Trent and Caitlin speak with cognitive scientist, linguist, and AI researcher Hagen Blix about his book, co-authored with Ingeborg Glimmer, called Why We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares. What do those selling AI-branded products have to gain from telling everybody that AI could take over the world? What
How media systems work, how ours came to be, and where we go from here.
The right-wing destruction of American higher education institutions is a strategic move. Liberals need to answer with a strategy of their own.
Nathan Hochman was fired from the DeSantis campaign for making a transparently neoNazi video featuring the Governor, and has only doubled down on his white nationalism since.
Even in seemingly powerless positions, the choice to withdraw one’s support from corrupt systems remains a meaningful assertion of humanity.
Join Samantha and guest Will Stancil as they talk the vexed question of whether politics is driven by merely material conditions, ask why tyrants are obsessed with their own popularity, and assess why the Democratic budget standoff fizzled while Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador broke through—
Trent and Caitlin talk with journalist Evan Urquhart about the ways trans rights get discussed in mainstream media, including the notion that supporting trans people’s full participation in society and protecting their right to bodily autonomy represents a viewpoint that is out of touch, too extreme, or endangers the
Misogyny, racism, and antisemitism all were glossed over in Ross Douthat's softball interview of Jonathan Keeperman.
“Compassion is important, but,” a beautiful turn of phrase that calls to mind the immortal words of the great leader Eddard Stark. Everything before the word "but" is horseshit.
The first episode of our patron-only podcast.
Justice Robert Jackson's fear that "doctrinaire logic" could turn the Constitution into a "suicide pact" was warranted, but the Bill of Rights is not the problem.
The Trump administration is an affront to everything good that America has become and everything America has ever sought to be.
Mobutu and Trump both rule by normalizing corruption, not just to enrich themselves but also to cement their own power.
Southern democracy, like every other aspect of Southern society, was shaped by the political and economic needs of the slaveholding planter class and is maintained by the MAGA movement via shame and projection.
The constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 encompassed three profound domains: politics, economics, and culture.
No serious person believes it’s possible to both decrease and increase the US population at the same time.
Commentators who got it wrong wouldn’t listen, won’t learn, and can’t lead.
"Sex-based rights" are a Potemkin feminism that commit us to a theory of objective sex where there is something special about your very biology that entitles you to special treatment not deserved by others.
Things literally cannot go on as they have before the present democratic crisis—things have been broken and will have to be put back together somehow. Ideas that were unthinkable even a decade ago may see their chance in the sun. It is time for liberal socialism.
Politicians will try to win elections whether you self-censor your principled position or not.
Brian Goldstone doesn’t use the abstract language of structural violence, but his story is full of landlords, bureaucrats, and politicians insulated from the pain they inflict by distance, resources, and power.
MAGA’s approach to young Americans is about creating adherents and eliminating undesirables.
The right and so-called moderate center have framed trigger warnings, the deplatforming of far right speakers, and peaceful protests as urgent free speech crises, but now they downplay the actual stifling of speech and expression.
In the vision of Musk and other lords of Silicon Valley, the purpose of AI technology is to insulate them, and only them, from any hint that they might live in a society.