We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. John Cassidy. John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality c…

We’re staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the People’s Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to. Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff. We’ve been bracing for a universal tra…

We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he stands for by now is a sort of MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Sarah Churchwell. The book mak…

We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian Gospels. The title is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Elaine Pagels. By the way, we’re in history class, not Su…

We’re tracking President Trump’s squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 million in federal funding. Then Princeton said, “No way, we’ll fight your flimsy charges to the end.” And then Harvard, with $9 billion at stake, tried …

We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and …

We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who steer by the interests of nations, not their egos or their dreams. And they look beyond the headlines to the long-term effects of policy, to the results. S…

Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of Schoolhouse Rock, the kids’ TV explainer. James Madison. Senator King has been in the thick of the frenzy in Donald Trump’s Washington, with a certain …

In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and republican government. Further question: do citizens have to follow the action? Matt Taibbi’s headline…

We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Kurt Andersen. Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because he’s been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the ’80s, when he founded Spy magazine, and then St…

We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning from Silence, we catch him at a turn in his thinking. His fresh question, for all of us, might just be: how do we surface our spirit…

We’re here with a capsule of memory from late last year. It was a spark of generosity in Liz Walker’s story that lit up the Christmas season for lots of us, and maybe the path ahead. She’s been a pathfinder—for decades—in television newscasting in Boston; then as an ordained minister, leading the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in town; and then in the…

We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman. Chas Freeman. Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in American politics, and a global crisis that can feel like a rolling nightmare even after the quick, almost blood…

We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign of Donald Trump. Mark Blyth. Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden …

We’re with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk. It’s not your standard book chat: closer to head-butting than conversation, as you’ll hear. But it’s polite enough and nobody gets hurt. Chris and Orhan Pamuk. Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to h…

We’re saluting one man’s century in American music. Roy Haynes was the jazz drummer from Boston who shaped the bebop sound in Harlem 80 years ago. He got nicknamed Snap Crackle for his own crisp, lyrical, almost melodic touch. Over the decades, he accompanied and energized scores of jazz stars: Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Powell, Pat Methen…

We’re with the writer’s writer Joshua Cohen—beyond category, but ever ahead of the game. He’s a realist, a fantasist, a satirist, New Jersey-born and at home in Israel. Joshua Cohen. It’s his imagination we need, just to peer through his vision of a changed world and, in particular, two force fields in motion: Donald Trump’s USA and Bibi Netanyahu’…

Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy—into something very modern and profoundly different. And he’s covered our country so well this year. Does he see something of a transformation that’s comparable in the United States?…

In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and we’ve been talking ever since. I call Amber my oracle from underground, the voice of the unknown America, undocumented since she arrived in the United States as a child and an orphan. And …

Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation might undo the power of death, as in the death of long ago people, the death of species today, even the death of a planet. Richard Powers. This is our …

For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching work of reporting on the social roots of a traffic catastrophe. It becomes also a moral meditation on whatever it is that cripples human sympathy, unders…

We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben. We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.Kirjoittanut Christopher Lydon

We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what we wanted? Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Re…

There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the rest of this campaign, come to look and sound presidential, even though no other president has ever looked like her? Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie Mc…

Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a variety of states. Cornel West. His will be the first book I want to read on this 2024 campaign, because he will be recounting a moral inquiry into the Americ…