Dishcast Archive
Find all of our pod episodes in one place, along with corresponding clips and transcripts.
Below are all our guests organized under a general theme (though many could fit under multiple themes):
Foreign Affairs: Noah Smith, Eli Lake, Jonathan Freedland, Graeme Wood, Robert Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Fraser Nelson, Robert Wright, Fiona Hill, Samuel Ramani (twice), Edward Luttwak, Anne Applebaum (twice), John Mearsheimer, Yossi Klein Halevi, Dominic Cummings, Michael Schuman, Michael Moynihan (twice), Peter Beinart, Niall Ferguson, Tim Shipman (twice)
Race/Wokeness: Musa al-Gharbi, Lionel Shriver, Nellie Bowles, Rob Henderson, Freddie DeBoer, Lee Fang, Tabia Lee, Nigel Biggar, Cathy Young, Glenn Loury, Douglas Murray, Christopher Rufo, John McWhorter, Briahna Joy Gray, Wesley Yang, Glenn Greenwald, Kmele Foster, Michael Hirschorn
Immigration/Diversity: Amy Chua, Bryan Caplan, Charles Murray, Eric Kaufmann (twice), Nick Miroff (twice), Mickey Kaus, Christopher Caldwell (twice), Matt Yglesias
Trump/Politics: Walter Kirn, Michelle Goldberg, James Carville, Jeffrey Toobin, Bill Maher, Oren Cass, Nate Silver, Mike Isikoff & Dan Klaidman, Jeff Greenfield, Joe Klein, David Leonhardt, John Judis & Ruy Teixeira, Ian Buruma, Vivek Ramaswamy, Josh Barro, Matt Lewis, David Weigel, Erick Erickson (twice), Chris Stirewalt, Michael Lind, Matt Taibbi, Robert Draper, Damon Linker (twice), Dexter Filkins, Larry Summers, Matthew Continetti, Ann Coulter, Bob Woodward & Robert Costa, Michael Wolff, Jonathan Rauch, Michael Anton, David Frum (twice), Damir Marusic & Shadi Hamid, Shadi Hamid, Olivia Nuzzi, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris (twice)
Technology/Media: Tina Brown (twice), Adam Moss, Kara Swisher, Ben Smith, Jonathan Haidt, Johann Hari (twice)
Gender/Sex: Neil J. Young, Abigail Shrier, Cat Bohannon, Pamela Paul, Leor Sapir, Jean Twenge, Hannah Barnes, Jill Filipovic, Ben Appel, Carl Trueman, Alyssa Rosenberg, Richard Reeves, Louise Perry, Jamie Kirchick, Bari Weiss, Kathleen Stock, Christina Sommers & Danielle Crittenden, Katie Herzog & Jamie Kirchick, Carole Hooven (twice), Julie Bindel, Buck Angel & Helena Kerschner, Emily Yoffe, Mara Keisling, Dana Beyer
Pandemics: Nicholas Wade, Kyle Harper, Peter Staley, David Wallace-Wells (twice), Michael O’Loughlin, Michael Lewis, Meghan Daum
Philosophy/Religion/Humanism: Anderson Cooper, Bill Wasik & Monica Murphy, Rod Dreher (twice), Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Corey, George Will, Daniel Finkelstein, Richard Dawkins, Christian Wiman, Jeffrey Rosen, Justin Brierley, Alexandra Hudson, Matthew Crawford, David Brooks, Spencer Klavan, Martha Nussbaum, Patrick Deneen, David Grann, John Oberg, Mark Lilla, Susan Neiman, Jon Ward, James Alison, John Gray, Aurelian Craiutu, Kathryn Schulz, Yoram Hazony, Frank Bruni, Christopher Hitchens, Matthew Rose, Sohrab Ahmari (twice), Jennifer Senior, David Goodhart, Francis Fukuyama, David French, Nicholas Christakis, Jim Holt, Roosevelt Montás, Steven Pinker, Cornel West, Antonio García Martínez, Ross Douthat, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Caitlin Flanagan
Addiction/Psychedelics/Mental Health: Abigail Shrier, Maia Szalavitz, Michael Shellenberger, Sam Quinones, Michael Pollan, Shawn McCreesh, Sally Satel, Brian Muraresku
To jump down to a brief episode description, along with links to its audio page, clips, and select transcripts, just type “Command + F” (for Mac) or “Control + F” (for PC) and enter the guest’s last name. (You can also enter the word “transcript” to pop down to one of 29 polished transcripts: Gray, Alison, Angel/Kerschner, Woodward/Costa, Herzog/Kirchick, Brown, Cummings, Flanagan, French, Greenwald, Haidt, Halevi, Hill, Hitchens, Loury, Mearsheimer, McWhorter, Kirchick, Montás, Moynihan, Murray, Perry, Rauch, Rose, Rufo, Shellenberger, Trueman, West, Yang.)
Substack now provides rough auto-transcripts for every episode, which you can find below the byline of each episode page by clicking on “Transcript”:
Descriptions for every episode are listed below, in reverse-chronological order:
Anderson Cooper And Me On Grief (11/15/24)
Anderson doesn’t need an introduction, but he’s a broadcast journalist who has anchored Anderson Cooper 360° for more than two decades. He’s also the host of a podcast centered on grief, “All There Is.” He invited me on the pod after the death of my mom this summer, and this episode is the extended version of our conversation, which covers my experience of the AIDS crisis and the deaths of my parents and my beagle, Bowie. I was not expecting to talk about my AIDS memories, so forgive me for some choking up. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here, and here for clips.
Damon Linker On Trump's Historic Win (11/8/24)
He’s political writer with a must-read substack, Notes from the Middleground. He’s been the editor of First Things and a senior correspondent at The Week, and he’s the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test. We both belong to the camp of conflicted moderates. He was on the Dishcast right after the 2022 midterms, so he’s back to discuss the results of this election. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Musa al-Gharbi On Elites And Wokeness (11/1/24)
He’s an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University, and his first book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. He also has a great substack, Symbolic Capital(ism). Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sam Harris On The Trump Threat, Harris, Wokeness (10/25/24)
He’s a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up App. This week we had our third consecutive talk on the eve of the election — the first on his pod in 2016, the second on the Dishcast in 2020. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here, and here for clips.
Tina Brown On Trump Panic, Media, Autism (10/18/24)
The inimitable Tina Brown revived Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before turning to the web and The Daily Beast (where I worked for her). She’s written three books, the latest of which we covered on the Dishcast a few years ago, The Palace Papers. This week she launched a substack, “Fresh Hell: Tina Brown’s Diaries.” This chat really is unplugged. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Walter Kirn On The Midwest, Walz, Trump (10/11/24)
He’s a novelist, literary critic, and journalist. The author of eight books, most famously Up in the Air, he’s now the editor-at-large for County Highway and co-hosts a weekly podcast with Matt Taibbi, “America This Week.” Way back in the day, I edited his work for The New Republic, and he guest-blogged for the Dish. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Wasik & Murphy On Animal Welfare (10/4/24)
Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. Their first book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a bestseller, and they’re back with a new one: Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Frum On History And This Election (9/27/24)
He’s an old friend, a long-time writer at The Atlantic, and a contributor to MSNBC. He’s also the author of 10 books, including Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michelle Goldberg On Harris And The Left (9/20/24)
She’s an opinion columnist at the New York Times, and before that she was a columnist for Slate. She has written three books: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, The Means of Reproduction, and The Goddess Pose. She’s also an on-air contributor at MSNBC. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Rod Dreher On Politics And Religious Awe (9/13/24)
He’s an old-school blogger and author living in Budapest. He’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and his new book is Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. And check out his raw and honest writing on Substack, “Rod Dreher’s Diary.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Eric Kaufmann On Liberal Overreach (9/6/24)
He’s a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he runs the new Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He’s also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism (its title in the UK is Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution). Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
James Carville On Trump, Harris, Clinton (8/30/24)
Carville needs no introduction, but he’s a legendary consultant, a former CNN contributor, and the author of a dozen books. He currently co-hosts the Politics War Room with Al Hunt, a podcast available on Substack, which you should definitely follow for the election season. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here, here, and here for clips.
Jeffrey Toobin On Lawfare And SCOTUS (8/2/24)
He’s a lawyer, author, and the chief legal analyst at CNN, after a long run at The New Yorker. He has written many bestselling books, including True Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Oath, The Nine, and Too Close to Call, and two others — The Run of His Life and A Vast Conspiracy — were adapted for television as seasons of “American Crime Story.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Anne Applebaum On Autocrats And Trump (7/26/24)
A journalist and historian, she’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Agora Institute. She’s written many books, including Red Famine, Gulag: A History, and Twilight of Democracy, and her new one is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Also check her substack, “Open Letters.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Lionel Shriver On Human Limitations (7/19/24)
She’s the author of 17 novels, most notably We Need to Talk About Kevin, and in 2022 she published her first book of nonfiction, Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction. She’s currently a columnist for The Spectator, and her new book is Mania, a satirical novel about a dystopian movement that claims that everyone is equally smart. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Stephen Fry On Depression And Loving Life (7/12/24)
He’s a legendary British actor, comedian, director, writer, and narrator. His TV shows include “A Bit of Fry & Laurie,” “Jeeves and Wooster,” and “Blackadder,” and his films include Wilde, Gosford Park, and Love & Friendship. He’s produced several documentary series, including “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive,” and he’s the president of Mind, a mental health charity. He has written 17 books, including three autobiographies, and he narrated all seven of the Harry Potter books. You can find him on Substack at The Fry Corner. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Erick Erickson On Politicized Faith (7/5/24)
He was an old-school blogger at RedState, serving as editor-in-chief, and he later became a political contributor for CNN and Fox News. Today he hosts the “Erick Erickson Show” on WSB Radio in Atlanta and runs a popular substack of the same name. He’s back on the Dishcast to discuss his new book, You Shall Be as Gods: Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left — though it also criticizes the “gnostic right.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Tim Shipman On The UK Elections (6/28/24)
The best political reporter in Britain returns to the Dishcast to discuss the election on July 4. Tim has been a chief political commentator at The Sunday Times since 2014, after serving eight years as political editor. His first two books, All Out War and Fall Out, are indispensable to understanding the politics of Brexit, and his new book is No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Elizabeth Corey On Oakeshott And Life (6/21/24)
She’s an associate professor of political science in the Honors Program at Baylor University and the author of the 2006 book, Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics. She also writes for First Things and serves on the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. We delve into the thinking and life of Michael Oakeshott — the philosopher I wrote my dissertation on. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nellie Bowles On Ditching Wokeness (6/14/24)
She’s a writer and reporter who’s worked for many mainstream publications, most notably the NYT covering Silicon Valley. Now she is teamed up with her wife, Bari Weiss, to run The Free Press — a media company they launched on Substack in 2021. Nellie’s weekly news roundup, TGIF, is smart and hilarious, and so is her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
George Will On Conservatism (6/7/24)
He writes a twice-weekly column on politics and foreign affairs for the Washington Post, a column he launched in 1974. He is also a regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News. The author of 14 books, his latest is American Happiness and Discontents, but the one we primarily cover in this episode is The Conservative Sensibility — which I reviewed for the NYT. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Noah Smith On A Second Cold War With China (5/31/24)
He’s a journalist who covers economics and geopolitics. A former assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University and an early blogger, Noah became an opinion columnist at Bloomberg in 2014. He left after seven years to focus on his own substack, Noahpinion, which you should definitely check out. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Bill Maher On Spurning The Likes (5/24/24)
Bill needs no introduction, but he’s been the formidable host of HBO’s Real Time for 21 years now, and before that he hosted Politically Incorrect, which ran from 1993 to 2002. He has a new book out, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You — a collection of his best editorials on Real Time. Also check out his podcast, “Club Random.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Oren Cass On Curbing The Free Market (5/17/24)
He’s a writer and policy advisor. In 2012, he was the domestic policy director for Romney’s presidential campaign, and in 2018 he wrote The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. In 2020, he founded the think tank American Compass, where he serves as executive director. He’s also a contributing opinion writer for the Financial Times. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Adam Moss On The Artistic Process (5/10/24)
He’s the best magazine editor of my generation, and an old friend. From 2004 to 2019, Adam was the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and before that he edited the New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days — a weekly news magazine covering art and culture in NYC. His first book is The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Johann Hari On Ozempic And Big Food (5/3/24)
My old and dear friend just released his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. That follows Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression (2018), and Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (2022), which we covered on the Dishcast. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kara Swisher On Big Tech And Media (4/19/24)
She’s a journalist who has covered the business of the Internet since 1994. She was the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, and she’s worked for the NYT, the WaPo, and the WSJ. She’s now the host of the podcast “On with Kara Swisher” and the co-host of the “Pivot” podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York Magazine. Her new memoir is Burn Book: A Tech Love Story. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Eli Lake On Israel, Anti-Semitism, Kanye (4/12/24)
He’s a former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and a former columnist for the Bloomberg View. He’s now a reporter for The Free Press, a contributing editor at Commentary Magazine, and the host of his own podcast, The Re-Education. I thought I should have a strong Israel supporter to come on and challenge my recent columns. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Neil J. Young On The Gay Right (4/5/24)
He’s a writer and historian. He used to be a contributing columnist at The Week, and he now co-hosts the “Past Present” history podcast. His first book was We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, and his new one is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Daniel Finkelstein On Hitler, Stalin, And His Mum And Dad (3/29/24)
He’s a journalist, politician, and old friend. Formerly an adviser to Prime Minister John Major, he was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013. He’s a former executive editor of The Times of London and is still there as a weekly political columnist. His latest book is Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family (the title in the UK is way, way better: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad). It’s an astonishingly well-researched thriller of a story. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Richard Dawkins On God, Sex, Race (3/22/24)
