Ball, Krystal and Saagar Enjeti. "Making & Breaking Points: Populism, New Media & More." The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (August 12, 2026) ["As populist energy continues to reshape both parties, Jon is joined by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, co-hosts of "Breaking Points." Together, they explore how both the left and right have grown disillusioned with the establishment, discuss what new media gets right that legacy outlets miss, and consider what it would take for real economic populism to break through."]
Boustan, Leigh. "Immigration in America: Data and Myths." Capitalisn't (July 4, 2024) ["If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration? In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean talk with Boustan to unpack how immigrants and their progeny have impacted jobs, wages, and housing prices for native-born Americans. Conversely, how do immigrants’ countries of origin overcome obstacles to socioeconomic change when many of their most-motivated citizens leave? Can data move the U.S. immigration debate beyond the current border crisis?"]
Campbell, John and Tarun Ramadorai. "Our Personal Finance Mistakes Are The Industry's Profits." Capitalisn't (July 2, 2026) ["Is personal finance rigged against ordinary people? Economists John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai argue the system rewards the wealthy and financially savvy at the expense of everyone else. Their book Fixed points to a troubling pattern: the fees you avoid by never overdrafting, or by refinancing on time, are paid for by people who don't, and they warn that the resulting resentment is fueling political discontent. But there is a tension at the heart of their argument. They don't want the government running finance or setting prices, yet they call for far more muscular rules. So what exactly are they proposing, and why do they insist it would expand your choices rather than limit them?"]
Fadiman, Lauren. "The Invention of Antifa." The Baffler (June 2026) ["As many scholars, journalists, and fact-checkers have noted, Donald Trump and his allies are continually producing and repeating falsities that veer into the realm of urban legend—tales of Muslims in New Jersey cheering during 9/11, of Haitian immigrants to Springfield eating cats and dogs, of the Mob fomenting concerns about asbestos so they could profit from its removal—and the “Antifa terrorist” is another favorite stock character. Fearmongering about Antifa, which Trump described as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government” in an executive order signed last September, is a reinvigoration of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century storytelling tradition that conceived of the anarchist as an American political bogeyman. Just as was historically the case with anarchists and their heirs, the violence of the Antifa member is described in terms that far outstrip reality but legitimize some of our basest political instincts. Anarchist was once practically interchangeable with immigrant and Jew, making it a particularly convenient dog whistle, perhaps, for a Republican Party currently trafficking anew in antisemitism and xenophobia."]
Fong, Benjamin. "America's Drug Binge." Against the Grain (July 8, 2026) ["Americans as a population have an unusually large appetite for psychoactive drugs, whether legal or illegal. And American history has been marked by periodic moral panics over drug use and normalization or legalization, as we’re experiencing right now. Why is that? What is it about US society that makes drug use simultaneously so appealing and reviled? Writer and scholar Benjamin Fong weighs in." Benjamin Yen-Yi Fong, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Verso, 2023. Book description: "Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. This is your nation's history on drugs Americans are stumbling through a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified “war” on drugs. How did we get here? Quick Fixes blows away the pharmacological fog to take a sober look at how drugs have shaped American society. Though particularly acute in recent decades, the contradiction between America’s passionate love for and intense hatred of these sub - stances has been one of its defining characteristics for over a century. Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans’ fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes, it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, affect the development and spread of medications and narcotics among the populace. By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical com - forts, the hope is to help answer that ever-perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?"]
Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "You've Always Been the Caretaker: On Kubrick's The Shining." Weird Studies #211 (April 29, 2026) ["In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining. That they are doing this eight years after starting the podcast is weird in itself, so fundamental is Kubrick's "chamber epic" to the modern weird in general, and the hosts' specific interests in particular. Well, as the Overlook Hotel's former caretaker Delbert Grady might put it, consider the situation corrrrected."]
