The Gray Area with Sean Illing

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Peter Beinart on anti-Semitism in America and illiberalism in Israel Nov 29, 2018

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This is a conversation I’ve been putting off, if I’m being honest. I can’t hold it from the safe space of journalistic distance. It’s about the strange, vulnerable space that many Jews, myself included, find themselves in today. The first part of this conversation is about being Jewish at a time of rising anti-Semitism in the Western world. The October massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence ever committed on American soil. In 2017, Charlottesville, Virginia, protesters waved torches while chanting “Jews will not replace us.” It’s often said that anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. It feels like it’s stirring. The second, and separate, part of this conversation is about Israel. The peace movement in the Jewish state has collapsed, and the country has decided a repressive illiberalism is the best guarantor of safety. They’ve found plenty of allies on the American right for that project, but it’s one that shreds the humanistic and pluralistic ideals that many diaspora Jews, myself included, believe in. All of this is coming at a time that has reminded many of us of the core lessons of Judaism: the importance of remembering what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land, of knowing that bigotry takes whatever forms it requires to justify itself, of maintaining humanity amid struggle. Peter Beinart is an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. He’s also a columnist at the Atlantic and the Forward, a CNN contributor, and author of The Crisis of Zionism. He’s a thoughtful and courageous writer on these issues, and I’m grateful he joined me for this conversation. Recommended books: Covenant & Conversation series by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America by Edward Kaplan The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

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Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong Nov 26, 2018

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Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University and the co-founder of Heterodox University. His book The Righteous Mind, which describes the different moral frameworks that animate the left and the right, was a key influence on my work. But these days, Haidt is worried about something new. "Teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years," he writes in The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff. "The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers." The kids, in other words, aren't all right. Haidt sees a generation warped by overparenting and smartphones and flirting with illiberalism. He worries over a culture of "safetyism" that confuses disagreement with violence. He sees political correctness on campus as a threat not just to speakers' incomes, but to students' psyches. I often find myself a skeptic in this conversation. The panic over campus activism seems overblown to me. It's suffused with bad-faith efforts to nationalize isolated examples of college kids behaving badly in order to discredit serious critiques of social injustice. But that's why I wanted to have Haidt on the show: If anyone could convince me I'm wrong about this, it'd be him. Recommended Books: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie The Authoritarian Dynamic by Karen Stenner Notes from our sponsors:LEGO: In today's show you heard advertising content from The LEGO Store. With LEGO, every gift has a story. Start your story today at https://LEGO.build/EKS-Pop

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The Impact: Deportation without representation Nov 22, 2018

Show notes

For Thanksgiving listening, I have an episode of The Impact, from my Weeds co-host Sarah Kliff. The Impact is a show about how policy shapes our lives. This season, Sarah and her team are focusing on the most exciting, innovative ideas at the state and local level. They crisscrossed the country and found that state and local officials are trying to fix some of our country’s biggest problems: campaign finance, affordable housing, educational inequality, and more. This episode focuses on immigration. While the federal government is trying to deport as many immigrants as possible, Oakland, California, is running a policy experiment to help immigrants stay in their communities. Immigrants have no constitutional right to attorneys in immigration court, but Oakland is giving as many immigrants as possible attorneys in court, free of charge. In this episode, find out how Oakland pulls this off when the federal government is against it — and how immigrants’ lives change when they get representation. Find The Impact on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Overcast | ART19

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Molly Ball on Nancy Pelosi’s future and Paul Ryan’s failure Nov 19, 2018

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The midterm elections are being interpreted almost entirely as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But it was also a referendum on Paul Ryan’s speakership, which drove Trump’s domestic policy agenda, and Nancy Pelosi’s opposition strategy. In its aftermath, the two parties need to work through a very different question. How do Republicans understand the failure of Ryan’s brief speakership, which managed to betray key promises (like cutting the debt) while crafting an agenda so unpopular that House Democrats ran more ads about Ryan’s plans than Trump’s words? On the Democratic side, Pelosi’s strategy won the day — but she’s still facing significant opposition from within her caucus. She’ll likely be the next speaker of the House, but what kind of speaker will she be? How will her style have to change for this era in the Democratic Party? Molly Ball is Time’s national political correspondent and one of the sharpest analysts, and best reporters, around today. I always feel like I have a much better handle on the deep forces of American politics after talking to her, and this conversation was no exception.