He’s a scientist, author, and public speaker. From 1995 to 2008 he was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and he's currently a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among his many bestselling books are the The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion, and his two-part autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and A Brief Candle in the Dark. He also has substack called The Poetry of Reality. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Abigail Shrier On Therapy For Kids (3/15/24)
She’s an independent journalist and author. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was a bestseller, and her new book is a bestseller that even the NYT has had to recognize eventually. It’s called Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She also has a substack, The Truth Fairy. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christian Wiman On God And Suffering (3/8/24)
He’s a poet and author, and, in my view, one of the most piercing writers on faith in our time. He served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and others. He’s the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, and his new one is called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve yet produced. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Rob Henderson On Overcoming Trauma (3/1/24)
A young independent writer, Rob’s work has been featured in the NYT, the WSJ, the Boston Globe and others, and he writes a popular substack that coined the term “luxury beliefs.” He had a tumultuous childhood in foster care, joined the Air Force at 17, and went on to graduate from Yale and Cambridge. He tells that story in his first book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jeffrey Rosen On Virtue And Learning (2/23/24)
He’s the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts “We the People,” a weekly pod of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the GW Law School, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. A former house-mate of mine and friend for 40 years, Jeff began his career writing some stellar essays on SCOTUS in the TNR when I was editor. His new book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nate Silver On Gambling And Politics (2/16/24)
He’s a statistician and writer focused on American politics and sports, and a longtime friend from the blog days. Nate was the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, and now he writes his own substack, Silver Bulletin. He’s the author of The Signal and the Noise, and his forthcoming book is On the Edge: How Successful Gamblers and Risk-Takers Think. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Isikoff & Klaidman On Trump's Trial In Georgia (2/9/24)
Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, where he is also editor-at-large for reporting and investigations. Daniel Klaidman is the editor-in-chief for Yahoo News. The veteran reporters have new a book called Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Justin Brierley On The Rebirth Of Belief In God (2/2/24)
He’s a writer and broadcaster who gets Christians and non-Christians to talk to each other. He co-hosts the “Re-Enchanting” podcast for Seen & Unseen, and is a guest presenter for the “Maybe God” podcast. He also contributes to Premier Christianity magazine, where he used to be editor. Justin’s new book is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and he has a documentary podcast series of the same name. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jonathan Freedland On Anti-Semitism And The Left (1/26/24)
He writes a column for The Guardian, hosts their “Politics Weekly America” podcast, and is the co-host of the “Unholy” podcast with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He’s also the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jeff Greenfield On Trump And History (1/19/24)
He’s been a senior political correspondent for CBS, a senior analyst for CNN, and a political and media analyst for ABC News. He has authored or co-authored 13 books, including If Kennedy Lived, When Gore Beat Bush, and Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Alexandra Hudson On The Struggle For Civility (1/12/24)
She’s the founder of Civic Renaissance, a newsletter and intellectual community dedicated to moral and cultural renewal. She’s also an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. Her first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis (1/5/24)
She’s back to discuss her travails at Harvard, teaching in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She appeared two years ago to discuss her superb book T: The Story of Testosterone, and she’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in Pinker’s lab. She’s also an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Joe Klein On Tradition In Chaotic Times (12/22/23)
He’s a journalist, author, old-school blogger, and an old friend. He’s written seven books, most famously Primary Colors, and he was a longtime columnist for Time magazine. This year he launched a must-read substack called “Sanity Clause,” and he just started a podcast with the great John Ellis called “Wise Owls.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Leonhardt On The Dwindling American Dream (12/8/23)
He writes the NYT’s flagship daily newsletter, “The Morning,” contributes to the paper’s Sunday Review section, and co-hosts “The Argument,” a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. In 2011 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on economic questions. His new book is Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Cat Bohannon On Women Driving Evolution (12/1/23)
She’s a researcher who focuses on the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other publications. Her fascinating new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and I highly recommend it. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matthew Crawford On Antihumanism And Social Control (11/24/23)
Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He’s currently a senior fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Judis & Teixeira On Redeeming The Dems (11/17/23)
John Judis is an editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior editor at The New Republic, and an old friend. Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing columnist at the WaPo, and politics editor of the fantastic substack The Liberal Patriot. In 2002 they wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, and their new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Graeme Wood On The Horrors Of Hamas' War (11/10/23)
He’s a foreign correspondent and one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met. Graeme has been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2006 and a lecturer in political science at Yale since 2014, and he’s the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. He was in Israel when we spoke earlier this week. It’s — shall we say — a lively conversation, covering every taboo in the Israel/Palestine question. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Pamela Paul On Ideology, Tech, Womanhood (11/3/23)
For nine years she was the editor of The New York Times Book Review, where she also hosted a weekly podcast, and she’s now a columnist for the Opinion section of the Times where she writes about culture, ideas, society, language and politics. She’s the author of eight books, most recently 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Brooks On Transcending Hate And Loneliness (10/27/23)
He’s a long-time columnist for the New York Times and a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Plus he teaches at Yale. His new book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Spencer Klavan On God And The Humanities (10/20/23)
He’s a writer, an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and the host of the “Young Heretics” podcast. He’s also written How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and edited Gateway to the Stoics. You can follow his latest writing on Substack. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Martha Nussbaum On Justice For Animals (10/13/23)
She’s a philosopher and legal thinker who’s taught at Harvard, Brown, Oxford and is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School. Of her many books, her latest is Justice for Animals. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ian Buruma On Conmen And Collaborators (10/6/23)
He’s a historian, a journalist, and an old friend. He’s currently the Paul Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, and he served as foreign editor of The Spectator and (briefly) as the editor of The New York Review of Books. His latest of many books is The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Leor Sapir On Transing Gender-Dysphoric Kids (9/29/23)
He’s a writer and researcher, currently working as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a frequent contributor to City Journal, particularly on issues of gender identity and public policy. I know of few people more likely to provide light than heat in the agonizing debate over treatment for children with gender dysphoria. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Vivek Ramaswamy On What Makes America Great (9/22/23)
He’s an entrepreneur and a Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race. He founded a biotech company, Roivant Sciences, after working as an investment partner at a hedge fund. He’s also the author of Woke, Inc. and Nation of Victims. I’ll get ahead of you guys and confess that I liked him in our chat, and decided I wasn’t going to repeat the now-familiar trope of trying to get him to denounce Trump. See what you think, but I learned some stuff about his life. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Freddie DeBoer On The Left Eating Itself (9/15/23)
He’s been a prolific freelancer at publications such as the NYT, the WaPo, Harper’s, The Guardian, Politico, and The Daily Dish. His first book was The Cult of Smart (reviewed on the Dish as “Bell Curve leftism”), and his new book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. A longtime friend of the Dish, Freddie is someone I felt I knew from his writing. He’s somewhat different in person. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sohrab Ahmari On The “Tyrannical” Free Market (9/8/23)
He is a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His first appearance on the Dishcast addressed what he sees as “the failures of liberalism.” This time, we debate his new book, Tyranny, Inc. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Moynihan On Orwell And Conspiracies (8/11/23)
He’s one-third of The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch. He was previously the cultural news editor for The Daily Beast, a senior editor at Reason, and a correspondent and managing editor of Vice. It’s a fun summer chat with an old friend. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Josh Barro On Defending Biden (8/4/23)
He’s an old friend, and a business and political journalist. Josh has worked for Business Insider, the NYT, and New York magazine. He currently runs his own substack called Very Serious, and he cohosts a legal podcast called Serious Trouble, also on Substack. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Lee Fang On Tensions Within The Left (7/28/23)
He was a long-time reporter at The Intercept, and in late 2022 he was one of the recipients of the Twitter Files. He left the MSM this year to launch his own substack at leefang.com. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matt Lewis On Moneyed Elites And Corruption (7/21/23)
He’s been a senior contributor for The Daily Caller and a columnist for AOL’s Politics Daily, and he’s currently a senior columnist at The Daily Beast. He also hosts his own podcast and YouTube show, “Matt Lewis & The News.” In this episode we discuss his new book, Filthy Rich Politicians. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jean Twenge On Gen Z's Social Crisis (7/14/23)
Jean is a writer and researcher who focuses on generational differences. She’s a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of seven books, most notably iGen. Her new one is Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Weigel On Political Reporting (7/7/23)
Dave has worked for The Washington Post, Slate, Bloomberg Politics, and he’s currently at Semafor. He’s also a contributing editor at Reason. In 2017 he wrote a book called The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, and he also guest-blogged for the Daily Dish back in the day. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Erick Erickson On Saving The GOP (6/30/23)
Erick is a radio host and writer. He was an old-school blogger at RedState, serving as editor-in-chief, and he later became a political contributor for CNN and Fox News. Today he hosts the “Erick Erickson Show” on WSB Radio in Atlanta and runs a popular substack of the same name. He’s also working toward a PhD in theology. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Tabia Lee On How To Teach Kids (6/23/23)
Dr. Tabia Lee is an educator and consultant. She was the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza College until she was fired for her heterodox views on DEI. (Her GoFundMe is here.) She’s also a cofounder of Free Black Thought. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Grann On High-Seas Suffering (6/16/23)
He’s an extraordinary investigative reporter, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and an old acquaintance. Several of his stories and books have been adapted into major motion pictures, including The Lost City of Z, Old Man and the Gun, and Killers of the Flower Moon. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder — and the film rights have already been acquired by Scorsese and DiCaprio. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Patrick Deneen On Ending The Liberal Order (6/9/23)
Deneen is a writer and academic. Based at the University of Notre Dame, he is Professor of Political Science and holds the David Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies. His books include The Odyssey of Political Theory and Why Liberalism Failed, and his new one is Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ben Smith On The Gadflies Of New Media (6/2/23)
He’s the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semafor, a global news company. Ben was an old-school blogger at Politico and others, the first editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and the media columnist for the NYT. His new book is Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. I wrote what he called a “savage and delightful” review of his book, but we remain friends and went at it cordially. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sam Ramani On Ukraine Striking Back (5/26/23)
Where are we in the war between the West and Russia in Ukraine? We asked Sam back to help us figure it out. He’s a tutor in the Department of Political Science at Oxford and a member of the Royal United Services Institute in London. His forthcoming book is Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Oberg On Veganism (5/19/23)
He’s an animal advocate and social media professional who tries to convince me to give up meat. John has served as the director of new media for The Humane League and the director of communications for Vegan Outreach, but now he’s an independent advocate funded by individual donations. He’s also a powerlifter — not something you usually associate with vegans. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Chris Stirewalt On Fox And Journalism (5/12/23)
He’s a political analyst and author. Chris worked at Fox News for more than a decade until they fired him in the wake of the 2020 election, when he was part of the election team that accurately called Arizona for Biden. He’s now the politics editor for NewsNation and a contributing editor for The Dispatch. His new book is Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. He’s also a blast. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nigel Biggar On Colonialism (5/5/23)
He’s an Anglican priest, academic and writer. Formerly the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, he now directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life and chairs the board of the UK’s Free Speech Union. The author of many books on ethics, his new controversial one is Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning — a qualified defense of British colonialism, which unwound itself and ended slavery. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Mark Lilla On Escaping Online Politics (4/28/23)
