It’s not an exaggeration to say that “clock time” runs our lives. From the moment our alarms go off in the morning, the clock reigns supreme: our meetings, our appointments, even our social plans are often timed down to the minute. We even measure the quality of our lives with reference to time, often lamenting that time seems to “fly by” when we’re having fun and “drags on” when we’re bored or stagnant. We rarely stop to think about time, but that’s precisely because there are few forces more o...
Dec 13, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast “From the U.S. Federal Reserve’s initial misjudgment that inflation would be ‘transitory’ to the current consensus that a probable U.S. recession will be ‘short and shallow,’ there has been a strong tendency to see economic challenges as both temporary and quickly reversible,” writes the economist Mohamed El-Erian. “But rather than one more turn of the economic wheel, the world may be experiencing major structural and secular changes that will outlast the current business cycle.” There are few p...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since 2021, Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, and they’ve used that power to pass consequential legislation, from the American Rescue Plan to the Inflation Reduction Act. That state of affairs was exceptional: In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, the U.S. House, Senate and presidency were only under unified party control for 14 years. Divided government has become the norm in American politics. And since Republicans won back the House in November, it is about ...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Republicans already hold tremendous power in America. They have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices. They have more state trifectas (control of both legislative houses, as well as the governor’s seat) than Democrats. And come 2023, they will also control the House of Representatives. But there’s a hollowness at the core of the modern G.O.P. It’s hard to identify any clear party leader, coherent policy agenda or concerted electoral strategy. The party didn’t bother putting fo...
Dec 02, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast About 50 years ago, beef cost more than $7 a pound in today’s dollars. Today, despite high inflation, beef is down to about $4.80 a pound, and chicken is just around $1.80 a pound. But those low prices hide the true costs of the meat we consume — costs that the meat and poultry industries have quietly offloaded onto not only the animals we consume but us humans, too. Animal agriculture is responsible for at least 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, with some estimates as high as 28 p...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American consumed about 34 gigabytes of information a day . Undoubtedly, that number would be even higher today. But what are we actually getting from this huge influx of information? How is it affecting our mem...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast The fight against climate change is at a crossroads. This past year, the climate movement in the United States achieved significant success. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act represents the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U.S. history. More than a dozen states have taken some form of climate action in 2022 alone. Earlier this year, California — which, if it were a country, would have the fifth largest economy in the world — approved a record $54 billion in climate s...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast The results of Tuesday’s midterm elections are still trickling in, but the broader story is clear: The red wave that many anticipated never materialized. Republicans gained 54 House seats against Bill Clinton in 1994 and 63 seats against Barack Obama in 2010. It doesn’t look as though the G.O.P. will secure anything close to that in 2022, and Democrats could retain their narrow control of the Senate — all against the backdrop of raging inflation and low approval ratings for President Biden. Why ...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast George Saunders is regarded as one of our greatest living fiction writers. He won the Booker Prize in 2017 for his novel “ Lincoln in the Bardo ” and has published numerous short-story collections to wide acclaim, including his most recent book, “ Liberation Day .” He also happens to be one of my favorite people to read and to talk to. Saunders is an incredibly prescient and sharp observer of American political culture. Way back in 2007, he argued that our media environment was transforming poli...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast “One can usually pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of wealth — that behind a person’s prosperity lies some rational basis, whether it is that person’s hard work, skill and farsightedness or some ancestor’s,” writes J. Bradford DeLong. “Inflation — even moderate inflation — strips the mask.” DeLong is an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury and the author of “ Slouching Towards Utopia ” — a new book about...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast As we approach the 2022 midterms, the outlook for American democracy doesn’t appear promising. An increasingly Trumpist, anti-democratic Republican Party is poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress. And the Democratic Party, facing an inflationary economy and with an unpopular president in office, looks helpless to stop them. But the United States isn’t alone in this regard. Over the course of 2022, Italy elected a far-right prime minister from a party with Fascist roots, a party fou...
Nov 01, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast How does the popularity of a president’s policies impact his or her party’s electoral chances? Why have Latinos — and other voters of color — swung toward the Republican Party in recent years? How does the state of the economy influence how people vote, and which economic metrics in particular matter most? We can’t answer those questions yet for 2022. But we can look at previous elections for insights into how things could play out. John Sides and Lynn Vavreck — political scientists at Vanderbil...
Oct 28, 2022•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast “What would you do for your relevance?” the political journalist Mark Leibovich asks in his new book, “ Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission .” “How badly did you want into the clubhouse, no matter how wretched it became inside?” For Leibovich, you can’t truly understand the current Republican Party without taking stock of the almost Shakespearean drama that unfolded during the Trump presidency — in which Republican after Republican bowed to the w...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast According to the conventional rules of politics, Democrats should be on track for electoral disaster this November. Joe Biden’s approval rating is stuck around 42 percent, inflation is still sky-high and midterms usually swing against the incumbent president’s party — a recipe for the kind of political wipeouts we saw in 2018, 2010 and 1994. But that’s not what the polls show. Currently, Democrats are on track to hold the Senate and lose narrowly in the House, which raises all kinds of questions...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast N.K. Jemisin is a fantasy and science-fiction writer who won three consecutive Hugo Awards — considered the highest honor in science-fiction writing — for her “Broken Earth” trilogy; she has since won two more Hugos, as well as other awards. But in imagining wild fictional narratives, the beloved sci-fi and fantasy writer has also cultivated a remarkable view of our all-too-real world. In her fiction, Jemisin crafts worlds that resemble ours but get disrupted by major shocks: ecological disaster...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast “The Rachel Maddow Show” debuted in the interregnum between political eras. Before it lay the 9/11 era and the George W. Bush presidency. Days after the show launched in 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and a few weeks later Barack Obama was elected president. And then history just kept speeding up. The Tea Party. The debt ceiling debacles. Donald Trump. The coronavirus pandemic. January 6th. The big lie. Maddow covered and tried to make sense of it all. Now, after 14 years, she has taken her sh...
