Public

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time follows the development of a self. The narrator grows up in Combray, in the seaside town of Balbec, in Paris, and resolves to become a writer. But that narrative also encompasses so much else, from historical crises to philosophical riffs to self-doubts.

Proust scholar Joshua Landy points out that Proust is “absolutely laying traps for the reader. He's tempting the reader into thinking it's a memoir at times. And he's tempting the reader to think that it's a treatise, that all the things that this narrator says can be taken at face value—you can take them to the bank, it's the gospel truth, this is what Proust believes. In fact, that's not the case.”

As Hannah Freed-Thall, a scholar of Proust at NYU, says: “I try to approach this text with a certain humility . . . I will never make an argument that is true for the entirety of this novel. It’s just too self-contradictory.” In this episode, we talk about how multitudinous richness buzzes throughout the novel’s story of self-discovery. Along the way, you'll hear a reading from Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust; and Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To what extent is drug addiction voluntary? In episode 162 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with philosopher Hanna Pickard about her book, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. They discuss how the “broken brain model” of addiction emerged to combat the moral model of addiction and explore the consequences of both of these models. What drives some people into addiction? What does it mean to say that addiction is a brain disease? How should responsibility and blame fit into our understanding of this condition? And how do we identify when somebody’s patterns of drug use have crossed the threshold into addiction? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about the temporality of addiction and what it means to hold an “addict identity.”

Works Discussed:

Alan Leshner, “Addiction Is a Brain Disease, and It Matters”

Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Hanna Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction

Enjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v

Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I.

It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids?

Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and Claude Code. His newsletter, Import AI, has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years. In this conversation, I ask him to share how he sees this moment — how the technology is changing, whether it is leading to meaningful changes in how we work and think, and how policy needs to or can change in response to any job displacement on the horizon.

Mentioned:

“Import AI” by Jack Clark

“2026: This is AGI” by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang

“Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development” by Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark

“Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’", Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Book Recommendations:

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

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 Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, 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.

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

Matthew Parris invites a fellow Radio 4 presenter into the studio to nominate a Great Life. Dr Sian Williams, who as well as a broadcaster is a counselling psychologist chooses Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund and considered by many to be the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895, the youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She was brought up in a city alive with pioneering culture and with a father at the forefront of new work in psychoanalysis. Although the youngest of the family, Anna had a close relationship with her father, sitting in on his psychoanalysis meetings from a young age before the conservative limitations of the time lead her into teaching. After the trauma of the 1st World War she started a nursery in VIenna that sought to help the young children of the poorest members of society. With the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 she was arrested by the Gestapo but freed. It was enough to persuade her father, who was dying of cancer, to take the family out of the country. They settled in London but Sigmund died soon after.

With the onset of war, and in a completely new environment, Anna rekindled her work with the launch of the Hampstead Nurseries. Again the aim was to provide support and help for very young children who's parents had either been killed or were away in the armed forces. The nurseries pioneered a supportive, observational system, giving children the space to express themselves in play and without the threat of punishment.

Matthew and Sian are joined by Nick Midgley, Professor of Psychological Therapies for Children and Young People in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology at University College London as well as working at Anna Freud.

Producer; Tom Alban

I learned something surprising in law school: To a great extent, we can’t be forced to follow the law; we must decide to follow the law.

Resources & links related to this episode:

Get in touch: [email protected]

Visit Gretchen's website to learn more about Gretchen's best-selling books, products from The Happiness Project Collection, and the Happier app.

Find the transcript for this episode on the episode details page in the Apple Podcasts app. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mary Gaitskill reads her story “Something Familiar,” from the March 2, 2026, issue of the magazine. Gaitskill is the author of eight books of fiction, including “Veronica,” which was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2005, and the novella “This Is Pleasure.” Her most recent book is the essay collection “Oppositions.”

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has long clashed with US President Donald Trump - filing more than 50 lawsuits against the administration to date.

Now, with a new memoir coming out, all signs seem to be pointing at Newsom himself running for the top job in 2028.

Born in San Francisco in 1967, Newsom lived in two worlds - the first, among the wealth and glamour of his father’s friends, the billionaire Getty family, often joining them on luxury trips abroad. The second was a modest home provided by his working single mother, attending the local public school where he struggled with dyslexia.

After launching a successful wine and hospitality business, with backing from the Gettys, Newsom now has two stints as Mayor of San Francisco and two as Governor of California under his belt, and looks to be eyeing up a possible presidential run for the Democrats.

So who exactly is the man once known as ‘Mayor McHottie’ by his fans and ‘Newscum’ by the Trump administration?

Production Team:

Archive

On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on the threat to voting rights posed by the SAVE Act, requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

***

When Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein released their book ‘Nudge’ in 2008, it caught the public imagination. ‘Nudge theory’ – the idea that people could be encouraged to make better choices through small, subtle interventions – was innovative, and exciting. A decade and a half later, a whole lot of nudging seems to have come to a whole lot of nothing. Why wasn’t ‘nudge theory’ more help in tackling climate change, or helping people enroll in pensions? And, even if it hasn’t saved the world, does behavioural science still have a role in policymaking? Former member of the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and professor of behavioural science, Nick Chater, reflects on the legacy of nudges.

Related Links

Can we ‘nudge’ our way to higher growth?

The uses — and the limits — of ‘nudge’ economics

What nudge theory got wrong

Subscribe to Soumaya's show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination: in 2016, and again in 2020. Our guest, Dan Chiasson, is the poet who braided the several stories here of a man—and his city, and his state, and his nation—into a big book called Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician.

Dan Chiasson with Chris.

It’s a masterpiece, full of surprises—the best I’ve read on the power game in our country since Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960, a long time ago. 60 years later, Chiasson has written the Bernie journey in Burlington as his own story. Dan Chiasson’s life is an outcome, he writes, of the Bernie years. But what are we going to call Bernie’s own story—a romance that failed, or arguably a tragedy? Maybe it’s a lesson that we were never encouraged to learn about the expansive promise lurking in our own American democracy

The post Bernie’s Journey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.