeffrey Young was robbed and killed, and his body was left on a street in the poor neighborhood of West Dallas. Benjamine Spencer was tried and convicted for the attack. Spencer was black, 22 years old, and recently married. Young was 33 and white, and his father was a senior executive for Ross Perot, one of the most prominent businessmen in Dallas. No physical evidence connected Spencer to the murder. Instead, he was convicted based on the testimony of three eyewitnesses and a jailhous...
Feb 16, 2018•55 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast Conor Friedersdorf recently argued in The Atlantic that in this moment, when the truth is bitterly contested, fiction presents us an opportunity. It allows us to step into another person’s perspective and talk about gray areas without the problems of detailing an actual person’s private moments. But does blurring the lines between truth and fiction undermine the messy complexities of the real world? David Sims and Megan Garber join to discuss the spate of recent pop culture that aims to recast r...
Feb 09, 2018•51 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast “Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there," Franklin Foer writes in his cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic. "But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?” Before Paul Manafort led the campaign to position Donald Trump as the ultimate Washington outsider, Manafort had built a career on being the c...
Feb 02, 2018•54 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast Once again, immigration is at the top of America's legislative agenda, as it has been, seemingly every generation, for much of the nation's history. But while many recent discussions of immigration have focused on unauthorized immigrants, some of the most contentious aspects of the current debate concern legal immigration: Who should the U.S. allow to be an American? Priscilla Alvarez, an editor on The Atlantic's politics and policy team, joins hosts Matt and Alex to discuss the debate within Co...
Jan 26, 2018•47 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast The 'retail apocalypse' is upon us, they say. In the United States, 2017 saw emptied malls, shuttered department stores, and once-iconic brands falling into bankruptcy. Yet retail spending continues to grow, in strange new directions that could have significant effects. What will shopping look like in the future? How will these changes reverberate throughout the country? Atlantic editor Gillian White joins our hosts to discuss. If you listen to Radio Atlantic, we value your feedback. Please help...
Jan 19, 2018•42 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast As the anniversary of his inauguration nears, a new book filled with salacious claims about the Trump administration has become a bestseller. Faced with renewed questions about his mental and temperamental fitness for the office, President Trump has pushed back, declaring himself a “very stable genius” and attacking his critics. But no new claims or revelations, James Fallows wrote recently for The Atlantic, have been more telling than Trump's public behavior. If the stories presented in a book ...
Jan 12, 2018•49 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast As 2018 begins, tensions and tumult in America are high. But before the end of 1968, Conor Friedersdorf reminded us in The Atlantic, "Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated; U.S. troops would suffer their deadliest year yet in Vietnam—and massacre scores of civilians at My Lai; Richard Nixon would be elected president; the Khmer Rouge would form in Cambodia; humans would orbit the moon; Olympic medal winners in Mexico City would raise their fists in a black power salu...
Jan 05, 2018•41 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Every year is impossible to synthesize. Yet 2017 was not just another year. To help us wrangle the chaotic, extraordinary events of the last 12 months into some sort of shape, we posed a question to journalists from across The Atlantic's staff, and to our listeners: What were the ideas of 2017? In this episode, Jeff and Matt discuss the many different responses to that question we collected, and share their own ideas of the year. Share yours: 202-266-7600. And here's to the year ahead. If you li...
Dec 22, 2017•51 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Vladimir Putin just announced, to the surprise of no one, that he will run for reelection as President of Russia. In her January/February 2018 Atlantic cover story, Julia Ioffe writes that Americans misunderstand the man ruling the former Soviet empire: he’s not a master tactician playing three-dimensional chess, he’s a gambler who won big. "Over the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States," Julia writes. "But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia portr...
Dec 15, 2017•53 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast That Pence is the vice president of the United States is "a loaves-and-fishes miracle," writes McKay Coppins in the latest issue of The Atlantic. It's remarkable enough that "an embattled small-state governor with underwater approval ratings, dismal reelection prospects, and a national reputation in tatters" would be chosen as a presidential running mate at all. But unlikelier still is the fact that Pence, known for his devotion to Christ, would become the most prominent character witness for Pr...
Dec 08, 2017•54 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast In December 2007, the U.S. marked the beginning of its longest recession since World War II. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency born in the ashes of the nation's economic downturn, is under new leadership that promises big changes. Meanwhile, a tax plan speeding through Congress could have far-reaching effects on the economy, well beyond taxes. On paper, the U.S. economy looks robust. But for whom, and for how long? This week, Annie Lowrey and Alana Semuels join our hosts to...
Dec 01, 2017•47 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast For generations, Hollywood has defined what masculinity means in the U.S., with iconic screen figures such as John Wayne. But Wayne's stoic, taciturn image was the product of a complicated relationship with the director John Ford, one that offers different lessons about masculinity and its constraints. As scandals about men and their behavior fill the news, we discuss the legacy of John Wayne and other male screen icons. Our cohosts are joined by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber and Stephen Me...
Nov 24, 2017•50 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Anglin spent his formative years flirting with hippie progressivism, then tried his hand at becoming a tribal hunter-gatherer. But he only achieved notoriety after he founded the Daily Stormer, the world's biggest website for neo-Nazis. Anglin and his mob of followers have terrorized people around the world, and their influence has been cited by the perpetrators of fatal violence. What lessons should be learned from Anglin's radicalization? And what is society's best response to his ideas...
Nov 17, 2017•33 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a year after Donald Trump's upset election victory. Before and after the 2016 election, President Trump referred to journalists as enemies to himself and to the American people. But his victory wasn’t just a success in vilifying the media, it was a success in manipulating it. Trump was a media figure, skilled at drawing attention. And news organizations were unused to being so squarely part of the story. What lessons have journalists taken from the 2016 campaign and President Trump’s electi...
Nov 10, 2017•38 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Since the 2016 election heightened America's deep political divides, the mantle of patriotism has become fodder for a bitter tug-of-war. Is it patriotic to leak a presidential secret? To voice dissent during a national rite? Should a general running the White House be deferred to or defied? In this episode, Atlantic journalists Krishnadev Calamur and Sigal Samuel talk with Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father whose stirring speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention touched off a famous feud ...
Nov 03, 2017•58 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast Allegations of sexual harassment (and more) by powerful men in numerous industries have been leading news reports across America. On-the-record accounts of disturbing behavior are proliferating. Several leaders of prominent companies have been forced out of their positions. Does this represent a lasting shift in attitudes toward scandalous conduct, or will the public's interest in these matters subside? Is this a tipping point, in other words, or a flash point? The journalism of Jodi Kantor, Kat...
Oct 27, 2017•49 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast "Infidelity," Esther Perel writes in the October issue of The Atlantic, "happens in bad marriages and in good marriages. It happens even in open relationships where extramarital sex is carefully negotiated beforehand. The freedom to leave or divorce has not made cheating obsolete." Adultery is as ancient as marriage, and as contemporary relationships have evolved, Perel writes, the causes and consequences of infidelity have much to teach us about the nature of commitment. In this conversation, P...
Oct 20, 2017•50 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 