Fraser, Nancy. "Gaza as World Event." New Left Review (March/April 2026) ["The meanings of Gaza continue to unfold. Eloquent, well-documented reports like those of the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories; acclaimed cinematic works like The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025); poetry such as Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die (2024); analysis by Palestinian historians such as Rashid Khalidi and jurists like Rabea Eghbariah—all these and many more have addressed the import of Israel’s scorched-earth assault, its repeated attacks on aid-distribution sites and ‘safe zones’, its tactics of siege and starvation, its displacement of millions of Palestinians into those ‘unthinkable wastelands of rubble, sewage and decomposing bodies’ described by the UN Rapporteur. Here, I want to examine a different aspect of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza: its significance as a ‘world event’, an epochal turning point that also serves to reveal, and so to signify, the nature of the times. I aim to do so in a register that will range between the political, the social, the philosophical and the personal. I argue that ‘Gaza’ signifies a crisis for the moral order that has held sway across much of the West for the past half century. Installed in the United States from the 1970s onward, and serving to justify its global hegemony along with Israeli expansionism, that order was centred on the Nazi Judeocide as the ultimate emblem of ‘radical evil’, delimiting the horizon within which wrong and its rectification could be thought. Today, however, Auschwitz itself is invoked as justification for a new genocide. The effect is to leave the Holocaust-centred Western moral order in tatters, no longer able to conceal or contain the glaring crimes committed by the Israeli state and its American backer. In the current period, ‘Gaza’ bids to replace ‘Auschwitz’ as symbol for the worst human atrocities of our time. That, in any case, is the scenario I explore here. I arrived at it by a circuitous route, which took me around the world, both literally and mentally, in 2024 and 2025: to Germany, where modest gestures of solidarity with Palestine were met with demands for recantation; to the US, where a great wave of campus protest against the unfolding genocide rose and was repressed; to ‘the Jewish community’, where extended families—including my own—were cancelling their annual Passover Seder because they could not talk to each another about what Israel was doing; and finally, to Japan, where I was invited to lecture about Gaza amid surprisingly widespread and uncontested pro-Palestinian sentiment, despite equally widespread and uncontested pro-Americanism."]
Galvani, Alison.
"Yale Study Says Medicare for All Would Save U.S. $450 Billion, Prevent Nearly 70,000 Deaths a Year." Democracy Now (February 19, 2020) ["As the Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare to take to the debate stage tonight, we turn to a central issue of the campaign: Medicare for All. In a new study, Yale scholars have found that Medicare for All will save Americans more than $450 billion and prevent 68,000 deaths every year. The study in The Lancet — one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals — found that Medicare for All, supported by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, will save money and is more cost-effective than “Medicare for All Who Want It, “a model supported by Pete Buttigieg. Sanders referenced the study at a campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada. For more, we go to New Haven, Connecticut, where we’re joined by Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale’s School of Public Health. She is the lead author of the new Lancet study, “Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA.”"]
Garcia, Maria Cristina and Ruth Wasem.
"The Ongoing Battle Over Asylum in America." Throughline (July 9, 2026) ["The U.S. has long professed to be a country where people can seek refuge. That's the promise etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. But it's never been that clear-cut. And in June, the Supreme Court passed two rulings that could make seeking safe haven in the U.S. even more difficult. Today on the show, the story of how the U.S. asylum system was forged in response to moments of crisis, and where it left gaps: from Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, to Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers during the Cold War, to the precarious system of today. Guests: Maria Cristina Garcia, Professor of History at Cornell University, studying immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers Ruth Wasem, former Immigration Policy Specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service and author of the forthcoming book,
The Struggle for Fairness: Forging the Immigration Act of 1965."]
Hansen, Suzy.
"Made in USA." The New York Review of Books (June 11, 2026) ["It is a condition of the Trump era, and particularly of this war, that we regularly, every day, every hour, see things online so ridiculous or obscene that they merge with images we’ve encountered in novels, Hollywood films, and TV satires. Heightening the disorientation, the Trump administration has spliced together real-life footage of bombings and scenes from action movies to make maniacal snuff films, something even the social critic Christopher Lasch could not have imagined. The videos provoke a cognitive confusion, a reflexive desire to dismiss what must not be real. Hegseth in particular, with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life. “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly as it should be,” he said in his first press briefing about February’s attack on Iran. And on the same occasion: “We have only just begun to hunt.” He loves to use the word “hunt” and to recite weapon names. He also frequently invokes God and Jesus, especially when talking about killing; in a Christian prayer service at the Pentagon, he called for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy … We ask [this] with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.” He compares Trump to Jesus and journalists to the Pharisees. He has fired or forced into retirement subordinates with significant expertise—as many as twenty-four top military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the army. He has openly targeted black officers and women officers. He has also, according to numerous reports, routinely abused alcohol, and in 2020 he paid off a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her. Congress knew that when it confirmed him as secretary of defense. Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!” He is what the world thinks some Americans are, the bleakest caricature. But like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves."]
