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Marjorie Taylor Greene is a darling of MAGA. But this week a disagreement with Trump over the Epstein files has seen him brand her as a traitor.

Born in 1974 in the suburbs of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene had a conventional upbringing. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Business Administration, and later owned her family’s construction business and a stake in a CrossFit gym.

But like so many Americans, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was a turning point for Marjorie Taylor Greene. In 2020, the newly-styled ‘MTG’ ran for election in her home state, winning a seat to the House of Representatives. Soon she was a recognised name on the national stage, known for her provocative style and endorsement of conspiracy theories.

In the years since, MTG has aligned herself so closely with the president that some called her ‘Trump in heels’. But her campaigning for the release of the Epstein files has caused a rift between her and her one-time hero.

Stephen Smith spoke to Professor Gina Yannitel Reinhardt, senior POLITICO staff writer Michael Kruse, QAnon expert Gabriel Gatehouse, political scientist Andra Gillespie and Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Patricia Murphy, about career, her life in politics and what this rift could mean for her future.

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“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus.

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On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on the role that concepts of power, liberty and conspiracy played in the American Revolution. (Inspired by Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series, ‘The American Revolution.’)

On Monday night, in front of a live audience, I talked to Fareed Zakaria about the different political age he believes we’ve entered. 

Zakaria is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and the author of the 2024 book “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” To mark the release of the book in paperback, Zakaria invited me to have this conversation at Symphony Space in New York City. We discuss the “revolution” we may be living through, the forces driving it,  and how the Democratic Party can adapt.

Mentioned:

The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson

"The Time Tax" by Annie Lowrey

"Behind Trump and Vance Is This Man’s Movement" by Ezra Klein

"The end of progress against extreme poverty?" by Max Roser

"What Does the ‘Post-Liberal Right’ Actually Want?" by The Ezra Klein Show

Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

Book Recommendations:

A Preface to Morals by Walter Lippmann

The Coming Of Post-Industrial Society by Daniel Bell

The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt

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. Mixing by Isaac Jones. 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 Dan Powell and 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.

Thirty-five years ago, the global economy could be neatly divided into market economies, socialist economies and poorer non-aligned countries. Today, that picture is rather more complicated. Western-style neoliberalism – expected to become the dominant economic system after the end of the cold war – is in retreat; socialism is no more; China has emerged as a global superpower; and formerly-poor countries in the global south are rising rapidly – all while neoliberalism itself becomes, well… less liberal. If neoliberalism is on the way out, what will replace it? And what does the rise of Asia mean for western consumers who find their spending power dwindling? The FT’s European economics commentator, Martin Sandbu, speaks to Branko Milanović, senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York, and a visiting professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE.

Further Reading

Globalisation: Where on the elephant are you? (BBC)

Branko Milanovic: ‘The forces of self-interest and technology cannot be undone’

The economic losers are in revolt against the elites  

Martin Sandbu is the Financial Times's European economics commentator. You can find his articles here: https://www.ft.com/martin-sandbu

Subscribe to The Economics Show on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. 

To sign up for free to the new FT Alphaville newsletter on substack, go to ftav.substack.com

Presented by Martin Sandbu. Produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and Lulu Smyth. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Original music and sound design by Breen Turner.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

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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.

25 years in the making, the Australian publication Quarterly Essay has reached its 100th edition. Editor Chris Feik shares how QE was born, and how it comes together four times a year.

• Guest: Chris Feik, editor

The acclaimed writer Simon Winchester turns his eye to the wind - the invisible force with the power to sustain, relieve, inspire, irritate and destroy us. From antiquity to today, we fear and revere the 'breath of the gods'. 

Plus, the bold Australian publication Quarterly Essay reaches its 100th edition. 

Kevin's childhood was a hard one. But it was made bearable by his neighborhood friends, Jason and Gerald. Then, one afternoon, the boys just vanished. Over thirty years later, Kevin still hasn't forgotten them.

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It's been said that the work of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer should come with a health warning, so stark and pessimistic was his outlook on life. And the man was no less confronting than the philosophy: he could be rude, intemperate and misanthropic. But a new biography of Schopenhauer shows him to have been a more complex and even endearing figure than his reputation might suggest.