Here are two thoughts I believe need to be held at once: Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 was heinous, murderous and unforgivable, and that makes it more, not less, important to try to understand what Hamas is, how it sees itself and how it presents itself to Palestinians. Tareq Baconi is the author of “ Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance ,” one of the best books on Hamas’s rise and recent history. He’s done extensive work interviewing members of Hamas and mapping the o...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several days later. But that drama isn’t actually the most important thing going on in the A.I. world, which hasn’t slowed down over the past year, even as people are still discovering ChatGPT for the first time and reckoning with all of its implication...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 10 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 memo...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is cruel fantasy. But it wasn’t always. Peace efforts in the Middle East have been tried over and over again. It is not a history without breakthroughs. There was a time when a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt would have been unthinkable. But that agreement lives alongside ...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a conversation about the relationship between Jewishness and the Jewish State. About believing some aspects of Israel have become indefensible and also believing that Israel itself must be defended. About what it means when a religion built on the lessons of exile creates a state that inflicts exile on others. About the ugly, recurrent reality of antisemitism. You know, the easy stuff. In these past few months, I’ve been moved by the sermons of Rabbi Sharon Brous, which have managed to h...
Nov 17, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast A New York Times and Siena College poll released Nov. 5 showed Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six key swing states, with a notable jump in support among nonwhite and young voters. In response, Democrats freaked out. But then two days later, voters across the country actually went to the polls, and Democrats and Democratic-associated policy did pretty well. In Kentucky, Andy Beshear held the governorship. Democrats took back the House of Delegates in Virginia. And Ohio voted for an...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Earlier this week, we heard a Palestinian perspective on the conflict. Today, I wanted to have on an Israeli perspective. Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of “ Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor .” In this episode, we discuss Halevi’s unusual education as an Israeli Defense Forces soldier in Gaza during the first intifada, the “seminal disconnect” between how Israel is viewed from the inside versus from the outside,...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Before there can be any kind of stable coexistence of people in Israel and Palestine, there will have to be a stable coexistence of narratives. And that’s what we’ll be attempting this week on the show: to look at both the present and the past through Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. The point is not to choose between them. The point is to really listen to them. Even — especially — when what’s being said is hard for us to hear. Our first episode is with Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 ...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast The day before Hamas’s horrific attacks in Israel, the Arab Barometer, one of the leading polling operations in the Arab world, was finishing up a survey of public opinion in Gaza . The result is a remarkable snapshot of how Gazans felt about Hamas and hoped the conflict with Israel would end. And what Gazans were thinking on Oct. 6 matters, now that they’re all living with the brutal consequences of what Hamas did on Oct. 7. So I invited on the show Amaney Jamal, the dean of the Princeton Schoo...
Nov 03, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible.” So writes Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox. Almost a month has passed since Hamas fighters slaughtered over 1,400 people in Israel and the state mounted its furious response. For weeks, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, cutting off water and electricity to the tiny strip of land and carrying out airstrikes that have reportedly killed over 8,000 Palestinians. On Friday a ground invasion began, and ...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast After factional infighting dominated the G.O.P.’s struggle to elect a House speaker, it feels weirdly quaint to revisit Mitt Romney’s career. He’s served as governor, U.S. senator and presidential nominee for a Republican Party now nearly unrecognizable from what it was when he started out. At the end of his time in public office, Romney has found a new clarity in his identity as the consummate institutionalist in an increasingly anti-constitutionalist party. But as a newly published biography o...
Oct 27, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is still ongoing. So far, more than 5,000 Palestinians are reported dead and many more injured. There’s no one way to cover this that reconciles all that is happening and all that needs to be felt. My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11. That’s been the refrain. I fear that analogy carries so much more truth than the people making it intend. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast , and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs . This audio essay...
Oct 18, 2023•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a time of contrast and contradiction for gender queerness in America: At the same time that about 5 percent of Americans under 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary, over 20 states have passed some sort of restriction on gender-affirming care for children. In 2023 alone, over 550 anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country. The political push and pull can overshadow a broad spectrum of rich questions and possibilities that queer culture opens up — about how we think about ide...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New Right has been associated with everyone from Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to right-wing influencers and Catholic integralists. The breadth of the term can make it hard to define: Is the New Right a budding ideological movement or a toxic online subculture? What does it mean if it’s both? Stephanie Slade is a senior editor at the magazine Reason, and has covered the New Right extensively. She argues that the New Right subverts the conventional left/right political binary and is better ...
Oct 03, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast With four ongoing criminal investigations, Donald Trump is the most indicted president in U.S. history. After years of defying unwritten norms, he will now be subject to a criminal justice system defined by norms and precedents. What does due process look like for a former president? Ken White is a former federal prosecutor, a practicing criminal defense lawyer and a co-host of the podcast “ Serious Trouble .” He writes the popular newsletter The Popehat Report, extensively covering the ins and ...
