Public

On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on how the Trump administration has eroded the ability of the U.S. to counter the threat of terrorism, even as that threat appears to be growing.

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“Perfection is the devil. Growth means a greater capaciousness, not a narrowing and an optimisation.” — Daniel Smith

Don’t feel bad about feeling bad. That’s the message of Daniel Smith’s therapeutic new book, Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. Smith — psychotherapist, anxiety memoirist, married Brooklynite — wants to rescue boredom, envy, shame, and regret from the category of emotions that are supposed to shame us. The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Boredom, Smith argues, is the price we pay for meaning. Our darkest emotions aren’t quite as dark as we fear.

Five Takeaways

•       Boredom Is the Price of Meaning: The things that bore us most — raising children, long marriages, eating breakfast with your spouse for the two thousandth time — are also the most meaningful. Repetition is boring. But that’s where the connection, the love, and the main event reside. Boredom is a sign that meaning is nearby.

•       Perfection Is the Devil: Growth means greater capaciousness, not narrowing and optimisation. Smith sees patients who want to perfect themselves out of their own emotions. The feelings that trouble them make perfect sense given the conditions of their lives. Real psychotherapy isn’t a quick fix. It’s about deep change, and deep change is uncomfortable.

•       Social Media Is an Envy Engine: The leaders of early consumer capitalism discovered that stoking envy drives economic growth. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, was the architect. Social media put it on steroids. The result: people constantly questioning whether their own lives are alright. Smith is far more worried about Mark Zuckerberg than about psychotherapists who write books.

•       His Father Heard Voices for Decades and Kept It Secret: He met none of the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. But the culture thought hearing voices was prototypically insane. Smith’s first book argued the border between sanity and insanity is far more porous than we think. Rilke said it best: it’s so often in the way we name things that we go wrong.

•       AI Chatbots Are Inherently Sycophantic: You go to AI for clinical services and what you get is straight validation. These systems have been built to please. There are documented cases of AI psychosis — where sycophantic validation led people into actual delusion. AI can give the illusion of empathy. It cannot deliver the real thing.

About the Guest

Daniel Smith is a psychotherapist and writer based in Brooklyn. He is the author of Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets, and Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions.

References:

•       Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions by Daniel Smith.

•       Episode 2850: Bring the Friction Back — Stephen Balkam on social media addiction. Smith’s envy engine meets Balkam’s friction argument.

•       Episode 2849: How Stories Can Save Us — Colum McCann on narrative and empathy. The real thing AI cannot deliver.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

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Apple Podcasts

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Chapters:

Continuing on Hegel's Phenomenology, "Spirit" chapter, now up to sections 484-510, which is the first part of "Self-Alienated Spirit. Culture."

In Hegel's ongoing semi-mythical story about the development of the modern self and society, we're now at a point where people are "bare persons," legally recognized but not distinguished from each other. We thicken these thin selves using cultural contents: your profession, your group memberships, your style, etc. But this way of individuating is fundamentally self-alienating: these ways that we identify ourselves are foreign to our souls!

Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.

Cassandra Neyenesch reads her story “Enough for Now,” from the April 6, 2026, issue of the magazine. Neyenesch is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator, who has published nonfiction in the Guardian, Public Books, and Art in America, among other places. Her début novel, “A Little Bit Bad,” will be published in May.

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war?

That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. He’s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and he’s one of the people who’ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, “The End of Trumpism,” sparked a lot of debate on the right.

At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think remain unresolved, despite Trump’s decade-long dominance of the Republican Party: What is Trumpism? Is there Trumpism, or is there just Donald Trump?

Caldwell is a contributing writer for Times Opinion and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.” In this conversation, he explains how he understood Trumpism as a movement of “democratic restoration” — and why he believes the Iran war betrays that. And I ask him why he sees the seams of Trump’s base fraying, despite polling that suggests otherwise.

Mentioned:

“The end of Trumpism” by Christopher Caldwell

The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell

“Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?” by Christopher Caldwell

Self-Rule by Robert H. Wiebe

“Trump as Alexander the Great” by John B. Judis

Book Recommendations:

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas

Ball Four by Jim Bouton

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Our muscles power us -- from the tissue that pumps blood from our heart to the tiny fibers that give us goosebumps. How exactly do muscles work — and how can we best strengthen them?

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Host Meg Wolitzer presents two stories from the volume Best American Short Stories 2025, selected by guest editor Celeste Ng.  In “An Early Departure,” by Jessica Treadway, a family relationship is altered in a moment at the train station. The reader is Cynthia Nixon.  In “Third Room,” by Julian Robles, an apartment, and its mysterious tenant, take on lives of their own.  The reader is Ivan Hernandez.   

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

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.

What’s the secret to making a living doing your art? “There really is no magic trick … spoiler,” says Mason Currey, author of Making Art and Making a Living. But in this episode of Emerging Form, we talk with Currey about what he learned by studying how other creatives across genres, cultures and centuries have made it work. We also talk about his own relationship to creative practice–little tricks and attitude shifts, the importance of repetition and habit, developing trust in our own practice, and which compromises can really harm our creative energy.

Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 brilliant minds. His latest book, Making Art and Making a Living was published on March 31, 2026. Currey lives in Los Angeles and writes Subtle Maneuvers, a twice-monthly newsletter on the creative process.