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Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media Nov 15, 2018

Show notes

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly depressing. At any rate, Whitney Phillips did exactly that. She was one of the earliest scholars of online trolling (yes, that’s a job). She was studying trolling when it was a tiny sideshow. And she was there, studying it, as online trolling got amplified by algorithmic platforms and a click-hungry media. As Gamergate made it a political movement. Then, most importantly, she was there, watching, as the media manipulation tactics that she had seen perfected by the trolls became the playbook for how Trump controls the media’s agenda, and the national conversation. I’m in the media. I’m inside this machine looking out. It can be hard, from inside, to understand what the hell is happening. But Phillips is outside the machine looking in. And she understands, better than anyone I’ve talked to, what’s gone wrong, and how hard it will be to fix. Recommended books: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble Custodians of the Internet by Tarleton Gillespie

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Ask Ezra Anything Nov 12, 2018

Show notes

You had questions. Smart, interesting questions. Questions about the zero-sum logic of markets, about whether compromise is possible or even desirable in today’s politics, about where the left goes too far, about local vs. national politics, about how to break into journalism, about Sam Harris and the “Intellectual Dark Web,” about deep work, about spirituality and politics, tribalism and democracy, and whose job it is to persuade racists, anyway. I have, well, not answers, exactly, but thoughts. Musings. Reflections. This is the long-awaited AMA episode. I’m joined by Vox’s master of interviews, Sean Illing, who agreed to make sure I wasn’t weaseling away from the hard questions or completely missing the point. This was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy it.

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Presidents in crisis with Slow Burn’s Leon Neyfakh Nov 08, 2018

Show notes

Slow Burn is one of my favorite podcasts of the past few years. Its first season, on Watergate, relived the confusion, chaos, and strangeness of the Richard Nixon presidency’s collapse. Its second season, on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and the surrounding allegations of sexual harassment and even assault, demanded a reckoning with one of the Democratic Party’s living icons. But where some histories use the past to comfort, Leon Neyfakh, Slow Burn’s host and creator, uses it to complicate: His show raises hard questions about presidential corruption, political accountability, public morality, and the partisan mind. This podcast was recorded before the midterm elections. For my take on the elections, head over to the latest episode of The Weeds. But if you want a conversation about whether liberals need to reassess Bill Clinton, whether Watergate would’ve been punished by a Republican Congress, and what all this teaches us about Donald Trump’s presidency, you’re in the right place. Recommended books: Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca ed. by Alexander Star A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris The Crime of Sheila McGough by Janet Malcolm

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Sandy Darity has a plan to close the wealth gap Nov 05, 2018

Show notes

Here’s something to consider: For families in which the lead earner has a college degree, the average white family has $180,500 in wealth. The average black family? $23,400. That’s a difference of almost $160,000 — $160,000 that could be used to send a kid to college, get through an illness, start a small business, or make a down payment on a home that builds wealth for the next generation, too. Sandy Darity is an economist at Duke University, and much of his work has focused on the racial wealth gap, and how to close it. He’s a pioneer of “stratification economics” — a branch of study that takes groups seriously as economic units, and thinks hard about how group incentives change our behavior and drive our decisions. In this podcast, we talk about stratification economics, as well as Darity’s idea of “baby bonds”: assets that would build to give poor children up to $50,000 in wealth by the time they become adults, which would in turn give them a chance to invest in themselves or their future the same way children from richer families do. Think of it as a plan for universal basic wealth — and people are listening: Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), a past guest on this show, recently released a plan to closely tracked Darity’s proposal. I know, I know, the election is in a day. But right now, we don’t know who will win. So how about spending some time thinking about what someone who actually wanted to ease problems like wealth inequality could do if they did have power? Recommended books: Caste, Class, and Race by Oliver Cox Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois

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How identity politics elected Donald Trump Nov 01, 2018

Show notes

Identity Crisis is the most important book written on the 2016 election. Based on reams of data covering virtually every controversy, theory, and explanation for the outcome, it settles many of the debates that have raged over the past two years. More importantly, it offers a framework for thinking about American politics in this era. The authors — political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck — show how identity drives American politics, why our political identities are getting stronger and angrier, and how the Obama and Trump eras have changed our parties and made conflict more irresolvable. Only some of the conversations I have on this show really change how I think about politics, but this was one of them. Don’t miss it. Recommended books: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild Divided by Color by Donald Kinder The American Voter by Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes

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Rep. Mark Sanford on losing the Republican Party to Donald Trump Oct 29, 2018

Show notes

Mark Sanford was elected to Congress in 1994, where he quickly established himself as one of the most conservative members of the chamber. In 2002, he was elected governor of South Carolina. He was, again, one of the most conservative elected officials in the country. Many expected him to be the GOP’s nominee against Obama in 2012. Then it all happened. The disappearance. “Hiking the Appalachian trail.” Sanford left public life. He was done, it seemed. And then he wasn’t. He won a House seat in South Carolina. He overcame the kind of scandal that usually destroys a politician. But he couldn’t overcome Trump. Sanford was a rock-ribbed conservative, a Republican, but he was no Trumpist. He accused the president of fanning the flames of intolerance, of being reckless with the truth. He wrote a New York Times op-ed calling on Trump to release his tax returns. Sanford got a primary opponent for his troubles, Trump endorsed her, and Sanford lost. Weeks after Sanford's defeat, Trump appeared before House Republicans and mocked Sanford in front of his colleagues. The president, unusually, was booed. I sat down with Sanford in his final weeks in Congress to talk about what he’s learned about the Republican Party, about Donald Trump, about America, and about himself. Recommended books: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson

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