Sep 26, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Love it or hate it, self-care has transformed from a radical feminist concept into a multibillion-dollar industry. But the wellness boom doesn’t seem to be making a dent in Americans’ stress levels. In 2021, 34 percent of women reported feeling burned out at work, along with 26 percent of men. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist, has observed how wellness culture fails her patients, who she says are often burned out because of systemic failures, from the stresses that come with financial precario...
Sep 19, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Public libraries around the country have become major battlegrounds for today’s culture wars. In 2022, the American Library Association noted a record 1,269 attempts at censorship — almost double the number recorded in 2021. Library events like drag story times and other children’s programming have also attracted protest. How should we understand these efforts to control what stories children can freely access? Emily Drabinski is the president of the American Library Association and an associate...
Sep 12, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. At the same time, it looks like we are at the start of a green revolution: Decarbonization efforts have gone far better than what many had hoped for just a few years ago, and renewable energy is getting cheaper. How should we make sense of these seemingly mixed signals? What does it mean to hold the pessimism of climate disaster and the o...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Should schools have been closed down? Were lockdowns a mistake? Was masking even effective? Was the economic stimulus too big? These are the questions that have defined the national conversation about Covid in recent months. They have been the subject of congressional hearings led by Republicans, of G.O.P. candidate stump speeches and of too many Twitter debates to count. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’...
Aug 29, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the so-called critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt and graphite, that are essential to building out clean energy technologies. There is no clean energy revolution without China. What would happen if China decided to weaponize it...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast You can’t understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the complete collapse of trust in mainstream institutions that has taken place among its voters over the last half-century. In 1964, 73 percent of Republicans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing always or most of the time. Today, that number is down to 9 percent . And it’s not just government. Pew found that only 35 percent of Republicans trust national news and 61 percent think public schools are h...
Aug 15, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast The 2024 Republican presidential primary is officially underway, and Donald Trump is dominating the field. But this is a very different contest than it was in 2016. Back then, the Republican Party was the party of foreign policy interventionism, free trade and cutting entitlements, and Trump was the insurgent outsider unafraid to buck the consensus. Today, Trump and his views have become the consensus. The primary, then, raises some important questions: How has Donald Trump changed the Republica...
Aug 08, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast The world economy has experienced many shocks over the past few years: A pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Skyrocketing inflation. These are the stories that have dominated headlines — and for good reason. But they’ve also overshadowed a set of deeper, more fundamental shifts — the rise of China as an economic superpower, the fracturing of trade relations, the realities of the climate crisis — that are transforming the global economic order and prompting ambitious policy responses from lea...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast As I head into a three-month book leave, I wanted to take some time to address a wide array of listeners’ questions. My column editor, Aaron Retica, joins me for a conversation that ranges from the content of my forthcoming book and President Biden’s climate record to the simulation hypothesis and legalized psychedelic therapy. We also discuss what the I-95 collapse — and remarkably quick repairs — tell us about government’s ability to build quickly, the problems with everything-bagel liberalism...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Barbara Kingsolver set out to write her latest novel, “ Demon Copperhead ,” she was already considered one of the most accomplished writers of our time. She had won awards including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a National Humanities Medal, and had a track record of best-selling books, including “ The Poisonwood Bible ” and “ Unsheltered .” But she felt there was one giant stone left unturned: to write “the great Appalachian novel.” Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and lives in sout...
Jul 21, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast California has around half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population. The state’s homelessness crisis has become a talking point for Republicans and a warning sign for Democrats in blue cities and states across the country. Last month, the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, released a landmark report about homelessness in the state, drawing from nearly 3,200 questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews. It is the single deepest study o...
Jul 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are few actors as widely beloved as Tom Hanks. Hanks has acted in over 75 films in his 46-year career, winning the best actor Academy Award two years in a row, for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” And more recently, he’s the author of the short story collection “ Uncommon Type ” and the novel “ The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece .” What is the source of Hanks’s near-universal admiration? In playing roles including Chesley Sullenberger, Mister Rogers and World War II h...
Jul 14, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since the release of ChatGPT, huge amounts of attention and funding have been directed toward chatbots. These A.I. systems are trained on copious amounts of human-generated data and designed to predict the next word in a given sentence. They are hilarious and eerie and at times dangerous. But what if, instead of building A.I. systems that mimic humans, we built those systems to solve some of the most vexing problems facing humanity? In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system tha...
Jul 11, 2023•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest piece of climate legislation ever passed in the United States, setting aside hundreds of billions of dollars for decarbonizing the economy. But the money was always just a first step. The fate of the act’s goals hinges on whether those investments can build the energy system of the future — everything from transmission lines and wind farms to electric vehicle factories and green hydrogen hubs. It’s now been almost a year since the I.R.A.’s passage. So,...
Jul 07, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