Hochschild, Adam. "A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth." The New York Review of Books (May 28, 2026) ["Two catastrophes haunt Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country. One is the Holocaust, which devoured the lives of many of the people in her pages. The other, more in the background but never far from her thoughts, is the ordeal of the Palestinian people. This includes the Nakba of 1948, in which some 750,000 men, women, and children were forced to flee their homes and land; the slow, creeping seizure of Palestinian farms and villages in the West Bank by Jewish settlers; and the Israeli military campaign that has left large parts of Gaza reduced to rubble, much as the Nazis left the Warsaw Ghetto. Are the two tragedies connected? “The Holocaust and the Nakba,” writes the Israeli-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov, “are inextricably linked,” despite “each group’s insistence on the exclusivity of its victimhood.” And, of course, Americans are implicated in both. We closed our borders to almost all Holocaust refugees, and many of those Gaza hospitals and apartment buildings were flattened with American bombs."]
Jackson, Greg. "What History Says About Today’s Supposedly Unprecedented Political Crises." Radio West (June 30, 2026) ["To a lot of people, the political challenges facing the country today feel unique in American history, but the historian Greg Jackson says that’s just not true. Fake news, hyper-partisanship, disputed elections, political violence – these all may seem to be unique problems in American history. But the country has been through a lot in 250 years, and the issues we’re dealing with today do have historical precedents. As Jackson puts it, “We’re the same brilliant and stupid, generous and stingy people we’ve always been,” it’s only the particulars that change. He joins us to recount how we confronted and overcame past political difficulties. If we’ve done it before, Jackson says, we can do it again. His book is called Been There, Done That: How Our History Shows What We Can Overcome."]
Norton, Bryan. "Our Tools Shape Ourselves." Aeon (April 1, 2024) ["In the late 20th century, Stiegler began applying this idea to new media technologies, such as television, which led to the development of a concept he called pharmacology – an idea that suggests we don’t simply ‘use’ our digital tools. Instead, they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs. Today, we can take this analogy even further. The internet presents us with a massive archive of formatted, readily accessible information. Sites such as Wikipedia contain terabytes of knowledge, accumulated and passed down over millennia. At the same time, this exchange of unprecedented amounts of information enables the dissemination of an unprecedented amount of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other harmful content. The digital is both a poison and a cure, as Derrida would say. This kind of polyvalence led Stiegler to think more deliberately about technics rather than technology. For Stiegler, there are inherent risks in thinking in terms of the latter: the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans. How we consume music, the paths we take to get from point A to point B, how we share ourselves with others, all of these aspects of daily life have been reshaped by new technologies and the humans that produce them. Yet we rarely stop to reflect on what this means for us. Stiegler believed this act of forgetting creates a deep crisis for all facets of human experience. By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology."]
Laxe, Oliver. " The Raves, Philosophy, and Brutal Twists of "Sirāt" with Director Oliver Laxe." Toolkit Podcast (February 10, 2026) ["Sirāt" is a truly original experience, a journey into desert rave culture but also into the desert of our minds and souls. From the Oscar nominated sound design, to the haunting visuals and non-professional cast, Director Oliver Laxe opened up about the making of one of the most intense theatrical experiences of the year. (Spoiler Warning. Seriously, you don't want to know anything before seeing this one).]
Lewis, Helen. "The History of Bad Ideas: Hysteria." Past Present Future (July 8, 2026) ["For the first in a new set of episodes about bad ideas with interesting histories David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about hysteria, an ancient idea that became a very modern diagnosis. Why was hysteria associated with both madness and saintliness? How did Charcot and then Freud use hysteria to rationalise otherwise baffling female behaviour? What happens when group hysteria takes hold? And why do we still find it so hard to do without these kinds of labels?"]