He’s a journalist, political scientist, historian of ideas, and a longtime friend since my twenties, when we studied political thought together. He has taught at NYU and the University of Chicago, and he’s currently a professor of humanities at Columbia. In this episode we focus on his essay, “On Indifference,” and the introduction he wrote for Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. It was a fantastic conversation. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Susan Neiman On The Leftist Case Against Woke (4/21/23)
She’s a philosopher and writer focusing on the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics and politics. Susan was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University, and in 2000 assumed her current position as director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She’s the author of nine books, and her new one is Left Is Not Woke. We hit it off from the get-go. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Robert Kaplan On The Tragedy In Geopolitics (4/14/23)
Bob is a foreign affairs and travel journalist, and a scholar of the classics. For three decades he reported for The Atlantic and wrote for many other places, including the editorial pages of the NYT and WaPo — and TNR back in my day. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is a senior adviser at Eurasia Group. He’s the author of 21 books, and his new book is The Tragic Mind. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Lind On Populism And Elites (4/7/23)
An old friend, Mike has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and UT-Austin. He’s been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New Republic, where I published him often, and he now writes frequently for the NYT and Financial Times. The author of many books, his most recent is The New Class War, and his forthcoming book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jon Ward On Evangelicals And Politics (3/31/23)
He’s the chief national correspondent for Yahoo News and the host of “The Long Game” podcast. His first book was Camelot’s End: Kennedy v Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party, and his new book is Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation. You can also follow Jon’s writing on his substack, Border-Stalkers, and on his website, jonwardwrites.org. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Hannah Barnes On The Scandal Of Tavistock (3/24/23)
The award-winning journalist is currently the Investigations Producer at Newsnight — the BBC’s flagship program for news and current affairs — and before that she was in BBC Radio, producing and reporting documentaries. She just published her first book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Twenty-two publishers turned down the book in the UK, it has no US publisher, yet it’s already a bestseller. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
James Alison On Christianity (3/17/23)
He’s a Roman Catholic priest, theologian and writer of many books. His life’s work has been the application of the thought of René Girard to the understanding of basic Christianity. He has also stood up for truthfulness about gays and lesbians in the life of the Church; and has been a good friend for many years. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Cathy Young On Ukraine And CRT In Schools (3/10/23)
She’s a libertarian journalist and author — currently a staff writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a frequent contributor to Reason magazine. Cathy has written two books: Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, and Growing Up In Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood. We talk about how her life under totalitarianism informed her views on the war in Ukraine, and the authoritarian illiberalism in the US. She cheered me up a bit. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Gray On The Dusk Of Western Liberalism (3/3/23)
I regard him as one of the great minds of our time, and this is one of my favorite pods ever. The political philosopher retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. John’s forthcoming book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Aurelian Craiutu On Moderation's Moment (2/24/23)
He’s a political scientist and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. His forthcoming book is Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. If you think you know what moderation is, Aurelian will surprise you. Not mushy; not vague; not the median: it’s a political temperament and philosophy with its own distinctive heritage. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jill Filipovic On Feminism And Abortion (2/17/23)
A journalist and lawyer, she’s has been a columnist for The Guardian, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and an old-school blogger at Feministe. She’s the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Currently a columnist for CNN, Jill also runs her own substack and writing retreats around the world. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nicholas Wade On The Lab Leak Covid Theory (2/10/23)
He’s a journalist with a long, distinguished career at the New York Times, the magazine Nature, and the journal Science. He’s the author of many books, including A Troublesome Inheritance, The Faith Instinct, and Before the Dawn. Last year he became one of the few mainstream journalists to seriously consider the lab leak theory, so in this episode we focus on his querulous and disturbing tract, Where Covid Came From. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ben Appel On Woke And Christian Cults (2/3/23)
After working as a hairstylist for over a decade, Ben got a creative writing degree from Columbia University and started contributing to publications such as Newsweek and The Washington Examiner. Raised in a Christian cult, he’s close to publishing a memoir, Cis White Gay, about his liberation from that church and what he calls the Church of Social Justice. You can also read Ben on his substack. I find his story a fascinating glimpse into our fast-changing world. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Rod Dreher On His Crises Of Faith And Family (1/27/23)
He’s a senior editor at The American Conservative and has written several bestsellers, including The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. He’s currently writing a book about bringing the enchantment back to Christianity in a time of growing secularism. He was enchanted himself after taking LSD in college, putting him on the path to Christianity — something he hasn’t talked about in public until now. We’ve been sparring online for a couple of decades, while remaining friends. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matt Taibbi On The Sad State Of Media (1/20/23)
The man himself. Taibbi is an investigative reporter in the Gonzo tradition who had a long career at Rolling Stone magazine, where he won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. He’s written several bestselling books, including Griftopia and The Great Derangement, and now runs a wildly successful substack, TK News. Almost every less-talented hack hates him. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Glenn Loury On Being A Minority Within A Minority (1/13/23)
At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure, and he’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, as well as a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His longtime podcast, The Glenn Show, is now on Substack, where he regularly appears with John McWhorter. He’s writing a memoir of his incredibly colorful life, The Enemy Within. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nick Miroff On The Fentanyl And Border Crises (1/6/23)
Back for a second pod appearance, Nick is a reporter at the Washington Post covering immigration and DHS, and before that he was a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City and Havana. This time we discuss not just the unending border crisis but the spiraling fentanyl emergency, which Nick and his colleagues just covered in a must-read seven-part investigation. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Carl Trueman On Gays And Personal Identity (12/16/22)
A Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian, Carl is currently a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, as well as an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He’s the author of many books, but in this episode, we discuss The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It’s been a hit on the paleocon right. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Alyssa Rosenberg On Cinema And Kid Books (12/9/22)
She writes about mass culture, parenting, and gender for the Washington Post’s “Opinions” section. Previously she was the culture editor at ThinkProgress, the TV columnist at Women and Hollywood, a columnist for the XX Factor at Slate, and a correspondent for The Atlantic. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Kyle Harper On Plagues And Covid (12/2/22)
He’s an historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature, and vice versa. He’s a Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and his latest, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. His mastery of the science is only matched by the ease of his prose. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Robert Draper On GOP Radicals (11/18/22)
He’s a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of several books, including Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and his new one is Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. He’s a friend and a prodigiously productive reporter who truly seems intent in finding out the truth — rather than spinning some ideological tale. And he was there on January 6. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Damon Linker On The Midterms And Extremism (11/11/22)
Damon is a political writer who recently launched his own Substack, “Eyes on the Right.” He’s been the editor of First Things and a senior correspondent at The Week, and he’s the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test. Back when we were both at Newsweek / Daily Beast, he edited my essays, so we’ve been friends for a while. We also both belong to the camp of conflicted moderates. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fareed Zakaria On Colonialism And Liberalism (11/4/22)
Fareed is the host of the CNN show “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” which has been on the air since 2008. He’s also a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of several bestsellers, including In Defense of a Liberal Education, The Post-American World, and his latest, Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World. He’s also been a friend since 1983. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kathryn Schulz On Love And Grieving (10/28/22)
Kathryn is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize for “The Really Big One,” about a future earthquake that will wreak havoc on the Pacific Northwest. She’s also the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and in this episode we discuss Lost & Found, a memoir about falling madly in love while her father lay dying. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Caldwell On Europe's Turmoil (10/21/22)
Chris — an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism — returns to the Dishcast. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, his latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is a constitutional narrative of the last half-century that is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding the roots of our polarization. We discussed the book here. This time on the pod, Chris has just returned from Europe and discusses the rapidly shifting politics there. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Yoram Hazony On Making America Devout Again (10/14/22)
Yoram is a philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He founded the Shalem Center, a research institute in Israel, and he’s currently president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in DC. He is one of the most compelling writers in the “post-liberalism” camp on the right, and his most recent book is Conservatism: A Rediscovery. I think you’ll find I challenged him on everything. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Frank Bruni On The Silver Linings Of Suffering (10/7/22)
Frank is a longtime writer at the NYT — ranging from White House correspondent to chief restaurant critic to op-ed columnist, and now also a journalism professor at Duke. We’ve known each other for many years, gay writers of the same generation. His latest book is the bestselling memoir The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, about aging and optimism after Frank began to go blind. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Richard Reeves On Struggling Men And Boys (9/30/22)
He’s a senior fellow at Brookings, where he directs the Boys and Men Project. His latest book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. I’m fascinated by the challenges of modernity for the weaker sex (men), and Richard has grappled with the questions more calmly than most. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Hitchens On Religion And Terrorism (9/23/22)
As you’ll tell from my brief new intro to this 2006 conversation, my voice right now is so eviscerated I can’t speak at all. Silenced at last! So here is a very early experiment I did with kinda-podcasting, when I took a microphone to Hitch’s place and let the tape roll. A blast from the grave in some ways. We debated the nature of religion and the global war on terrorism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Louise Perry On The Sexual Revolution (9/16/22)
She’s a writer and campaigner against sexual violence. This year she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here. Extensive listener debate here.
Matthew Rose On The Radical Right (9/9/22)
A scholar of religion, Rose is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life — a project of the Morningside Institute — and he previously taught at Villanova. His newest book is A World After Liberalism, an examination of five far-right thinkers, from Julius Evola to Sam Francis, who are proving increasingly influential in post-liberal conservatism in America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Dexter Filkins On DeSantis And Trump (8/12/22)
How to think about DeSantis? We decided to ask Dexter Filkins, who wrote a super-smart profile of the man for The New Yorker. Dexter is an award-winning journalist best known for covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the New York Times. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s the best in the business, a native of Florida, and a longtime friend of the Dish. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sohrab Ahmari On The Failures Of Liberalism (8/5/22)
He’s a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His books include From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. A new voice for a new conservatism, I tried to talk him through how he got to this place — politically and spiritually. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Larry Summers On Inflation And Mistakes (7/29/22)
He’s in the news again this week — after persuading Joe Manchin that the climate and healthcare bill he’s pushing isn’t inflationary. Larry Summers has had a storied career, as the chief economist of the World Bank, the treasury secretary under Clinton, and the director of the National Economic Council under Obama. He also was the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006 and remains there as a professor. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fraser Nelson On The PM Race And Tory Diversity (7/22/22)
He’s a Scottish Catholic highlander who now edits (brilliantly) the Spectator in London. Deeply versed in Tory politics, and sympathetic to Boris, he seemed the ideal person to ask to explain what’s been going on in Westminster, what went so wrong under PM Johnson, and who is likely to replace him. It’s a one-stop guide to contemporary British politics in a mild Scottish accent. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Peter Staley On AIDS And Monkeypox (7/15/22)
Peter is a political activist, most famously as a pioneering member of ACT UP — the grassroots AIDS group that challenged and changed the federal government. Check out his memoir, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism. He’s an old friend and sparring partner, so the episode gets fiery at times. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips, and here for a long segment on the feds’ failures on monkeypox.
