Hard Fork

The president of Microsoft says "absolutely not" — at least when it comes to his company. Brad Smith discusses Microsoft's new guidelines for political contributions, the six stages of antitrust grief and how corporations — and the U.S. government — missed the SolarWinds Hack.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

The billionaire says the current stock market is reminiscent of the first dot-com boom. “Everybody’s a genius in a bull market — until they’re not.”

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Shares of GameStop shot up 400 percent last week, egged on by the Reddit forum r/WallStreetBets. The online community rallied to drive up the stock price and put the squeeze on big hedge funds who had bet against the struggling video game retailer. Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman — who calls r/WallStreetBets one of his “guilty pleasures” — described this as “the online stock-betting equivalent of, like, jumping off a cliff into a river.”

On this episode of "Sway," Kara speaks to Huffman about the ethos behind the online movement, whether Reddit may have been used for market manipulation and if he fears an investigation by the S.E.C. She also presses him on the narrative that this is a David vs. Goliath story of Main Street beating Wall Street — after all, who will be left holding the bag when GameStop’s stock eventually comes crashing?

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

The “Karate Kid” was a hero of the 1980s. Now he’s back, with the actor Ralph Macchio reprising the role for the series “Cobra Kai.” The story is ostensibly a classic battle between a hero and a villain. But as Mr. Macchio notes, it’s actually more complex. Audiences, he says, “recognize the good and bad in both these guys and are rooting for both with their two separate types of shortcomings and problems and demons.”

On this episode of “Sway,” Kara and Mr. Macchio discuss how “Cobra Kai” got from YouTube to Netflix, and explore the show’s underlying themes of toxic masculinity, bullying and polarized politics.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Kara’s conversation on Monday with Chris Best, the chief executive of Substack, hit on echo chambers, extremism and the future of journalism. Afterward, she called up the Times tech columnist Kevin Roose to discuss.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Facebook and Twitter have kicked Donald Trump off their platforms and Amazon Web Services removed Parler from its cloud. But there’s another popular platform that markets itself as the destination for free speech: Substack.

With more than 250,000 unique individuals paying for the newsletters on its platform, Substack is a lot smaller than Twitter or Facebook. Still, it’s a rapidly growing space for big media personalities who want to reach their audience directly. Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Hunter Harris and Anne Helen Petersen have all left their legacy media publications to start their own Substack newsletters. So should media companies be worried about the competition?

On this episode of “Sway,” Kara Swisher speaks to Chris Best, the chief executive and a co-founder of Substack, about content moderation on his platform and asks whether Substack is going to destroy media gatekeepers or just turn into one of them.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

At the inauguration on Wednesday, Kamala Harris became vice president — the nation’s first Black person, the first Asian person and the first woman to do so — and President Biden spoke of “a cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making,” adding that “the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.”

But according to Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian, change may not come so easily. Her reporting reveals that the systems of power in America are deeply defined by caste. On this episode of “Sway,” she explains how she saw an invisible ranking system play out in the raid at the U.S. Capitol, and argues that rushing to move on would be a mistake.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Bryan Cranston has built his reputation playing powerful men, from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Walter White in "Breaking Bad" to Michael Desiato in "Your Honor." On this episode of "Sway," the Tony and Emmy-winning actor breaks down his method, the motivations behind the larger-than-life men he plays and why he draws the line at playing the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz" or the President currently in the White House.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, is charging toward a world in which food is delivered through apps like Uber Eats and “a driver may be human or may be software.” On the way, he acknowledges, “the human consequences can be painful.” Uber is not profitable yet, but its deep pockets and vast infrastructure give it power over independent restaurants and individual drivers. He says, “Do I feel guilty about it? No.”

On this episode of “Sway,” Kara Swisher asks Mr. Khosrowshahi about the plight of drivers and restaurant owners, and whether Uber is part of the “menace economy.”

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.

The February cover of Vogue featuring Vice President-elect Kamala Harris kicked off a controversy involving the most powerful woman in fashion and the soon-to-be most powerful woman in the White House. In a multiday social media maelstrom, a leaked cover photo that Anna Wintour originally described as “joyful,” “casual” and “accessible” was deemed “disrespectful” by Twitter. According to people familiar with the matter on both sides, although there had been no contractual cover approval agreement in place, the cover image was not what the vice president-elect’s team had expected. The day after the first photo leaked, a second — more formal — digital exclusive cover was also released.

Ms. Wintour said in a follow-up statement to "Sway," “Obviously we have heard and understood the reaction to the print cover and I just want to reiterate that it was absolutely not our intention to, in any way, diminish the importance of the vice president-elect’s incredible victory.”

In an exclusive interview on this episode of "Sway," Ms. Wintour discusses the magazine cover, diversity concerns at Condé Nast, the future of the fashion industry — and whether Jeff Bezos could be the next Anna Wintour.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/sway, and you can find Kara on Twitter @karaswisher.