McKay, Adam.
"The Angel and the Devil on the Shoulder: Adam McKay on Surviving the Post-Holocene." Team Human (July 1, 2026) [""The most useful framework is that our country’s been invaded. But like all great invasions, it involves new techniques." - Adam McKay. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up, The Big Short, Succession) dissects the urgent cultural, political, and planetary moment we are living through. McKay brings a massive unified theory exploring how our prehistoric evolutionary limits - and the constraints of Dunbar’s Number - are colliding with a collapsing Holocene and modern corporate media systems designed to abstract us from reality. From Leonardo DiCaprio's ad-libbed line that broke the crew on the set of "Don’t Look Up" to a clear-eyed diagnosis of the macro "Hail Mary" phase of climate adaptation, Rushkoff and McKay chart a path through doomerism. Together, they argue that surviving a post-Holocene world requires breaking the digital illusion, reclaiming pro-social local networks, and finding the holy act of mutual connection on the deck of the Titanic."]
Muncer, Mike and Honey Ross. "Man-Made Monsters Pt. #36: Poor Things (2023) and The Substance (2024)." The Evolution of Horror (May 1, 2026) ["Mike is joined by Honey Ross to discuss two recent films about female identity and bodily autonomy."]
North, James. "How mainstream media bias contributed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza." Mondoweiss (June 20, 2026) ["Robin Andersen's indispensable new book, The Complicit Lens, offers a comprehensive examination of the media's role in supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Even those of us who closely followed U.S. mainstream media bias in its coverage of Israel’s murderous war on Palestinians since October 7, 2023 will find that The Complicit Lens, a superb, comprehensive new book, is indispensable. Author Robin Andersen is a veteran expert in media studies. Her success is two-fold. First, she exhaustively chronicles the day-by-day twistings, distortions and omissions in the New York Times, CNN and the rest. She uses an impressive, broad range of sources (including this site), and documents them in an astonishing 942 footnotes. And she weaves this enormous mass of information together, and outlines revealing patterns. For instance, she zeroes in on clear bias in the language that the mainstream used to describe deaths, right from the beginning. She points out that the New York Times from October 7, 2023 to November 24 “used the word ‘massacre’ fifty-three times when it referred to Israelis being killed by Palestinians but only once to refer to Palestinians being killed by Israel.” This linguistic dishonesty had immediate consequences. Andersen cites a U.S. opinion poll from March 2024: “At a time when the official death toll in Gaza stood at 32,000 Palestinians, compared with 1,200 Israeli killed, ‘half of Americans do not know which side has had a higher death toll.’”"]
Runciman, David. " Politics on Trial: Muhammad Ali vs. the Draft." Past Present Future (January 11, 2026) ["Today’s episode is about the epic battle between Muhammad Ali and the US government over its attempt to draft him during the Vietnam war and what happened when that fight reached the US Supreme Court. What were Ali’s grounds for claiming to be a conscientious objector? How did that argument cut across wider questions of race, religion and power? Why did the Supreme Court change its original decision against Ali to find unanimously in his favour? And who won and who lost as a result?"]
Sanders, Bernie. "Bernie Sanders Wants You to Own Half the Profits from AI." Uncanny Valley (June 30, 2026) ["While many politicians are still getting their bearings around AI, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has taken a leading stance. He’s proposed a sovereign wealth fund, to allow Americans to share in half of the financial profits made by big AI companies. He’s also calling for a moratorium on data center construction, until we’re able to answer some key questions – including how AI can improve our lives. Senator Bernie Sanders talks to Katie about the transformational power of AI, and why we need to keep talking about safely regulating it."]
Sterling, Andrea and Brooke Williamson. "A Tour Through the Epstein Files." On the Media (July 8, 2026) ["The Department of Justice collected more than 6 million pages of the Epstein Files, and released about 3 million under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A few months ago, Brooke visited an art installation called the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room to behold the files... at least those we’ve been authorized to see. Plus, Andrea Sterling, an online content creator and a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, shares how to felt to see the files in real life."]