Matthew Continetti On Conservatism (7/8/22)
He’s a journalist who worked at The Weekly Standard and co-founded The Washington Free Beacon, where he served as editor-in-chief. Currently he’s a contributing editor at National Review, a columnist at Commentary, and a senior fellow at AEI. We discuss his wonderful book, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jennifer Senior On Friendship (7/1/22)
She was a long-time staff writer at New York magazine and a daily book critic for the NYT. Her own book is the bestseller, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. She’s now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she won the 2022 Pulitzer for Feature Writing. In this episode we focus on her essay, “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Jill Abramson On Journalism And Beltway Scandals (6/24/22)
Jill is a journalist, academic, and the author of five books. She’s best known as the first woman to become executive editor at the New York Times, from 2011 to 2014. She’s currently a professor in the English department at Harvard. We’ve been friends forever. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Goodhart On Overvaluing Smarts (6/17/22)
He’s a British journalist who founded Prospect, the center-left political magazine, where he served as editor for 15 years, and then became the director of Demos, the cross-party think tank. We discuss his latest book, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jamie Kirchick On Gay Washington (6/10/22)
We took the podcast on the road — to Provincetown for a live chat with Jamie Kirchick, whose new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, I reviewed here. We were able to discuss much more than could be covered in pixels — with questions from the audience as well. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Robert Wright On The Ukraine Crisis (6/3/22)
He is a journalist, public intellectual, and the author of many books, including The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True. Bob is quite simply brilliant, and his books have been very influential in the development of my own thinking. Empirical but spiritual, he’s one of a kind. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Francis Fukuyama On Liberalism’s Crisis (5/27/22)
He is simply the most sophisticated and nuanced political scientist in the field today. Frank is currently at Stanford, but he’s also taught at Johns Hopkins and George Mason. The author of almost a dozen books, his most famous is The End of History and the Last Man, published shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His new book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
David French On Religious Liberty, CRT, Grace (5/20/22)
He’s a political writer and former attorney who took on high-profile cases for religious liberty. He was also a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and before that he served as president of FIRE, the campus free-speech group. David now writes for The Dispatch and The Atlantic, and the conservative Christian is a mighty critic of the Trump right. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Tina Brown On The Royal Family (5/13/22)
She needs no introduction — but in magazine history, Tina Brown is rightly deemed a legend, reviving Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before turning to the web and The Daily Beast (where I worked for her). We talked journalism, life and royals — her latest book is The Palace Papers. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Douglas Murray On Defending The West (5/6/22)
He’s a British writer and commentator, primarily for The Spectator, and his latest book is The War on the West. It’s a powerful narrative of the past couple of decades, in which a small minority waged ideological war on the underpinnings of Western civilization: reason, toleration, free speech, color-blind racial politics. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Bari Weiss On Saving Liberalism From Right And Left (4/29/22)
She was an op-ed editor at the WSJ and the NYT before leaving to create her own op-ed page on Substack, Common Sense. For some reason Bari is one of the most reviled figures on Left Twitter, despite being one of the most gifted editors of her generation. We talk groomers and culture war desperation and the amnesia of recent triumphs. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jonathan Haidt On Social Media’s Havoc (4/15/22)
He’s a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business, and he co-founded Heterodox Academy. His latest book is The Coddling of the American Mind, but our discussion centered on his new piece for The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” a history of social media. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nicholas Christakis On Covid And Friendship (4/8/22)
He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and co-directs the Yale Institute for Network Science. We talked Covid, plagues, and friendship as a virtue. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fiona Hill On Russia, Trump, The American Dream (4/1/22)
She was an intel analyst under Bush and Obama and then served under Trump as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Currently a senior fellow at Brookings, her new book is There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Samuel Ramani On Deciphering Russia (3/25/22)
He is a tutor in the Department of Political Science at Oxford and a member of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He has studied Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria, and has two books in the works — one on Russia in Africa and another on the current war in Ukraine. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Maia Szalavitz On Drugs And Harm Reduction (3/11/22)
She is the author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction and Undoing Drugs. Much of her reporting and research on harm reduction is informed by her own history of drug addiction, including heroin, which we discussed in detail. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jim Holt On Philosophy, Humor, Hitchens (3/4/22)
I’ve known Jim forever, and he’s one of the liveliest and rudest conversationalists. He’s the author of Why Does the World Exist?, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, and his latest, When Einstein Walked with Gödel. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Edward Luttwak On Putin, China, Brexit (2/25/22)
He’s a military strategist, historian, and consultant in the “grand strategy” school of geopolitics who has advised many world leaders. He’s the author of almost two dozen books, including Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook and, most recently, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Anne Applebaum On The Ukraine Crisis (2/16/22)
Who better to comment on the Ukraine standoff as the days unfold than Anne Applebaum? She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of many formidable books, including Red Famine, Gulag: A History (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and her latest, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kathleen Stock On The Nature Of Sex And Gender (2/11/22)
She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex for nearly 20 years. In the fall of 2021, she resigned under duress following a vicious campaign to have her fired for questioning the policy goals of radical trans activists. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Johann Hari On Our Attention Crisis (2/4/22)
His latest subject is the modern curse of screen-driven distraction, and how to combat it: Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — And How To Think Deeply Again. Johann is a close friend, so excuse some of the informality and jokiness at the beginning of this chin-wag. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Mearsheimer On Handling Russia And China (1/28/22)
The question of how to deal with a resurgent Russia and a new super-power in China is now an urgent one to think through. I couldn’t think of a better person to kick off this debate than John Mearsheimer, a titan in the field of international relations, and the most eloquent defender of realism in foreign policy I know. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Roosevelt Montás On Saving The Humanities (1/21/22)
He led the humanities-rich Core Curriculum at Columbia for a decade and still teaches there. His new book is Rescuing Socrates. We talk of Augustine and Socrates and Freud and Gandhi and the timelessness of the great texts. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Christopher Rufo On CRT In Schools (1/14/22)
He’s a key architect of the anti-CRT legislation being passed in state legislatures around the country. He’s also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and his Twitter account is tirelessly flagging examples of CRT in the public school system, corporate America, and elsewhere. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Yossi Klein Halevi On Zionism (1/7/22)
He’s an American-born Israeli journalist whose latest book is Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. I truly enjoyed our conversation — alternately honest and difficult. How can one admire Israel while also being candid about its flaws? Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Shellenberger On Homelessness, Addiction, Crime (12/17/21)
I belatedly came to Shellenberger in my research on nuclear power’s potential to help cut carbon emissions. But his new book is what gave me the idea to interview him. On homelessness, crime, addiction, and the fast-deterioration of our public spaces, San Fran-sicko, despite its trolly title, is empirical, tough-minded and, in my view, humane. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
David Wallace-Wells On Omicron And COP26 (12/10/21)
The Covid news keeps coming, and who better to talk to than David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine’s Covid specialist and environmental correspondent. He was on the Dishcast early this year, before the vaccines arrived, and he’s about as honest a broker on the pandemic as anyone. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Femsplainers (+ Frum) On Culture Wars, Covid, Russiagate (12/3/21)
I’ve been meaning to invite Christina Sommers and Danielle Crittenden on the pod since they first had me on theirs, Femsplainers, a few years ago. This week we talked about men and women, trans and cis, gay and straight, and they drank rosé and I smoked half a joint. Danielle’s husband, David Frum, also stopped by. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael O'Loughlin On AIDS And The Church (11/26/21)
Many of you will recall the horrendous way in which the Catholic Church hierarchy responded to the AIDS crisis. But it was not the only story. On the ground, many lay Catholics, priests and nuns defied the hierarchy and came to the aid of the young and sick and dying. Michael O’Loughlin, another gay Catholic, has written a history book, Hidden Mercy, about this other story. We talked faith, sex, disease, and redemption. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Dominic Cummings On Boris, Brexit, Immigration (11/19/21)
How to introduce Dominic Cummings? I’d say he has a decent claim to be one of the most influential figures in modern European history, whatever you think of him. He innovated Brexit, led the Leave campaign, then guided Boris Johnson into a stinking election victory in 2019. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Sam Quinones On Addiction And Bouncing Back (11/12/21)
The author of Dreamland is out with another book about the explosion of hard and dangerous drugs, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. His reporting was an indispensable part of my big magazine piece on the opioid crisis, and we go into great detail on the pod. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ann Coulter on Trump and Immigration (11/5/21)
She’s the author of 13 NYT bestselling books, including Adios, America. I know, I know. A lot of you are going to get mad at me for this one. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Steven Pinker On Rationality In Our Tribal Times (10/29/21)
His new book is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. It’s like taking a Harvard course on the tricks our minds play on us. We had a blast — and I pressed him on several points. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Go here to watch the video.
John McWhorter On Woke Racism (10/22/21)
The Columbia linguist just wrote a bracing tract, Woke Racism, against the new elite religion. He, like me, despises the racism inherent in critical race theory and its various off-shoots, and let’s just say we talked very freely about many of the dynamics of our time. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the whole transcript here.
Bob Woodward & Robert Costa On The Peril Of Trump (10/15/21)
Two of the planet's best reporters uncover more details about the Trump administration. This conversation is a civil, careful examination of the core political question we face today: how can we save liberal democracy from becoming tyranny? Go here for a full description and audio. Go here to watch a recording in living color. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Cornel West On God And The Great Thinkers (10/8/21)
His academic career is long and storied, having taught religion, philosophy, and African-American studies at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Union Theological Seminary. Erudite, passionate, and deeply humane, he is an unapologetically leftist Christian, who is also a champion of free speech, civility and the classics. In other words: a rare and beautiful man. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Briahna Joy Gray On Race And Class (10/1/21)
A lawyer and political consultant who served as press secretary for Bernie Sanders, Briahna co-hosts the superb podcast Bad Faith. I start our enjoyable convo with a simple question: how can we best facilitate the flourishing of black America? A tough but civil conversation. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. The debate continued on Briahna’s podcast.
Antonio García Martínez On Christianity And Woke Religion (9/24/21)
He’s quite the Renaissance man: child of Cuban exiles, journalist, PhD student in physics, Wall Street ace, entrepreneur, Facebook ad pioneer, and Silicon Valley apostate. In this episode we dive deep into our Catholic backgrounds, his break toward Judaism, and the new Woke religion. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ross Douthat On Lyme, Chronic Pain, Faith (9/17/21)
He’s a dear old colleague whose newest book, The Deep Places, is a memoir about his long fight against Lyme disease. In this episode we talked about the world of sickness, which we both know something about, and we debated our differing views of Pope Francis and our different levels of panic over Trump and CRT. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Wolff On The Enduring Danger Of Trump (9/10/21)
A longtime media critic and now the author of three Trump tell-alls, Michael talks with me about the 45th president. How politically dangerous is he still? How delusional and mentally unbalanced? We get into it. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Moynihan On Afghanistan And Free Speech (8/20/21)
He is one-third of the The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch — and he’s a long-time correspondent for Vice. In this episode we mostly cover the cascading news out of Afghanistan, but also bounce around to topics like old media, woke media, neocons and Israel, Big Tech, and third rails. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Schuman On China's Threat And Confucius (8/13/21)
Currently in Hong Kong, Michael is a veteran journalist on East Asian affairs and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and Bloomberg. His most recent book, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World, explores the driving force behind the current Xi regime. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael Lewis On Covid And Grieving (8/6/21)
A chat with the best nonfiction writer in America — and an old friend. Michael’s latest book, The Premonition, spotlights a band of dissenting doctors that battled the inept government response to Covid-19. He also discusses the recent loss of his daughter. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Wesley Yang On The Successor Ideology (7/30/21)
The writer who coined that term — a sort of unifying theory of wokeness — talks with me about the Great Awokening and how to counter it. He’s a columnist for Tablet magazine, the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, and a newly minted Substacker. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Peter Beinart On Zionism, China, Apartheid (7/23/21)
He’s a long-time friend, fellow ex-editor of The New Republic, and one of the most influential Jewish critics of Netanyahu’s Israel. In this episode we focused on foreign affairs — China, Israel, and South Africa — as well as our shared apostasy when it comes to Iraq and neoconservatism. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Pollan On Caffeine, Opium, Mescaline (7/16/21)
One of the writers I most revere in journalism, Michael has a style that is as lucid as his research is exhaustive. His new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants — specifically coffee, poppies, and the San Pedro cactus — is a continuation of his magisterial How to Change Your Mind, a deep dive into psychedelics that made the subject more respectable than it’s ever been. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Amy Chua On Immigrant Success (7/9/21)
Amy, who you probably know as the Tiger Mom, is a law professor at Yale. In this episode we discussed the experience of being an immigrant, of being a minority within a minority, and the importance of, in her words, “turning being an outsider into a source of strength,” not victimhood. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Katie Herzog & Jamie Kirchick On Pride And Alphabet People (7/2/21)
Katie, one of the last remaining lesbians in America, is the co-host of Blocked and Reported alongside her battered pod-wife, Jesse Singal. Gay neocon Jamie is a Brookings fellow and the author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. If you’d like to hear a politically incorrect gay and lesbian conversation that would never be aired in the MSM, check it out. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Brendan Dougherty On Spiritual Crises (6/25/21)
He’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific writer, primarily for National Review. In this episode, the conservative Catholic writer and former atheist discusses “liquid modernity” and the Great Awokening. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Carole Hooven On Testosterone And The Nature Of Sex (6/18/21)
Prof. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of the awesome new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. She’s a teaching star at Harvard and it’s easy to see why. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Bryan Caplan On Open Borders (6/11/21)
He teaches economics at George Mason University. His views on immigration, nation-states, and democracy are extremely different from my own, so we debate all throughout the episode. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Jonathan Rauch On Dangers To Liberalism (6/4/21)
Jon and I go way back to the early days of the marriage movement. In this episode we discussed his important new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, and get into some heated exchanges over Trump, the MSM, and Russiagate — Jon as the optimistic liberal and me as the pessimistic conservative. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Charles Murray On Human Diversity (5/28/21)
He has a new — and probably explosive — book coming out soon, Facing Reality. This conversation is not about that. Instead, I wanted to discuss his last book, which received almost no attention, Human Diversity. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Niall Ferguson On Disasters (5/21/21)
He’s one of my oldest and dearest friends, stretching back to our time at Magdalen College. The prolific historian is out with a new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Julie Bindel On Gender And Sex Differences (5/14/21)
A co-founder of Justice for Women, she has a long career campaigning against male violence. I disagree with her on many subjects but found strange agreement on others. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Eric Kaufmann On Race And Demographics In The West (4/30/21)
He’s a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and he most recently wrote the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here clips.