Oct 14, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times podcast, Hard Fork . Hosted by veteran tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork is a rigorous and fun exploration of Silicon Valley’s already-emerging future — and its evolving imprint on the rest of the world. In this episode, Kevin and Casey discuss Elon Musk’s on-again-off-again – and recently on-again – interest in Twitter, as the billionaire signals once again that he’s buying the social media plat...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast “There are moments when history making creeps up on you,” writes the economic historian Adam Tooze. “This is one of those moments.” Countries across the world are raising interest rates at unprecedented speeds. That global monetary tightening is colliding with spiking food and energy prices, financial market instability, high levels of emerging market debt and economies still struggling to recover from the Covid pandemic. Alone, each of these factors would warrant concern; combined, they could b...
Oct 07, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly one in five adults in America lives with a mental illness. And we have plenty of evidence — from suicide rates to the percentage of Americans on psychopharmaceuticals — that our collective mental health is getting worse. But beyond mental health diagnoses lies a whole, complicated landscape of difficult, often painful, mental states that all of us experience at some point in our lives. Rachel Aviv is a longtime staff writer at The New...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast When most people hear “crypto,” the first thing they think of is “currencies.” Cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. And they’ve given rise to an entire ecosystem of financial speculation, get rich quick schemes, and in some cases outright fraud. But there’s another side of crypto that gets less attention: the segment of the community that is interested in the way the technology that powers crypto can decentralize decision making, make institutions more transpa...
Sep 30, 2022•2 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Why do some countries produce far more science Nobel laureates than others? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did? These are just some of the questions that have inspired the formation of a new intellectual movement called “progress studies.” The basic idea is this: For hundreds of thousands of years, human history played out without any rapid, marked advance in material living standards. And...
Sep 27, 2022•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the question most analysts were asking was not whether Russia would win. It was how fast. On almost every quantifiable metric from military strength to economic size Russia has decisive advantages over Ukraine. A swift Russian victory appeared inevitable. Of course, that swift victory didn’t happen. And in recent weeks, the direction of the war has begun to tilt in Ukraine’s direction. On Sept. 6, the Ukrainian military launched a counteroffensive near Kh...
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast In August, Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $392 billion towards a new climate budget — the single largest investment in emissions reduction in U.S. history. The CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act bring that number up to around $450 billion. All of that spending is designed with one major objective in mind: to put the United States on a path to a decarbonized economy, with the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Achieving tha...
Sep 20, 2022•2 hr 41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the past few months, Joe Biden’s agenda has gone from a failed promise to real legislation. Taken together, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (along with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act) have the potential to put America on a path to decarbonization, develop some of the most advanced and crucial supply chains in the world, and build all kinds of next-generation technologies. It’s hard to overstate just how transformative these plans could be if they are carried out i...
Sep 16, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We see status virtually everywhere in social life, if we think to look for it,” writes Cecilia Ridgeway. “It suffuses everyday possessions, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food brands we prefer, and the music we listen to.” And that’s only a partial list. Status influences the neighborhood we live in, the occupation we pursue, the friends we choose. It attaches itself to our race, gender, class and age. It shapes our interpersonal interactions. And, most of the time, it does all of ...
Sep 13, 2022•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we’re bringing you a special episode from New York Times Opinion: a roundtable, hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro , about how parents view the role of school. America’s schools have emerged as a battleground for the country’s most fervent cultural disagreements, and in many places, parents are finding themselves on the front lines. Three parents of public school students joined Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss the big questions underlying the new era of parental activism. Letha Muhammad is a mot...
Sep 10, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast When is the last time you paused — truly paused the flow of life — to appreciate something beautiful? For as long as we know, humans have sought out beauty, believing deeply that beautiful things and experiences can enhance our lives. But what does beauty really do to us? How can it fundamentally alter our experience of the world? Beauty is always “teaching me something about my own mind,” says the writer and philosopher Chloé Cooper Jones. In her book, “Easy Beauty,” Jones takes readers on a jo...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from 2021 with the novelist Richard Powers. Enjoy! There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. This is one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should. It’ll change you. It changed me. I haven’t walked through a forest the same way again. And I’m no...
Sep 02, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast In times of deep sorrow or joy, humans have always turned to music. Archaeologists have found evidence of instruments among very early civilizations. Spiritual communities have centered on music for centuries. We teach our children their ABCs and how to brush their teeth with songs. We dance out our feelings and cry along with sad tunes. What is it about music that enables it to work so powerfully on our bodies, minds and emotions? That is one of the core animating questions of this conversation...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we're revisiting one of our favorite episodes from this year, with the prolific writer Margaret Atwood. A good rule of thumb is that whatever Margaret Atwood is worried about now is likely what the rest of us will be worried about a decade from now. The rise of authoritarianism. A backlash against women’s social progress. The seductions and dangers of genetic engineering. Climate change leading to social unrest. Advertising culture permeating more and more of our lives. Atwood — the author...
Aug 26, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
