This week, New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel, coauthor of the blockbuster book “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination,” describes her and coauthor Cecilia Kang's deep dive into the history and ambitions of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. How and why did Zuck allow his tech behemoth to become a hothouse of hate speech, misinformation and coordinated attacks on world governments? And what has he done about it? Frenkel explains to cohost Joe Hagan how Zuckerberg's pursuit of power has run roughshod over social responsibility, as he cashes in on Kumbaya connectivity instead. With Donald Trump suing Facebook for temporarily evicting him and Joe Biden accusing the platform of “killing people” by spreading vaccine misinformation, Zuckerberg keeps his eyes on the 5 billion customers that remain to be converted to the platform. An in-depth conversation.

Floods, wildfires, skies filled with smoke and ash—it’s been a summer full of alarming signs of climate change. This week, journalist and novelist Nathaniel Rich joins Joe Hagan on Inside the Hive to discuss the looming catastrophe we’ve known about for decades but have consistently failed to slow, let alone stop. Should we take the climate fight to politicians and corporations, or is our system too hopelessly broken to respond to the earth’s rising temperatures? How much do individual choices like eating vegan or driving electric cars really help? The author of Losing Earth: A Recent History talks about his personal response as he paints a portrait of ignorance and bad faith among the powers that be. Rich also suggests new ways to change and deepen our relationship to our planet in crisis—including the power of fiction.

This week, we welcome cohost Emily Jane Fox back to the podcast from paid family leave to discuss some personal breaking news: the arrival of infant daughter J.R. last week and the implications for work-life balance, family, marriage and podcasting. Plus, a review of the summer news cycle, what readers of Vanity Fair can expect in weeks to come, and a squeak or two from the new podcast cohost.

This week, veteran Hive correspondent Chris Smith talks to co-host Joe Hagan about the winner of the Democratic primary for New York mayor, Eric Adams, and his journey toward the most powerful office in the city. Smith has been covering city politics for more than two decades, through Bloomberg’s three terms and Bill DeBlasio’s seven tumultuous years, and understands better than most the risks and opportunities for a city trying to reinvent itself after the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer. Can a former policeman and savvy self-promoter like Adams lower crime, enact police reforms while also earning the trust of the NYPD and shepherd the city to prosperity? Chris Smith explains it all to you.

This week, Vanity Fair special correspondent Nick Bilton returns to Inside the Hive to help cohost Joe Hagan (finally) understand what cryptocurrencies are — how they came to be, how they work, and where they’re headed. From Bitcoin to Ethereum, from Elon Musk’s favored Dogecoin to the dreaded “shitcoin," Bilton, who has covered technology for over a decade, links cryptocurrencies to the evolution of an Internet culture driven by speculators, conspiracists and opportunists — and then answers the $33,000 question (the current price of Bitcoin): Should we actually invest in these things?

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox talked to White House press secretary Jen Psaki about the administration's plans to pass paid leave and support working families, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about paternity leave and the stigma around fathers taking time off (if they even get it, that is), and Rent the Runway C.E.O. Jenn Hyman about how offering fair and robust leave to employees makes economic and moral sense for employers.

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about 60 hours of Beatles footage, the fallibility of memories, and recording moments big and small in our own lives. Plus: what's happening in Washington and what's to come next week. 

A year ago, when the pandemic was first raging, director Jon Chu faced a painful decision: He could send his new musical adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” straight to streaming on HBO or wait for the theaters to reopen once the pandemic was over—a depressingly indeterminate time. Now it looks like that decision has paid off. Chu and his film editor Myron Kerstein return to Inside the Hive to talk about the experience of keeping their dream alive while the world twisted and turned. The movie — about a community of immigrants friends and families struggling to keep their “suenitos” alive in New York’s Washington Heights — arrives in a poetic new context that not even Hollywood could have dreamed up: “In the Heights,” screening in 5,300 theaters in the U.S., is the first real blockbuster film to test the power of cinemas after a year of closure. Chu and Kerstein discuss the long journey to the screen, the influences and ideas that went into making it, Chu's desire to mint a new cast of unknown Latino stars (like Anthony Ramos), the unlikely story of how the soon-to-be-iconic swimming pool sequence was conceived and created, and their hopes for a financial success that will make similar musicals possible.

On this week’s episode, Vanity Fair’s senior media correspondent Joe Pompeo breaks down what’s happened to all the news networks post-Trump and what he thinks will happen to the hosts, ratings, and news-obsessed viewers now.