Shawn McCreesh On Surviving The Opioid Crisis (4/23/21)
He’s a first-generation college grad working at the New York Times and just penned a popular op-ed on his own experience growing up in a culture of opioids in suburban Philly. It’s a moving account of a Millennial tragedy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Buck Angel & Helena Kerschner On Trans And Detrans (4/16/21)
Buck was a pioneering porn star and now a sex educator, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. Helena is a 22-year-old woman who lived as a man on hormone therapy for several years before detransitioning. They share a resistance to the dogma of the trans activist community and speak forcefully and elegantly against it. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nick Miroff On The Border Crisis (4/9/21)
He’s the supremely talented reporter at the Washington Post covering immigration and DHS, and before that he was a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City and Havana. We tried to break down what is actually happening on the Southern border, and how likely it is to get exponentially worse. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Emily Yoffe On Due Process And Campus Rape (4/2/21)
She’s been the most fearless reporter on the fraught subject of sexual assault and due process on college campuses, first for Slate and then The Atlantic. She also wrote a hilarious book about a beagle, What the Dog Did. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Tim Shipman On Brexit, Boris, The Embattled Crown (3/26/21)
He is simply the best political reporter in Britain and knows the Westminster political class as well as anyone. In this episode, we talk about Boris Johnson’s astonishing luck and charm, as well as the Labour Party’s floundering. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Mickey Kaus On Immigration And Welfare (3/19/21)
He’s an old friend and colleague from way back. His 1992 book, The End of Equality, was hugely influential for welfare reform in the Clinton years. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Sally Satel On Drug Addiction And Personal Agency (3/12/21)
She’s a psychiatrist and journalist who just came back after spending a year with opioid addicts in Ironton, Ohio. We also discussed depression, mental illness, and modernity. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Glenn Greenwald On Woke Journalists, Bolsonaro, Torture (3/5/21)
The indefatigable Greenwald needs no introduction for Dishheads. He was once a demon for the pro-war right; and now for the woke left. You can order his book on Brazil under Bolsonaro, Securing Democracy, and you can donate to the animal shelter he started. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Mara Keisling On The Trans Debate (2/26/21)
She’s a brilliant transgender rights activist and founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. I’m so grateful for her willingness to have a robust exchange of views on some issues, along with much agreement as well. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael Anton On The State Of Trumpism (2/19/21)
One of the leading intellectuals of Trumpism, Anton was a senior national security official in the Trump administration and is most widely known for writing “The Flight 93 Election,” an essay endorsing Trump in 2016. I think you’ll find our debate, er, lively. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kmele Foster On Individualism, Equity, Neoracism (2/12/21)
He’s a co-host for the brilliant and funny Fifth Column podcast and the lead producer at Free Think. A friend and an inspiration, Kmele really opens up in this conversation. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
David Wallace-Wells On The Mutating Dangers Of Covid19 (2/5/21)
He’s a deputy editor at New York magazine and one of the sharpest journalists covering the Covid-19 pandemic. This pod is full of fact, insight, and speculation on the virus, the vaccines, and the new variants. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Caldwell On Downsides Of The Civil Rights Act (1/29/21)
He’s an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, his latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is indispensable in understanding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act and the roots of our polarization. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Frum On Immigration, Trump, America's Narrative (1/22/21)
Frum needs little introduction; he’s a long-time writer at The Atlantic and the author of many books. We cover a range of issues in this episode, including immigration, Russiagate, and critical race theory. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Hirschorn On Race And Class In America (1/15/21)
He’s the Emmy-winning CEO of Ish Entertainment, which makes political documentaries, and the founder of The People PAC, which promotes democratic values. We talk about race, class, the resistance, the Democrats, “deep canvassing,” the woke and the promise of the unwoke left. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Shadi Hamid On The Capitol Crisis (1/8/21)
A senior fellow at Brookings and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, Shadi runs a podcast and pens articles with Damir Marusic at the Wisdom of Crowds. Shadi has been a strong advocate of the argument that American democracy is resilient, and that Trump never represented an existential threat to American democracy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Caitlin Flanagan On Cancer, Abortion, Other Christmas Cheer (12/25/20)
She’s a longtime writer at The Atlantic and the author of several books — the most recent is Girl Land. I’ve long been a super-fan. Her extraordinary poise and deep humanity are on full display in our chat. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Meghan Daum On The Culture Wars, Covid, Facing Death (12/18/20)
She’s the author of many books and the host of her own podcast, Unspeakable. We talked about our generation; what it feels like, if anything, to be a man or woman; the truthful hyperboles of wokeness and Trump, the poison of Twitter, the lessons of facing death early, and the benefits of solitude. It was a blast. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Damir Marusic & Shadi Hamid On Authoritarian Threats (12/11/20)
This week I did a simulcast episode with Damir and Shadi that will also air on their own podcast, Wisdom of Crowds. We discussed and debated the resilience of American democracy in this fraught time — with some sharp disagreements. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Olivia Nuzzi On Covering Trump (12/4/20)
She’s the brilliant 27-year-old Washington correspondent for my old haunt, New York magazine, who has been covering all things Trump. I talked with her about the man who has defined so much of the news these past five years. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Dana Beyer On The Science Of Sex, Tensions Within "LGBTQ" (11/27/20)
She’s a retired surgeon, a mother, a trans rights advocate, and the former executive director (and current board member) of Gender Rights Maryland. She’s also been on the boards of two Jewish LGBT organizations. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Matt Yglesias On Pro-Trump Minorities, Immigrant Patriotism (11/20/20)
The contrarian progressive joins the Dishcast to discuss the fallout of the 2020 election. In the episode we talk about wokeness and media, the cancel culture on the right, the progressives who find patriotism hokey, the black voters who support Biden more than white liberals do, and more. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Brian Muraresku On Psychedelics And Christianity (11/13/20)
He’s the author of the NYT bestseller The Immortality Key, which examines the pivotal role that psychedelics may have played in the origins of Western civilization, first among the ancient Greeks and then early Christians. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here for a clip.
Coleman Hughes On The Election’s Blow To Identity Politics (11/6/20)
He’s a brilliant young writer at Quillette on issues related to race, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman. We discuss what kind of authoritarian Trump actually turned out to be, how woke overreach cost the Democrats big this year, and how vulnerable a president Biden could be to the pressures of the identitarian left. Go here for a full description and audio.
Sam Harris On Trump, Biden, The Toll Of Wokeness (10/30/20)
He’s a neuroscientist, philosopher, NYT best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up App. He’s also an old friend, jousting partner, meditation role model, and all round wonderful man. In thinking who might be an ideal first guest for the first Dishcast, and on the eve of an election, Sam came up immediately. Go here for a full description and audio.
Abigail Shrier On Therapy For Kids (3/15/24)
She’s an independent journalist and author. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was a bestseller, and her new book is a bestseller even the NYT has had to recognize eventually. It’s called Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She also has a substack, The Truth Fairy. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christian Wiman On God And Suffering (3/8/24)
He’s a poet and author, and, in my view, one of the most piercing writers on faith in our time. He served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and others. He’s the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, and his new one is called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve yet produced. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Rob Henderson On Overcoming Trauma (3/1/24)
A young independent writer, Rob’s work has been featured in the NYT, the WSJ, the Boston Globe and others, and he writes a popular substack that coined the term “luxury beliefs.” He had a tumultuous childhood in foster care, joined the Air Force at 17, and went on to graduate from Yale and Cambridge. He tells that story in his first book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jeffrey Rosen On Virtue And Learning (2/23/24)
He’s the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts “We the People,” a weekly pod of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the GW Law School, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. A former house-mate of mine and friend for 40 years, Jeff began his career writing some stellar essays on SCOTUS in the TNR when I was editor. His new book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nate Silver On Gambling And Politics (2/16/24)
He’s a statistician and writer focused on American politics and sports, and a longtime friend from the blog days. Nate was the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, and now he writes his own substack, Silver Bulletin. He’s the author of The Signal and the Noise, and his forthcoming book is On the Edge: How Successful Gamblers and Risk-Takers Think. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Isikoff & Klaidman On Trump's Trial In Georgia (2/9/24)
Michael Isikoff is the chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, where he is also editor-at-large for reporting and investigations. Daniel Klaidman is the editor-in-chief for Yahoo News. The veteran reporters have new a book called Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Justin Brierley On The Rebirth Of Belief In God (2/2/24)
He’s a writer and broadcaster who gets Christians and non-Christians to talk to each other. He co-hosts the “Re-Enchanting” podcast for Seen & Unseen, and is a guest presenter for the “Maybe God” podcast. He also contributes to Premier Christianity magazine, where he used to be editor. Justin’s new book is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and he has a documentary podcast series of the same name. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jonathan Freedland On Anti-Semitism And The Left (1/26/24)
He writes a column for The Guardian, hosts their “Politics Weekly America” podcast, and is the co-host of the “Unholy” podcast with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi. He’s also the author of The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, along with several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jeff Greenfield On Trump And History (1/19/24)
He’s been a senior political correspondent for CBS, a senior analyst for CNN, and a political and media analyst for ABC News. He has authored or co-authored 13 books, including If Kennedy Lived, When Gore Beat Bush, and Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Alexandra Hudson On The Struggle For Civility (1/12/24)
She’s the founder of Civic Renaissance, a newsletter and intellectual community dedicated to moral and cultural renewal. She’s also an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy. Her first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Carole Hooven On Harvard's Existential Crisis (1/5/24)
She’s back to discuss her travails at Harvard, teaching in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. She appeared two years ago to discuss her superb book T: The Story of Testosterone, and she’s now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, in Pinker’s lab. She’s also an active member of the newly established Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Joe Klein On Tradition In Chaotic Times (12/22/23)
He’s a journalist, author, old-school blogger, and an old friend. He’s written seven books, most famously Primary Colors, and he was a longtime columnist for Time magazine. This year he launched a must-read substack called “Sanity Clause,” and he just started a podcast with the great John Ellis called “Wise Owls.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Leonhardt On The Dwindling American Dream (12/8/23)
He writes the NYT’s flagship daily newsletter, “The Morning,” contributes to the paper’s Sunday Review section, and co-hosts “The Argument,” a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. In 2011 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on economic questions. His new book is Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Cat Bohannon On Women Driving Evolution (12/1/23)
She’s a researcher who focuses on the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other publications. Her fascinating new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and I highly recommend it. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matthew Crawford On Antihumanism And Social Control (11/24/23)
Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He’s currently a senior fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Judis & Teixeira On Redeeming The Dems (11/17/23)
John Judis is an editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior editor at The New Republic, and an old friend. Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing columnist at the WaPo, and politics editor of the fantastic substack The Liberal Patriot. In 2002 they wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, and their new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Graeme Wood On The Horrors Of Hamas' War (11/10/23)
He’s a foreign correspondent and one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met. Graeme has been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2006 and a lecturer in political science at Yale since 2014, and he’s the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. He was in Israel when we spoke earlier this week. It’s — shall we say — a lively conversation, covering every taboo in the Israel/Palestine question. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Pamela Paul On Ideology, Tech, Womanhood (11/3/23)
For nine years she was the editor of The New York Times Book Review, where she also hosted a weekly podcast, and she’s now a columnist for the Opinion section of the Times where she writes about culture, ideas, society, language and politics. She’s the author of eight books, most recently 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Brooks On Transcending Hate And Loneliness (10/27/23)
He’s a long-time columnist for the New York Times and a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Plus he teaches at Yale. His new book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Spencer Klavan On God And The Humanities (10/20/23)
He’s a writer, an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and the host of the “Young Heretics” podcast. He’s also written How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and edited Gateway to the Stoics. You can follow his latest writing on Substack. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Martha Nussbaum On Justice For Animals (10/13/23)
She’s a philosopher and legal thinker who’s taught at Harvard, Brown, Oxford and is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School. Of her many books, her latest is Justice for Animals. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ian Buruma On Conmen And Collaborators (10/6/23)
He’s a historian, a journalist, and an old friend. He’s currently the Paul Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, and he served as foreign editor of The Spectator and (briefly) as the editor of The New York Review of Books. His latest of many books is The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Leor Sapir On Transing Gender-Dysphoric Kids (9/29/23)
He’s a writer and researcher, currently working as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a frequent contributor to City Journal, particularly on issues of gender identity and public policy. I know of few people more likely to provide light than heat in the agonizing debate over treatment for children with gender dysphoria. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Vivek Ramaswamy On What Makes America Great (9/22/23)
He’s an entrepreneur and a Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential race. He founded a biotech company, Roivant Sciences, after working as an investment partner at a hedge fund. He’s also the author of Woke, Inc. and Nation of Victims. I’ll get ahead of you guys and confess that I liked him in our chat, and decided I wasn’t going to repeat the now-familiar trope of trying to get him to denounce Trump. See what you think, but I learned some stuff about his life. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Freddie DeBoer On The Left Eating Itself (9/15/23)
He’s been a prolific freelancer at publications such as the NYT, the WaPo, Harper’s, The Guardian, Politico, and The Daily Dish. His first book was The Cult of Smart (reviewed on the Dish as “Bell Curve leftism”), and his new book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. A longtime friend of the Dish, Freddie is someone I felt I knew from his writing. He’s somewhat different in person. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sohrab Ahmari On The “Tyrannical” Free Market (9/8/23)
He is a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His first appearance on the Dishcast addressed what he sees as “the failures of liberalism.” This time, we debate his new book, Tyranny, Inc. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Moynihan On Orwell And Conspiracies (8/11/23)
He’s one-third of The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch. He was previously the cultural news editor for The Daily Beast, a senior editor at Reason, and a correspondent and managing editor of Vice. It’s a fun summer chat with an old friend. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Josh Barro On Defending Biden (8/4/23)
He’s an old friend, and a business and political journalist. Josh has worked for Business Insider, the NYT, and New York magazine. He currently runs his own substack called Very Serious, and he cohosts a legal podcast called Serious Trouble, also on Substack. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Lee Fang On Tensions Within The Left (7/28/23)
