The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Latest Episodes:

What Buddhism got right about the human brain Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

I wanted to take a post-Thanksgiving break from politics and current events this week to talk to Robert Wright. He's written some of the best books on religion and evolutionary psychology, including Non-Zero and The Evolution of God. His latest book is Why Buddhism is True, and it’s fantastic. I’m interested in mindfulness, and so have read a lot of books on the subject. This isn’t like those. It’s a not a how-to guide, or an argument for meditation’s health benefits. It’s a deep dive into theories of the mind, informed both by Wright’s scientific background and his study and practice of Buddhism. It’s about how our minds evolved to keep us alive, not to keep us happy or satisfied — and what can be done about it. There is practical advice in this podcast, too. Wright beautifully describes what happens when he reaches what he calls "meditative depths,” what it’s like to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat, and why a mindful outlook doesn’t lead to complacency or neutrality. But whether you’re interested in meditation or not, you should be interested in how your mind works, and on that, Wright has a lot to say that’s worth hearing. Books: What is Life? / Mind and Matter by Erwin Schrödinger Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratan What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

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Rebecca Traister on #MeToo, female rage, and Anita Hill’s legacy Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

We’re living through an upheaval. The #MeToo moment has engulfed some of the most powerful men in politics, entertainment, and media. It has also forced a national reckoning with the reality of America’s sexual and workplace cultures — how often they permitted harassment and assault to flourish, how routinely they protected perpetrators and blamed victims. But why is it happening now? And will it continue or be swept away in backlash? Rebecca Traister is a writer-at-large at New York magazine, as well as the author of Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women. And she’s one of the most essential writers to read on the intersection of gender and politics. In this conversation, Traister traces this moment back to Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas — a “turning point” that changed American politics. We talk about Bill Clinton’s complex legacy, and Traister’s view that there would be no #MeToo moment without Trump. We talk about why the Weinstein allegations were able to set off such a chain reaction — and also how this is a more fragile movement than many realize, and the various ways in which Traister fears it could collapse. Books: Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jill Abramson and Jane Meyer Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper One Woman One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler

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Ai-jen Poo: the future of work isn’t robots. It’s caring humans. Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

When we talk about the future of work, we usually focus on artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless cars. The future of work, we’re told, is a future where humans cease to be necessary. Ai-jen Poo wants to refocus that conversation. When we think about the future of work, she says, we need to think about care workers. Home care work — caring for the elderly and for children — is the fastest-growing occupation in the entire workforce, expanding at five times the rate of any other job. By the year 2030, child care and elder care jobs will be our economy's single largest occupation. If you’re talking about the future of work and you’re not talking about care work, you’re doing it wrong. Poo is a MacArthur "genius" grant-winning activist and organizer. She began her career in New York City, organizing domestic workers, and eventually lobbied New York state to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Thanks to her efforts, seven other states have now passed similar legislation. Today, Poo is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the co-director of Caring Across Generations, and the author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. In this episode, we talk about how she managed to organize a population of workers that spend most of their lives behind closed doors, why she calls herself a "futurist," and the central paradox of care work in America — that the folks who care for those we love are often the most undervalued and least protected. Books: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande Year of Yes by Shonda Rimes, My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

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Evan Osnos on the North Korea crisis, Trump’s mental health, and China's rise Nov 06, 2017

Show notes

Evan Osnos is the author of the National Book Award-winning The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, as well as a staff writer at the New Yorker. And he’s recently back from a trip to North Korea, where he learned how Trump’s threats are playing in one of the strangest and most sealed-off regimes on earth. “To go between Washington and Pyongyang at this nuclear moment is to be struck, most of all, by how little the two understand each other,” he wrote. “In eighteen years of reporting, I’ve never felt as much uncertainty at the end of a project, a feeling that nobody—not the diplomats, the strategists, or the scholars who have devoted their lives to the subject—is able to describe with confidence how the other side thinks.” In this discussion, Osnos and I talk about that trip: about what North Korea is like, what they think about us, and what war with them would actually mean. We also talk about China — they literally can’t believe their luck with Donald Trump, he says — and whether the widespread rumors that Trump is facing some kind of mental deterioration are true. Osnos, who dove deep into the subject for a New Yorker article on the 25th Amendment, fears they are. And that’s not all: We dig into the pressures for war in Washington, the tendency toward survivalism in Silicon Valley, and why Osnos finds his best article subjects by looking at some of the worst things that could possibly happen to the human race. I enjoyed this conversation immensely. I think you will, too. Books Citizen-Protectors by Jennifer Carlson The Vegetarian by Han Kang The China Fantasy by James Mann

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Why politics needs more conflict, not less Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

Here’s a counterintuitive thought: maybe Congress in particular, and politics in general, has too little conflict, not too much. That’s James Wallner’s argument, and it’s more persuasive than you might think. Wallner is a political scientist who became a top Republican Senate aide, working as legislative director for Senators Jeff Sessions and Pat Toomey, as well as executive director of the Senate Steering Committee under Toomey and Lee. He’s now a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, and the author of “The Death of Deliberation: Partisanship and Polarization in the United States Senate.” Wallner is immersed in congressional history and procedure, and one of his conclusions after years of both study and experience is that the leadership in both parties are using the rules to stymie disagreement and suppress chaos — and well-intentioned though this might be, it’s making everything worse. Congress, Wallner believes, is an institution designed to surface conflict so that positions can be made clear, compromises can be tested, and a way forward can be found. That’s not happening now, and the results are disastrous. The Republican Party is particularly bad on this score, he says. “They pretend like they all agree on everything...But if you never deal with your problems, what do you think happens? A break-up! And that's literally what you're seeing right now.” The first few times I hard Wallner’s arguments, I was skeptical. In some ways, I’m still skeptical, as you’ll hear in this conversation. But I’m also convinced he’s onto something important. Books: The Professor's House by Willa Cather Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 by James Madison

