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What Next | Will Israel Starve Gaza Into Submission? Jun 11, 2025

Show notes

In Gaza, two million people are at risk of starvation, as Israeli-controlled aid has been repeatedly interrupted and marked by violence towards aid workers and chaos at distribution sites.

Guests:

Mohammed Mhawish, journalist and writer from Gaza City.

Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, author of the 2017 book, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.

Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.

Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther.

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What Next | Legally Dead—And Pregnant May 29, 2025

Show notes

Adriana Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she was declared brain dead in February—far enough along that her fetus showed cardiac activity. The hospital then refused to let her family decide whether or not they want to keep Smith on life support long enough for the fetus to be delivered.

Guests:

Imani Gandy, Editor-at-Large for Rewire News Group, covering law and courts and co-host of the podcast “Boom! Lawyered.”

Mary Ziegler, law professor at UC Davis, author of Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction.

Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther.

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What Next | What Would You Pay to Stay Alive? May 27, 2025

Show notes

A Revlimid pill costs about 25 cents to make, and about a thousand dollars to buy—but it’s keeping him alive, so what choice does he have?

Guest: David Armstrong, investigates healthcare at ProPublica, author of “The Price of Remission.”

Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther.

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What Next | Here’s How the GOP Cuts Medicaid May 20, 2025

Show notes

In a return to a classic party policy goal, Republicans want to add “work requirements” to Medicaid to offset costs in Trump’s “one big beautiful bill.” Work requirements for health insurance have been tried before, on the state level, and the end result is a lot of people—including working people—losing their health insurance.

Guest: Leo Cuello, research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families and former Health Policy Director of the National Health Law Program.

Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther.

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What Next: TBD | Online and Pregnant May 11, 2025

Show notes

The intimate and extremely personal experience of bringing a child into this world? There’s an app for that…and forums…and so much advice…that contradicts other advice…and a surprising amount of eugenics.

Guest: Amanda Hess, critic at the New York Times and author of the book “Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age.”

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What Next | Will HHS Survive RFK Jr? Apr 29, 2025

Show notes

At his first press conference as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. gave a glimpse of what the department will look like under his leadership: a smaller overall budget, relitigating settled scientific questions.

Guest: Kiera Butler, senior editor and reporter at Mother Jones and author of Raise: What 4-H Teaches Seven Million Kids and How Its Lessons Could Change Food and Farming Forever.

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Ethan Oberman, Isabel Angell, and Rob Gunther.

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Amicus | Playing Chicken With the Constitution Apr 19, 2025

Show notes

Ever since March 15, when three flights carrying hundreds of men who had been afforded zero due process left United States airspace and landed in El Salvador, American democracy has been hurtling toward an internal conflict that the federal judiciary would very much prefer to avoid, but just keeps getting more unavoidable. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Mark Joseph Stern is joined by Leah Litman for the first half of the show. They discuss how, faced with a Trump administration that claims the ability to rewrite the Constitution on the fly, denies the ability to follow court orders, and dangles the possibility of extending its lawlessness to renditioning American citizens to a foreign prison, the federal judiciary this week did what the Supreme Court failed to do last week: explicitly call out the regime’s lawless actions. Aptly, Leah’s new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, comes out on May 13 and they discuss how the highest court’s enabling of Trump and MAGA more broadly has brought us to the constitutional precipice.

Next: In the six months since the re-election of Donald Trump, abortion and reproductive rights have been squished way below the fold, news-wise, obscured by an ever-mounting pile of terrifying headlines. But outside of the public glare, the legal landscape of reproductive rights has been shifting. Dahlia Lithwick talks to Mary Ziegler about her book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction. Together, they examine how notions of fetal and embryonic personhood are fueling punitive actions against women, physicians, and those who provide or seek healthcare related to reproduction.

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What Next | Should Hospitals Drug Test New Moms? Apr 17, 2025

Show notes

In an ongoing opioid epidemic, hospitals drug testing new mothers and their babies has an intuitive logic. But applied unequally, rife with false positives, and prone to disrupting those important early weeks, is it a best practice?

Guest: Shoshana Walter, investigative reporter for The Marshall Project

Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Ethan Oberman, and Rob Gunther.

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Death, Sex & Money | Scorpion Venom and Coffee Enemas Didn't Cure My Mother's Cancer Apr 08, 2025

Show notes

At a time when skepticism about conventional medicine has become even more mainstream, we’re revisiting a story about the causes and effects of that mistrust. Archie Matlow’s mother refused to get a surgery that could have saved her life, which led to her and Archie trying to love each other while bitterly at odds.

You can listen to the full audio piece Archie made here, and you can order their memoir, Dead Mom Walking, here.

Also make sure to check out Archie’s New York Times piece, titled Why My Father Called Me Son, Daughter, He, She and It.

Death, Sex & Money is now produced by Slate! To support us and our colleagues, please sign up for our membership program, Slate Plus! Members get ad-free podcasts, bonus content on lots of Slate shows, and full access to all the articles on Slate.com. Sign up today at slate.com/dsmplus.

And if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com. Our new email address, where you can reach us with voice memos, pep talks, questions, critiques, is deathsexmoney@slate.com.

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What Next | How the Supreme Court Could Gut Planned Parenthood Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, a case that will determine whether South Carolina can cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood.

But with clear legal precedent stating that they can’t, how did this case even end up before the Supreme Court? And, given how far the court has gone to accommodate the MAGA agenda, is the outcome of this case in doubt?

Guest: Ian Millhiser, senior correspondent at Vox.

Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Ethan Oberman, and Rob Gunther.

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