He was a long-time reporter at The Intercept, and in late 2022 he was one of the recipients of the Twitter Files. He left the MSM this year to launch his own substack at leefang.com. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matt Lewis On Moneyed Elites And Corruption (7/21/23)
He’s been a senior contributor for The Daily Caller and a columnist for AOL’s Politics Daily, and he’s currently a senior columnist at The Daily Beast. He also hosts his own podcast and YouTube show, “Matt Lewis & The News.” In this episode we discuss his new book, Filthy Rich Politicians. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jean Twenge On Gen Z's Social Crisis (7/14/23)
Jean is a writer and researcher who focuses on generational differences. She’s a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of seven books, most notably iGen. Her new one is Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Weigel On Political Reporting (7/7/23)
Dave has worked for The Washington Post, Slate, Bloomberg Politics, and he’s currently at Semafor. He’s also a contributing editor at Reason. In 2017 he wrote a book called The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, and he also guest-blogged for the Daily Dish back in the day. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Erick Erickson On Saving The GOP (6/30/23)
Erick is a radio host and writer. He was an old-school blogger at RedState, serving as editor-in-chief, and he later became a political contributor for CNN and Fox News. Today he hosts the “Erick Erickson Show” on WSB Radio in Atlanta and runs a popular substack of the same name. He’s also working toward a PhD in theology. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Tabia Lee On How To Teach Kids (6/23/23)
Dr. Tabia Lee is an educator and consultant. She was the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza College until she was fired for her heterodox views on DEI. (Her GoFundMe is here.) She’s also a cofounder of Free Black Thought. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Grann On High-Seas Suffering (6/16/23)
He’s an extraordinary investigative reporter, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and an old acquaintance. Several of his stories and books have been adapted into major motion pictures, including The Lost City of Z, Old Man and the Gun, and Killers of the Flower Moon. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder — and the film rights have already been acquired by Scorsese and DiCaprio. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Patrick Deneen On Ending The Liberal Order (6/9/23)
Deneen is a writer and academic. Based at the University of Notre Dame, he is Professor of Political Science and holds the David Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies. His books include The Odyssey of Political Theory and Why Liberalism Failed, and his new one is Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ben Smith On The Gadflies Of New Media (6/2/23)
He’s the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Semafor, a global news company. Ben was an old-school blogger at Politico and others, the first editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and the media columnist for the NYT. His new book is Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. I wrote what he called a “savage and delightful” review of his book, but we remain friends and went at it cordially. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sam Ramani On Ukraine Striking Back (5/26/23)
Where are we in the war between the West and Russia in Ukraine? We asked Sam back to help us figure it out. He’s a tutor in the Department of Political Science at Oxford and a member of the Royal United Services Institute in London. His forthcoming book is Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Oberg On Veganism (5/19/23)
He’s an animal advocate and social media professional who tries to convince me to give up meat. John has served as the director of new media for The Humane League and the director of communications for Vegan Outreach, but now he’s an independent advocate funded by individual donations. He’s also a powerlifter — not something you usually associate with vegans. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Chris Stirewalt On Fox And Journalism (5/12/23)
He’s a political analyst and author. Chris worked at Fox News for more than a decade until they fired him in the wake of the 2020 election, when he was part of the election team that accurately called Arizona for Biden. He’s now the politics editor for NewsNation and a contributing editor for The Dispatch. His new book is Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. He’s also a blast. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nigel Biggar On Colonialism (5/5/23)
He’s an Anglican priest, academic and writer. Formerly the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, he now directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics & Public Life and chairs the board of the UK’s Free Speech Union. The author of many books on ethics, his new controversial one is Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning — a qualified defense of British colonialism, which unwound itself and ended slavery. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Mark Lilla On Escaping Online Politics (4/28/23)
He’s a journalist, political scientist, historian of ideas, and a longtime friend since my twenties, when we studied political thought together. He has taught at NYU and the University of Chicago, and he’s currently a professor of humanities at Columbia. In this episode we focus on his essay, “On Indifference,” and the introduction he wrote for Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. It was a fantastic conversation. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Susan Neiman On The Leftist Case Against Woke (4/21/23)
She’s a philosopher and writer focusing on the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics and politics. Susan was professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University, and in 2000 assumed her current position as director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She’s the author of nine books, and her new one is Left Is Not Woke. We hit it off from the get-go. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Robert Kaplan On The Tragedy In Geopolitics (4/14/23)
Bob is a foreign affairs and travel journalist, and a scholar of the classics. For three decades he reported for The Atlantic and wrote for many other places, including the editorial pages of the NYT and WaPo — and TNR back in my day. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is a senior adviser at Eurasia Group. He’s the author of 21 books, and his new book is The Tragic Mind. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Lind On Populism And Elites (4/7/23)
An old friend, Mike has taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and UT-Austin. He’s been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New Republic, where I published him often, and he now writes frequently for the NYT and Financial Times. The author of many books, his most recent is The New Class War, and his forthcoming book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jon Ward On Evangelicals And Politics (3/31/23)
He’s the chief national correspondent for Yahoo News and the host of “The Long Game” podcast. His first book was Camelot’s End: Kennedy v Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party, and his new book is Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation. You can also follow Jon’s writing on his substack, Border-Stalkers, and on his website, jonwardwrites.org. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Hannah Barnes On The Scandal Of Tavistock (3/24/23)
The award-winning journalist is currently the Investigations Producer at Newsnight — the BBC’s flagship program for news and current affairs — and before that she was in BBC Radio, producing and reporting documentaries. She just published her first book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Twenty-two publishers turned down the book in the UK, it has no US publisher, yet it’s already a bestseller. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
James Alison On Christianity (3/17/23)
He’s a Roman Catholic priest, theologian and writer of many books. His life’s work has been the application of the thought of René Girard to the understanding of basic Christianity. He has also stood up for truthfulness about gays and lesbians in the life of the Church; and has been a good friend for many years. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Cathy Young On Ukraine And CRT In Schools (3/10/23)
She’s a libertarian journalist and author — currently a staff writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a frequent contributor to Reason magazine. Cathy has written two books: Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, and Growing Up In Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood. We talk about how her life under totalitarianism informed her views on the war in Ukraine, and the authoritarian illiberalism in the US. She cheered me up a bit. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Gray On The Dusk Of Western Liberalism (3/3/23)
I regard him as one of the great minds of our time, and this is one of my favorite pods ever. The political philosopher retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. John’s forthcoming book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Aurelian Craiutu On Moderation's Moment (2/24/23)
He’s a political scientist and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. His two most recent books are A Virtue for Courageous Minds: Moderation in French Political Thought and Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes. His forthcoming book is Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals. If you think you know what moderation is, Aurelian will surprise you. Not mushy; not vague; not the median: it’s a political temperament and philosophy with its own distinctive heritage. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jill Filipovic On Feminism And Abortion (2/17/23)
A journalist and lawyer, she’s has been a columnist for The Guardian, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and an old-school blogger at Feministe. She’s the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. Currently a columnist for CNN, Jill also runs her own substack and writing retreats around the world. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Nicholas Wade On The Lab Leak Covid Theory (2/10/23)
He’s a journalist with a long, distinguished career at the New York Times, the magazine Nature, and the journal Science. He’s the author of many books, including A Troublesome Inheritance, The Faith Instinct, and Before the Dawn. Last year he became one of the few mainstream journalists to seriously consider the lab leak theory, so in this episode we focus on his querulous and disturbing tract, Where Covid Came From. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ben Appel On Woke And Christian Cults (2/3/23)
After working as a hairstylist for over a decade, Ben got a creative writing degree from Columbia University and started contributing to publications such as Newsweek and The Washington Examiner. Raised in a Christian cult, he’s close to publishing a memoir, Cis White Gay, about his liberation from that church and what he calls the Church of Social Justice. You can also read Ben on his substack. I find his story a fascinating glimpse into our fast-changing world. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Rod Dreher On His Crises Of Faith And Family (1/27/23)
He’s a senior editor at The American Conservative and has written several bestsellers, including The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies. He’s currently writing a book about bringing the enchantment back to Christianity in a time of growing secularism. He was enchanted himself after taking LSD in college, putting him on the path to Christianity — something he hasn’t talked about in public until now. We’ve been sparring online for a couple of decades, while remaining friends. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Matt Taibbi On The Sad State Of Media (1/20/23)
The man himself. Taibbi is an investigative reporter in the Gonzo tradition who had a long career at Rolling Stone magazine, where he won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. He’s written several bestselling books, including Griftopia and The Great Derangement, and now runs a wildly successful substack, TK News. Almost every less-talented hack hates him. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Glenn Loury On Being A Minority Within A Minority (1/13/23)
At the age of 33, he became the first African-American professor of economics at Harvard to get tenure, and he’s currently the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Economics at Brown University, as well as a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His longtime podcast, The Glenn Show, is now on Substack, where he regularly appears with John McWhorter. He’s writing a memoir of his incredibly colorful life, The Enemy Within. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nick Miroff On The Fentanyl And Border Crises (1/6/23)
Back for a second pod appearance, Nick is a reporter at the Washington Post covering immigration and DHS, and before that he was a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City and Havana. This time we discuss not just the unending border crisis but the spiraling fentanyl emergency, which Nick and his colleagues just covered in a must-read seven-part investigation. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Carl Trueman On Gays And Personal Identity (12/16/22)
A Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian, Carl is currently a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, as well as an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He’s the author of many books, but in this episode, we discuss The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It’s been a hit on the paleocon right. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Alyssa Rosenberg On Cinema And Kid Books (12/9/22)
She writes about mass culture, parenting, and gender for the Washington Post’s “Opinions” section. Previously she was the culture editor at ThinkProgress, the TV columnist at Women and Hollywood, a columnist for the XX Factor at Slate, and a correspondent for The Atlantic. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Kyle Harper On Plagues And Covid (12/2/22)
He’s an historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature, and vice versa. He’s a Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and his latest, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. His mastery of the science is only matched by the ease of his prose. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Robert Draper On GOP Radicals (11/18/22)
He’s a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of several books, including Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and his new one is Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind. He’s a friend and a prodigiously productive reporter who truly seems intent in finding out the truth — rather than spinning some ideological tale. And he was there on January 6. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Damon Linker On The Midterms And Extremism (11/11/22)
Damon is a political writer who recently launched his own Substack, “Eyes on the Right.” He’s been the editor of First Things and a senior correspondent at The Week, and he’s the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test. Back when we were both at Newsweek / Daily Beast, he edited my essays, so we’ve been friends for a while. We also both belong to the camp of conflicted moderates. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fareed Zakaria On Colonialism And Liberalism (11/4/22)
Fareed is the host of the CNN show “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” which has been on the air since 2008. He’s also a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of several bestsellers, including In Defense of a Liberal Education, The Post-American World, and his latest, Ten Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World. He’s also been a friend since 1983. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kathryn Schulz On Love And Grieving (10/28/22)
Kathryn is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize for “The Really Big One,” about a future earthquake that will wreak havoc on the Pacific Northwest. She’s also the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and in this episode we discuss Lost & Found, a memoir about falling madly in love while her father lay dying. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Caldwell On Europe's Turmoil (10/21/22)
Chris — an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism — returns to the Dishcast. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, his latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is a constitutional narrative of the last half-century that is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding the roots of our polarization. We discussed the book here. This time on the pod, Chris has just returned from Europe and discusses the rapidly shifting politics there. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Yoram Hazony On Making America Devout Again (10/14/22)
Yoram is a philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He founded the Shalem Center, a research institute in Israel, and he’s currently president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in DC. He is one of the most compelling writers in the “post-liberalism” camp on the right, and his most recent book is Conservatism: A Rediscovery. I think you’ll find I challenged him on everything. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Frank Bruni On The Silver Linings Of Suffering (10/7/22)
Frank is a longtime writer at the NYT — ranging from White House correspondent to chief restaurant critic to op-ed columnist, and now also a journalism professor at Duke. We’ve known each other for many years, gay writers of the same generation. His latest book is the bestselling memoir The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, about aging and optimism after Frank began to go blind. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Richard Reeves On Struggling Men And Boys (9/30/22)
He’s a senior fellow at Brookings, where he directs the Boys and Men Project. His latest book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. I’m fascinated by the challenges of modernity for the weaker sex (men), and Richard has grappled with the questions more calmly than most. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Hitchens On Religion And Terrorism (9/23/22)
As you’ll tell from my brief new intro to this 2006 conversation, my voice right now is so eviscerated I can’t speak at all. Silenced at last! So here is a very early experiment I did with kinda-podcasting, when I took a microphone to Hitch’s place and let the tape roll. A blast from the grave in some ways. We debated the nature of religion and the global war on terrorism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Louise Perry On The Sexual Revolution (9/16/22)
She’s a writer and campaigner against sexual violence. This year she co-founded a non-partisan feminist think tank called The Other Half, where she serves as Research Director. Her debut book is The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here. Extensive listener debate here.