Suskind, Dana. "How to Raise Kids in the Age of AI." Big Brains (July 9, 2026) ["As AI rapidly changes how we work, learn, and communicate, it also raises an urgent question: What does it mean to grow up in a world dominated by smart technology? From smart-baby monitors to stuffed animals embedded with LLMs, kids and parents are increasingly bombarded with AI everywhere they turn. According to Prof. Dana Suskind, a renowned surgeon and pediatrician at the University of Chicago, AI might be able to mimic language, logic, and creativity, but it cannot replace the deeply relational, responsive human interactions that are crucial to a child’s development. In her latest book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, Suskind argues that the earliest years of life are more critical than ever—and that parents and caregivers cannot be replaced or outsourced in building a child's brain. Suskind explains how we can build a society that genuinely supports parents in raising the next generation, so that human connection does not become a “luxury good.""]
West, Stephen. "The modern day concentration camp and the failure of human rights: Giorgio Agamben." Philosophize This! #191 (December 4, 2023) ["Giorgio Agamben’s critique of human rights, influenced by Simone Weil, begins with the argument that legal frameworks fail to capture the essence of what they claim to protect—human dignity and freedom. Weil’s example contrasting a farmer’s legal right to sell eggs with the moral horror of forced prostitution underscores how legal language can flatten profound ethical violations. Agamben expands this critique, arguing that human rights are often weaponized as justifications for imperialist actions, such as U.S. and Russian military interventions framed as humanitarian efforts. He warns that the reverence given to human rights can obscure real political motivations and hinder discourse on equally urgent issues like inequality or climate change. Drawing on Aristotle’s concepts of zoe (bare life) and bios (political life), Agamben suggests that in states of exception—like concentration camps or Guantanamo Bay—individuals are stripped of both private autonomy and public representation, existing in a dehumanized limbo. He sees this logic extending through normalized practices like police brutality, pandemic lockdowns, international customs, and mass surveillance, arguing that these examples follow the same core political maneuver: suspending rights through emergency declarations. Additionally, Agamben critiques modern institutions for suppressing human potential in favor of control and productivity, proposing that societies rooted in potential rather than fear may offer a more humane future. Ultimately, his work asks whether the frameworks we depend on for justice are inherently flawed—and if moving beyond them is the only way forward. Further Reading [Books]: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben (1998); State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben (2005); Means Without End: Notes on Politics by Giorgio Agamben (2000)"]
---. "The Myth of the Self-Made Person - Alasdair Macintyre." Philosophize This! #246 (April 26, 2026) ["Today we talk about Macintyre's book Dependent Rational Animals." Book description: "In Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre compares humans to other intelligent animals, ultimately drawing remarkable conclusions about human social life and our treatment of those whom he argues we should no longer call "disabled." MacIntyre argues that human beings are independent, practical reasoners, but they are also dependent animals who must learn from each other in order to remain largely independent. To flourish, humans must acknowledge the importance of dependence and independence, both of which are developed in and through social relationships. This requires the development of a local community in which individuals discover their own "goods" through the discovery of a common Good."]
Zirin, Dave. "Howard Zinn spoke to this moment, even decades ago." Los Angeles Times (July 8, 2026) ["Not many historians have seen their work referenced on “The Simpsons” and “The Sopranos.” Not many historians have been condemned by name by a president on the White House lawn for the “crime” of researching and writing about this nation’s history. And not many historians have taught countless people that this country’s past looks quite different depending upon the perspective of those doing the telling. This is Howard Zinn, who shaped Americans’ understanding of themselves through seven decades of activism and whose insights should continue to color how we understand the news of the day. ... At the barest-bones level, detractors attack Zinn for the same reason teachers, students and readers celebrate him: because his work inspires people to think critically, fight back and make their own history. For the authoritarian, the thought of people being inspired in such a manner is chilling. It also contradicts their politically useful belief that history only happens at the behest of “great men.” Those who’ve read Zinn — and some of the generations of historians inspired by him — recognize this to be the greatest lie of all. As he wrote: “The good things that have been done, the reforms ... all of that was not done by government edict. ... It was all done by citizens’ movements. ... What really matters is what are people doing, and what are people saying, what are people demanding.” Dave Zirin is the author of The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn]