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Why the Weinstein scandal gives Tig Notaro hope about Hollywood Oct 23, 2017

Show notes

Tig Notaro dropped out of high school. She drifted between odd jobs for a long time and eventually found her way to Colorado, where she discovered open mic nights and a talent for stand-up comedy. Stand-up brought discipline to her life. But fame eluded her until 2012, when she released "Live," the comedy album of the stand-up set she performed just four days after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and soon after her mother suddenly passed away. Now, Notaro has her own show, "One Mississippi," on Amazon Prime. The show is semi-autobiographical, and she plays a version of herself, a radio host who recently lost her mother and struggles after a double mastectomy. As we discuss here, "One Mississippi" brilliantly tackles workplace sexual harassment, in terms all too familiar in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations. And it doesn’t stop within the boundaries of the show: Notaro has said that Louis CK, one of her executive producers, needs to “handle” the sexual harassment allegations that have swirled around him.

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What happens when human beings take control of their own evolution? Oct 16, 2017

Show notes

Over the past decade, scientists have developed what was once just the subject of dystopian fiction: gene editing technology. It's known as CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, was a key member of the research group that developed the technology. She's also the co-author of the recent book A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. A straightforward description of CRISPR is mind-boggling in what it suggests. As Doudna writes, “the genome — an organism’s entire DNA content, including all its genes — has become almost as editable as a simple piece of text.” It is possible that when the history of this era is written, most of our obsessions — Trump, tax rates, cybersecurity, Obamacare, NFL protests — will be forgotten, and CRISPR will be where historians focus. With great power comes great responsibility — and genuine terror. Doudna had a nightmare as her lab and others started to use CRISPR to make heritable changes in genes. She dreamed that her colleague wanted her to meet someone interested in her research — and it was Adolf Hitler with a pig face, waiting to take notes on the technology she developed. She awoke from that dream in a cold sweat. And the concerns that dream represent pushed her to discuss the implications of CRISPR technology publicly. CRISPR could do enormous good or tremendous harm — or both. In this conversation, Doudna and I discuss its possibilities, its dangers, its technical obstacles, the regulatory questions it raises, and much more. Books: The Double Helix by Jim Watson Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you Oct 09, 2017

Show notes

“It’s important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Coates’s view of his career flows from his view of human events: contingent, unguided, and devoid of higher morality or cosmic justice. He is not here to comfort you. He is not here to comfort himself. "Nothing in the record of human history argues for a divine morality, and a great deal argues against it," he writes. "What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world." It’s this worldview that makes conversations with Coates so bracing. His philosophy leaves room for chaos, for disorder, for things to go terribly wrong and stay that way. In this discussion, I asked him what would make him hopeful, what it would mean for America to live up to its ideals. Closing the 20-to-1 white-black wealth gap, he replied. But what would that take, he asked? “Maybe something so large that you find yourself in a country that's not even America anymore.” Maybe, he mused, it’s something that he couldn’t even support. "It's very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don't tend to happen peacefully." This is a discussion about race, about luck, about history, about politics, but above all, about how the stories we tell ourselves are often designed to carry comfort rather than truth. "For me, my part in this struggle, my part to make a better world, is not simply to have people pick up my work and say, 'Well, all the facts seem correct. I think this is right,' and, then move on with their lives," says Coates. "My job is to bring across the emotion, to make them feel a certain way, to haunt them, to make it hard to sleep."

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How the Republican Party created Donald Trump Oct 02, 2017

Show notes

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress. In 2012, they rocked Washington when they published It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a book that marshaled their considerable authority to argue that the dysfunction poisoning American government was the result of “asymmetric polarization,” notably a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” This was a controversial diagnosis then. After Trump, it’s closer to the conventional wisdom. E.J. Dionne is a columnist at the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of the classic book Why Americans Hate Politics. He’s one of the sharpest political observers alive. And now, like a Canadian indie-rock supergroup, the three of them have come together to write One Nation After Trump, a dive into how the Republican Party created Trump, how Trump won, and what comes next. As Dionne says in this interview, the American system was "not supposed to produce a president like this,” and so a lot of our conversation is about how the guardrails failed and whether they can be rebuilt. Mann, Ornstein, and Dionne may be political sages, but they're also a lot of fun, and they have a lot of fun together. You'll hear that in this conversation. Books: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal by William Leuchtenburg Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr. The First Congress by Fergus Bordewich Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels

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Reihan Salam wants to remake the Republican Party -- again Sep 25, 2017

Show notes

In 2008, Reihan Salam co-wrote Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with his frequent collaborator Ross Douthat. After nearly eight years of President Bush, Salam wanted to remake the Republican Party to appeal to the working-class voters it needed. The vision was idea-driven: tax policy that helped the middle class, healthcare ideas that would mean more insurance for more people, and a generalized effort to remake the safety net to support modern families. In 2016, Donald Trump managed to make the Republican Party more popular among working class whites. But he didn’t do it the way Salam hoped. Today, Salam is executive editor at the National Review, and he’s trying to puzzle his way towards a new synthesis on the questions fracturing American politics. In this episode, we talk about the future of the Republican Party, the healthcare debate, and how he would reform our immigration system (and upend the whole way we talk about it). Salam is a fast, original thinker, and he packs a lot into this conversation. Enjoy! Books: Greater Than Ever: New York's Big Comeback by Dan Doctoroff How Change Happens -- Or Doesn't: The Politics of US Public Policy by Elaine Kamarck The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration by David Goodhart

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