Matthew Rose On The Radical Right (9/9/22)
A scholar of religion, Rose is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life — a project of the Morningside Institute — and he previously taught at Villanova. His newest book is A World After Liberalism, an examination of five far-right thinkers, from Julius Evola to Sam Francis, who are proving increasingly influential in post-liberal conservatism in America. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Dexter Filkins On DeSantis And Trump (8/12/22)
How to think about DeSantis? We decided to ask Dexter Filkins, who wrote a super-smart profile of the man for The New Yorker. Dexter is an award-winning journalist best known for covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the New York Times. His book, The Forever War, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s the best in the business, a native of Florida, and a longtime friend of the Dish. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Sohrab Ahmari On The Failures Of Liberalism (8/5/22)
He’s a founder and editor of Compact: A Radical American Journal, and he’s a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His books include From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos. A new voice for a new conservatism, I tried to talk him through how he got to this place — politically and spiritually. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Larry Summers On Inflation And Mistakes (7/29/22)
He’s in the news again this week — after persuading Joe Manchin that the climate and healthcare bill he’s pushing isn’t inflationary. Larry Summers has had a storied career, as the chief economist of the World Bank, the treasury secretary under Clinton, and the director of the National Economic Council under Obama. He also was the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006 and remains there as a professor. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fraser Nelson On The PM Race And Tory Diversity (7/22/22)
He’s a Scottish Catholic highlander who now edits (brilliantly) the Spectator in London. Deeply versed in Tory politics, and sympathetic to Boris, he seemed the ideal person to ask to explain what’s been going on in Westminster, what went so wrong under PM Johnson, and who is likely to replace him. It’s a one-stop guide to contemporary British politics in a mild Scottish accent. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Peter Staley On AIDS And Monkeypox (7/15/22)
Peter is a political activist, most famously as a pioneering member of ACT UP — the grassroots AIDS group that challenged and changed the federal government. Check out his memoir, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism. He’s an old friend and sparring partner, so the episode gets fiery at times. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips, and here for a long segment on the feds’ failures on monkeypox.
Matthew Continetti On Conservatism (7/8/22)
He’s a journalist who worked at The Weekly Standard and co-founded The Washington Free Beacon, where he served as editor-in-chief. Currently he’s a contributing editor at National Review, a columnist at Commentary, and a senior fellow at AEI. We discuss his wonderful book, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Go here for the full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jennifer Senior On Friendship (7/1/22)
She was a long-time staff writer at New York magazine and a daily book critic for the NYT. Her own book is the bestseller, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. She’s now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she won the 2022 Pulitzer for Feature Writing. In this episode we focus on her essay, “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart.” Go here for the full description and audio. Go here, here and here for clips.
Jill Abramson On Journalism And Beltway Scandals (6/24/22)
Jill is a journalist, academic, and the author of five books. She’s best known as the first woman to become executive editor at the New York Times, from 2011 to 2014. She’s currently a professor in the English department at Harvard. We’ve been friends forever. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Goodhart On Overvaluing Smarts (6/17/22)
He’s a British journalist who founded Prospect, the center-left political magazine, where he served as editor for 15 years, and then became the director of Demos, the cross-party think tank. We discuss his latest book, Head Hand Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jamie Kirchick On Gay Washington (6/10/22)
We took the podcast on the road — to Provincetown for a live chat with Jamie Kirchick, whose new book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, I reviewed here. We were able to discuss much more than could be covered in pixels — with questions from the audience as well. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Robert Wright On The Ukraine Crisis (6/3/22)
He is a journalist, public intellectual, and the author of many books, including The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True. Bob is quite simply brilliant, and his books have been very influential in the development of my own thinking. Empirical but spiritual, he’s one of a kind. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Francis Fukuyama On Liberalism’s Crisis (5/27/22)
He is simply the most sophisticated and nuanced political scientist in the field today. Frank is currently at Stanford, but he’s also taught at Johns Hopkins and George Mason. The author of almost a dozen books, his most famous is The End of History and the Last Man, published shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His new book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
David French On Religious Liberty, CRT, Grace (5/20/22)
He’s a political writer and former attorney who took on high-profile cases for religious liberty. He was also a major in the Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and before that he served as president of FIRE, the campus free-speech group. David now writes for The Dispatch and The Atlantic, and the conservative Christian is a mighty critic of the Trump right. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Tina Brown On The Royal Family (5/13/22)
She needs no introduction — but in magazine history, Tina Brown is rightly deemed a legend, reviving Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, before turning to the web and The Daily Beast (where I worked for her). We talked journalism, life and royals — her latest book is The Palace Papers. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Douglas Murray On Defending The West (5/6/22)
He’s a British writer and commentator, primarily for The Spectator, and his latest book is The War on the West. It’s a powerful narrative of the past couple of decades, in which a small minority waged ideological war on the underpinnings of Western civilization: reason, toleration, free speech, color-blind racial politics. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Bari Weiss On Saving Liberalism From Right And Left (4/29/22)
She was an op-ed editor at the WSJ and the NYT before leaving to create her own op-ed page on Substack, Common Sense. For some reason Bari is one of the most reviled figures on Left Twitter, despite being one of the most gifted editors of her generation. We talk groomers and culture war desperation and the amnesia of recent triumphs. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jonathan Haidt On Social Media’s Havoc (4/15/22)
He’s a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business, and he co-founded Heterodox Academy. His latest book is The Coddling of the American Mind, but our discussion centered on his new piece for The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” a history of social media. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nicholas Christakis On Covid And Friendship (4/8/22)
He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and co-directs the Yale Institute for Network Science. We talked Covid, plagues, and friendship as a virtue. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Fiona Hill On Russia, Trump, The American Dream (4/1/22)
She was an intel analyst under Bush and Obama and then served under Trump as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Currently a senior fellow at Brookings, her new book is There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Samuel Ramani On Deciphering Russia (3/25/22)
He is a tutor in the Department of Political Science at Oxford and a member of the Royal United Services Institute in London. He has studied Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria, and has two books in the works — one on Russia in Africa and another on the current war in Ukraine. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Maia Szalavitz On Drugs And Harm Reduction (3/11/22)
She is the author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction and Undoing Drugs. Much of her reporting and research on harm reduction is informed by her own history of drug addiction, including heroin, which we discussed in detail. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Jim Holt On Philosophy, Humor, Hitchens (3/4/22)
I’ve known Jim forever, and he’s one of the liveliest and rudest conversationalists. He’s the author of Why Does the World Exist?, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, and his latest, When Einstein Walked with Gödel. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Edward Luttwak On Putin, China, Brexit (2/25/22)
He’s a military strategist, historian, and consultant in the “grand strategy” school of geopolitics who has advised many world leaders. He’s the author of almost two dozen books, including Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook and, most recently, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Anne Applebaum On The Ukraine Crisis (2/16/22)
Who better to comment on the Ukraine standoff as the days unfold than Anne Applebaum? She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of many formidable books, including Red Famine, Gulag: A History (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and her latest, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kathleen Stock On The Nature Of Sex And Gender (2/11/22)
She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex for nearly 20 years. In the fall of 2021, she resigned under duress following a vicious campaign to have her fired for questioning the policy goals of radical trans activists. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Johann Hari On Our Attention Crisis (2/4/22)
His latest subject is the modern curse of screen-driven distraction, and how to combat it: Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — And How To Think Deeply Again. Johann is a close friend, so excuse some of the informality and jokiness at the beginning of this chin-wag. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
John Mearsheimer On Handling Russia And China (1/28/22)
The question of how to deal with a resurgent Russia and a new super-power in China is now an urgent one to think through. I couldn’t think of a better person to kick off this debate than John Mearsheimer, a titan in the field of international relations, and the most eloquent defender of realism in foreign policy I know. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Roosevelt Montás On Saving The Humanities (1/21/22)
He led the humanities-rich Core Curriculum at Columbia for a decade and still teaches there. His new book is Rescuing Socrates. We talk of Augustine and Socrates and Freud and Gandhi and the timelessness of the great texts. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Christopher Rufo On CRT In Schools (1/14/22)
He’s a key architect of the anti-CRT legislation being passed in state legislatures around the country. He’s also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and his Twitter account is tirelessly flagging examples of CRT in the public school system, corporate America, and elsewhere. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Yossi Klein Halevi On Zionism (1/7/22)
He’s an American-born Israeli journalist whose latest book is Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor. I truly enjoyed our conversation — alternately honest and difficult. How can one admire Israel while also being candid about its flaws? Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Shellenberger On Homelessness, Addiction, Crime (12/17/21)
I belatedly came to Shellenberger in my research on nuclear power’s potential to help cut carbon emissions. But his new book is what gave me the idea to interview him. On homelessness, crime, addiction, and the fast-deterioration of our public spaces, San Fran-sicko, despite its trolly title, is empirical, tough-minded and, in my view, humane. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
David Wallace-Wells On Omicron And COP26 (12/10/21)
The Covid news keeps coming, and who better to talk to than David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine’s Covid specialist and environmental correspondent. He was on the Dishcast early this year, before the vaccines arrived, and he’s about as honest a broker on the pandemic as anyone. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Femsplainers (+ Frum) On Culture Wars, Covid, Russiagate (12/3/21)
I’ve been meaning to invite Christina Sommers and Danielle Crittenden on the pod since they first had me on theirs, Femsplainers, a few years ago. This week we talked about men and women, trans and cis, gay and straight, and they drank rosé and I smoked half a joint. Danielle’s husband, David Frum, also stopped by. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael O'Loughlin On AIDS And The Church (11/26/21)
Many of you will recall the horrendous way in which the Catholic Church hierarchy responded to the AIDS crisis. But it was not the only story. On the ground, many lay Catholics, priests and nuns defied the hierarchy and came to the aid of the young and sick and dying. Michael O’Loughlin, another gay Catholic, has written a history book, Hidden Mercy, about this other story. We talked faith, sex, disease, and redemption. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Dominic Cummings On Boris, Brexit, Immigration (11/19/21)
How to introduce Dominic Cummings? I’d say he has a decent claim to be one of the most influential figures in modern European history, whatever you think of him. He innovated Brexit, led the Leave campaign, then guided Boris Johnson into a stinking election victory in 2019. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Sam Quinones On Addiction And Bouncing Back (11/12/21)
The author of Dreamland is out with another book about the explosion of hard and dangerous drugs, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. His reporting was an indispensable part of my big magazine piece on the opioid crisis, and we go into great detail on the pod. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ann Coulter on Trump and Immigration (11/5/21)
She’s the author of 13 NYT bestselling books, including Adios, America. I know, I know. A lot of you are going to get mad at me for this one. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Steven Pinker On Rationality In Our Tribal Times (10/29/21)
His new book is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. It’s like taking a Harvard course on the tricks our minds play on us. We had a blast — and I pressed him on several points. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Go here to watch the video.
John McWhorter On Woke Racism (10/22/21)
The Columbia linguist just wrote a bracing tract, Woke Racism, against the new elite religion. He, like me, despises the racism inherent in critical race theory and its various off-shoots, and let’s just say we talked very freely about many of the dynamics of our time. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the whole transcript here.
