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Back in 2015, before President Donald Trump, before January 6, before all the craziness of the last decade, Matt Yglesias made a blunt prediction: American democracy is doomed.

Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt about what that argument got right, what it missed, and why the real problem might not be any one politician but the structure of the system itself. They get into presidential power, partisan loyalty, why Congress keeps folding, and how the two-party system might be quietly making everything worse. They also discuss what it would actually take to fix it — or whether things have to completely break first.

Host: Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp)

Guest: Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias)

We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. 
And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. New episodes drop every Monday and Friday.

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Host Meg Wolitzer presents two works with unusual family dynamics. In Zadie Smith’s “Grand Union,” the mother-daughter bond transcends death and brings with it a whole family history. The reader is Kaneza Schaal. And Richard Bausch’s “What Feels Like the World,” read by James Naughton, explores the bond between a grandparent and a grandchild.

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This is a catch-up version of James O'Brien's Mystery Hour. To join the game, call 0345 60 60 973, Thursdays at 12pm.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball and others gathered on a small stage, sometimes dressed in cardboard, often performing nonsense poems. This was the start of Dada, a spirit more than a movement which spread to other cities in Europe during the war. In part the Dadas (as they called themselves) were protesting against the inevitability of constant wars on the continent and in part this was an artistic experiment around the absurd; they were creating poems, songs, costumes and art that made no obvious sense, just as the war around them made no sense to the artists, designers and poets at the Cabaret Voltaire.

With

Ruth Hemus

And

Stephen Forcer

Produced by Martha Owen

Reading list:

Dawn Ades (ed.), The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (Tate Publishing, 2006)

Hugo Ball (trans. Ann Raimes and ed. John Elderfield), Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (first published 1927; University of California Press, 1996)

Stephen Forcer, Dada as Text, Thought and Theory (Legenda, 2015)

Ruth Hemus, Dada's Women (Yale University Press, 2009)

David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Jed Rasula, Destruction was my Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2015)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

It's often claimed that the Enlightenment was a time when Europeans awoke from their superstitious slumber, discovered rationality, got started on science and threw religion in the bin. But a surprising number of Enlightenment philosophers had religious commitments — including Immanuel Kant, whose work at the time was understood as not just a religion, but a rival to Christianity.

Recorded live at Shakespeare and Company, Adam Biles speaks with Ben Lerner about his novel Transcription, a formally inventive meditation on technology, memory, and human connection.

Beginning with the novel’s deceptively simple premise (a writer loses his recording device and reconstructs an interview from memory) the conversation expands into questions of mediation, voice, and authenticity. Lerner explores how devices reshape attention and relationships, suggesting that humans themselves function as “media,” transmitting voices across time and between generations.

The discussion moves between the philosophical and the intimate: from the limits of digital communication to the emotional power of disembodied voices, from intergenerational care to the fragile transmission of experience. Ultimately, Transcription emerges as a reflection on how stories, memories, and voices persist—less as fixed recordings than as living, shifting acts of interpretation.

Buy Transcription: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/transcription-4

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three other internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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In his bestselling debut The Examined Life psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz explored how we learn to live. Now in Love’s Labour (Chatto) he turns to the equally perplexing topic of how we love. Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there? Grosz was in conversation with Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights.

Frank celebrates the joys of wallowing in a big fat poetry anthology, in this case "A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker: 1925-2025". The poems referenced are “My Great-Grandmother’s Bible” by Spencer Reece and “How to Listen” by Major Jackson.

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With the rise of hustle culture, the grind, and capitalist productivity, we often associate discipline with toxicity. But is there still value in disciplining oneself? In episode 169 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a disciplined approach to this question and more! They discuss modern culture’s rejection of discipline and how this manifests on the left vs the right, the association between discipline and punishment, and Michel Foucault’s seminal ideas on disciplinary power. How can we discipline children without resorting to punishment? And are there models of self-discipline that aren’t rooted in punishment of the self? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss Sandra Bartky’s argument that gender norms are a modern form of disciplinary power.

Works Discussed:

Joan E. Durrant and Ashley Stewart-Tufescu. “What is “Discipline” in the Age of Children’s Rights?.”

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

Adekunle A. Ibrahim and Philomena A. Ojomo. “Discipline and Punishment in Schools: A Philosophical Appraisal.”

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