Bob Woodward & Robert Costa On The Peril Of Trump (10/15/21)
Two of the planet's best reporters uncover more details about the Trump administration. This conversation is a civil, careful examination of the core political question we face today: how can we save liberal democracy from becoming tyranny? Go here for a full description and audio. Go here to watch a recording in living color. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Cornel West On God And The Great Thinkers (10/8/21)
His academic career is long and storied, having taught religion, philosophy, and African-American studies at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and Union Theological Seminary. Erudite, passionate, and deeply humane, he is an unapologetically leftist Christian, who is also a champion of free speech, civility and the classics. In other words: a rare and beautiful man. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Briahna Joy Gray On Race And Class (10/1/21)
A lawyer and political consultant who served as press secretary for Bernie Sanders, Briahna co-hosts the superb podcast Bad Faith. I start our enjoyable convo with a simple question: how can we best facilitate the flourishing of black America? A tough but civil conversation. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. The debate continued on Briahna’s podcast.
Antonio García Martínez On Christianity And Woke Religion (9/24/21)
He’s quite the Renaissance man: child of Cuban exiles, journalist, PhD student in physics, Wall Street ace, entrepreneur, Facebook ad pioneer, and Silicon Valley apostate. In this episode we dive deep into our Catholic backgrounds, his break toward Judaism, and the new Woke religion. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Ross Douthat On Lyme, Chronic Pain, Faith (9/17/21)
He’s a dear old colleague whose newest book, The Deep Places, is a memoir about his long fight against Lyme disease. In this episode we talked about the world of sickness, which we both know something about, and we debated our differing views of Pope Francis and our different levels of panic over Trump and CRT. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Wolff On The Enduring Danger Of Trump (9/10/21)
A longtime media critic and now the author of three Trump tell-alls, Michael talks with me about the 45th president. How politically dangerous is he still? How delusional and mentally unbalanced? We get into it. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Moynihan On Afghanistan And Free Speech (8/20/21)
He is one-third of the The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch — and he’s a long-time correspondent for Vice. In this episode we mostly cover the cascading news out of Afghanistan, but also bounce around to topics like old media, woke media, neocons and Israel, Big Tech, and third rails. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Schuman On China's Threat And Confucius (8/13/21)
Currently in Hong Kong, Michael is a veteran journalist on East Asian affairs and a regular contributor to The Atlantic and Bloomberg. His most recent book, Superpower Interrupted: The Chinese History of the World, explores the driving force behind the current Xi regime. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael Lewis On Covid And Grieving (8/6/21)
A chat with the best nonfiction writer in America — and an old friend. Michael’s latest book, The Premonition, spotlights a band of dissenting doctors that battled the inept government response to Covid-19. He also discusses the recent loss of his daughter. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Wesley Yang On The Successor Ideology (7/30/21)
The writer who coined that term — a sort of unifying theory of wokeness — talks with me about the Great Awokening and how to counter it. He’s a columnist for Tablet magazine, the author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, and a newly minted Substacker. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Peter Beinart On Zionism, China, Apartheid (7/23/21)
He’s a long-time friend, fellow ex-editor of The New Republic, and one of the most influential Jewish critics of Netanyahu’s Israel. In this episode we focused on foreign affairs — China, Israel, and South Africa — as well as our shared apostasy when it comes to Iraq and neoconservatism. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Pollan On Caffeine, Opium, Mescaline (7/16/21)
One of the writers I most revere in journalism, Michael has a style that is as lucid as his research is exhaustive. His new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants — specifically coffee, poppies, and the San Pedro cactus — is a continuation of his magisterial How to Change Your Mind, a deep dive into psychedelics that made the subject more respectable than it’s ever been. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Amy Chua On Immigrant Success (7/9/21)
Amy, who you probably know as the Tiger Mom, is a law professor at Yale. In this episode we discussed the experience of being an immigrant, of being a minority within a minority, and the importance of, in her words, “turning being an outsider into a source of strength,” not victimhood. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Katie Herzog & Jamie Kirchick On Pride And Alphabet People (7/2/21)
Katie, one of the last remaining lesbians in America, is the co-host of Blocked and Reported alongside her battered pod-wife, Jesse Singal. Gay neocon Jamie is a Brookings fellow and the author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. If you’d like to hear a politically incorrect gay and lesbian conversation that would never be aired in the MSM, check it out. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Michael Brendan Dougherty On Spiritual Crises (6/25/21)
He’s a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific writer, primarily for National Review. In this episode, the conservative Catholic writer and former atheist discusses “liquid modernity” and the Great Awokening. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Carole Hooven On Testosterone And The Nature Of Sex (6/18/21)
Prof. Hooven is an evolutionary biologist and the author of the awesome new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. She’s a teaching star at Harvard and it’s easy to see why. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Bryan Caplan On Open Borders (6/11/21)
He teaches economics at George Mason University. His views on immigration, nation-states, and democracy are extremely different from my own, so we debate all throughout the episode. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Jonathan Rauch On Dangers To Liberalism (6/4/21)
Jon and I go way back to the early days of the marriage movement. In this episode we discussed his important new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, and get into some heated exchanges over Trump, the MSM, and Russiagate — Jon as the optimistic liberal and me as the pessimistic conservative. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Charles Murray On Human Diversity (5/28/21)
He has a new — and probably explosive — book coming out soon, Facing Reality. This conversation is not about that. Instead, I wanted to discuss his last book, which received almost no attention, Human Diversity. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Niall Ferguson On Disasters (5/21/21)
He’s one of my oldest and dearest friends, stretching back to our time at Magdalen College. The prolific historian is out with a new book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Julie Bindel On Gender And Sex Differences (5/14/21)
A co-founder of Justice for Women, she has a long career campaigning against male violence. I disagree with her on many subjects but found strange agreement on others. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Eric Kaufmann On Race And Demographics In The West (4/30/21)
He’s a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and he most recently wrote the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here clips.
Shawn McCreesh On Surviving The Opioid Crisis (4/23/21)
He’s a first-generation college grad working at the New York Times and just penned a popular op-ed on his own experience growing up in a culture of opioids in suburban Philly. It’s a moving account of a Millennial tragedy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Buck Angel & Helena Kerschner On Trans And Detrans (4/16/21)
Buck was a pioneering porn star and now a sex educator, motivational speaker, and entrepreneur. Helena is a 22-year-old woman who lived as a man on hormone therapy for several years before detransitioning. They share a resistance to the dogma of the trans activist community and speak forcefully and elegantly against it. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Nick Miroff On The Border Crisis (4/9/21)
He’s the supremely talented reporter at the Washington Post covering immigration and DHS, and before that he was a foreign correspondent based in Mexico City and Havana. We tried to break down what is actually happening on the Southern border, and how likely it is to get exponentially worse. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Emily Yoffe On Due Process And Campus Rape (4/2/21)
She’s been the most fearless reporter on the fraught subject of sexual assault and due process on college campuses, first for Slate and then The Atlantic. She also wrote a hilarious book about a beagle, What the Dog Did. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Tim Shipman On Brexit, Boris, The Embattled Crown (3/26/21)
He is simply the best political reporter in Britain and knows the Westminster political class as well as anyone. In this episode, we talk about Boris Johnson’s astonishing luck and charm, as well as the Labour Party’s floundering. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Mickey Kaus On Immigration And Welfare (3/19/21)
He’s an old friend and colleague from way back. His 1992 book, The End of Equality, was hugely influential for welfare reform in the Clinton years. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Sally Satel On Drug Addiction And Personal Agency (3/12/21)
She’s a psychiatrist and journalist who just came back after spending a year with opioid addicts in Ironton, Ohio. We also discussed depression, mental illness, and modernity. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Glenn Greenwald On Woke Journalists, Bolsonaro, Torture (3/5/21)
The indefatigable Greenwald needs no introduction for Dishheads. He was once a demon for the pro-war right; and now for the woke left. You can order his book on Brazil under Bolsonaro, Securing Democracy, and you can donate to the animal shelter he started. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Mara Keisling On The Trans Debate (2/26/21)
She’s a brilliant transgender rights activist and founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. I’m so grateful for her willingness to have a robust exchange of views on some issues, along with much agreement as well. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Michael Anton On The State Of Trumpism (2/19/21)
One of the leading intellectuals of Trumpism, Anton was a senior national security official in the Trump administration and is most widely known for writing “The Flight 93 Election,” an essay endorsing Trump in 2016. I think you’ll find our debate, er, lively. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Kmele Foster On Individualism, Equity, Neoracism (2/12/21)
He’s a co-host for the brilliant and funny Fifth Column podcast and the lead producer at Free Think. A friend and an inspiration, Kmele really opens up in this conversation. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
David Wallace-Wells On The Mutating Dangers Of Covid19 (2/5/21)
He’s a deputy editor at New York magazine and one of the sharpest journalists covering the Covid-19 pandemic. This pod is full of fact, insight, and speculation on the virus, the vaccines, and the new variants. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Christopher Caldwell On Downsides Of The Civil Rights Act (1/29/21)
He’s an old friend and, in my view, one of the sharpest right-of-center writers in journalism. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books, his latest book, The Age of Entitlement, is indispensable in understanding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act and the roots of our polarization. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
David Frum On Immigration, Trump, America's Narrative (1/22/21)
Frum needs little introduction; he’s a long-time writer at The Atlantic and the author of many books. We cover a range of issues in this episode, including immigration, Russiagate, and critical race theory. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Michael Hirschorn On Race And Class In America (1/15/21)
He’s the Emmy-winning CEO of Ish Entertainment, which makes political documentaries, and the founder of The People PAC, which promotes democratic values. We talk about race, class, the resistance, the Democrats, “deep canvassing,” the woke and the promise of the unwoke left. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Shadi Hamid On The Capitol Crisis (1/8/21)
A senior fellow at Brookings and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, Shadi runs a podcast and pens articles with Damir Marusic at the Wisdom of Crowds. Shadi has been a strong advocate of the argument that American democracy is resilient, and that Trump never represented an existential threat to American democracy. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Caitlin Flanagan On Cancer, Abortion, Other Christmas Cheer (12/25/20)
She’s a longtime writer at The Atlantic and the author of several books — the most recent is Girl Land. I’ve long been a super-fan. Her extraordinary poise and deep humanity are on full display in our chat. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips. Read the transcript here.
Meghan Daum On The Culture Wars, Covid, Facing Death (12/18/20)
She’s the author of many books and the host of her own podcast, Unspeakable. We talked about our generation; what it feels like, if anything, to be a man or woman; the truthful hyperboles of wokeness and Trump, the poison of Twitter, the lessons of facing death early, and the benefits of solitude. It was a blast. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Damir Marusic & Shadi Hamid On Authoritarian Threats (12/11/20)
This week I did a simulcast episode with Damir and Shadi that will also air on their own podcast, Wisdom of Crowds. We discussed and debated the resilience of American democracy in this fraught time — with some sharp disagreements. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Olivia Nuzzi On Covering Trump (12/4/20)
She’s the brilliant 27-year-old Washington correspondent for my old haunt, New York magazine, who has been covering all things Trump. I talked with her about the man who has defined so much of the news these past five years. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Dana Beyer On The Science Of Sex, Tensions Within "LGBTQ" (11/27/20)
She’s a retired surgeon, a mother, a trans rights advocate, and the former executive director (and current board member) of Gender Rights Maryland. She’s also been on the boards of two Jewish LGBT organizations. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here and here for clips.
Matt Yglesias On Pro-Trump Minorities, Immigrant Patriotism (11/20/20)
The contrarian progressive joins the Dishcast to discuss the fallout of the 2020 election. In the episode we talk about wokeness and media, the cancel culture on the right, the progressives who find patriotism hokey, the black voters who support Biden more than white liberals do, and more. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here and here for clips.
Brian Muraresku On Psychedelics And Christianity (11/13/20)
He’s the author of the NYT bestseller The Immortality Key, which examines the pivotal role that psychedelics may have played in the origins of Western civilization, first among the ancient Greeks and then early Christians. Go here for a full description and audio. Go here for a clip.
Coleman Hughes On The Election’s Blow To Identity Politics (11/6/20)
He’s a brilliant young writer at Quillette on issues related to race, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman. We discuss what kind of authoritarian Trump actually turned out to be, how woke overreach cost the Democrats big this year, and how vulnerable a president Biden could be to the pressures of the identitarian left. Go here for a full description and audio.
Sam Harris On Trump, Biden, The Toll Of Wokeness (10/30/20)
He’s a neuroscientist, philosopher, NYT best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up App. He’s also an old friend, jousting partner, meditation role model, and all round wonderful man. In thinking who might be an ideal first guest for the first Dishcast, and on the eve of an election, Sam came up immediately. Go here for a full description and audio.
