We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known over the decades as the storyteller we trust to observe the troubled heart of our country—our own troubled hearts. She’s been a voice of encouragement—somebody said: a voice that has been overheard by more readers than any other living American writer.

Marilynne Robinson with Chris.

This summer, she crossed a line, relabelling the American condition in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, she writes, are “under occupation” by a faction of our fellow citizens. And it’s quite unlike your normal, ordinary right-to-left or left-to right political shift. It is not what people mean by polarization. It’s something quite different.

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We’re in the Orwellian aftermath of what President Trump has called his 12-day war in the Middle East. It’s over, he proclaimed on Monday. “Congratulations world,” he said on his Truth Social site, “it’s time for peace.”

Huss Banai.

Our guest to watch a mystery unfolding is the Iranian-American scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hussein Banai, known as Huss. He’s been my refuge and resource for 20 years and some on not just venomous politics, but high-tech warfare and now tentative, sudden peace, it appears, between two governments.

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This week, it’s a conversation on the democracy question and the embattled fate of our own, beset as it is from within. Philosopher-historian Danielle Allen is our guest examiner of the cranky American condition. It feels to me shaken, defensive, divided, embarrassed—as I don’t remember ever before—around questions that go to our character as a country, questions about democracies morphing, sometimes disappearing, even dying.

Danielle Allen.

In all the talk we’re hearing, what’s different about Danielle Allen is her timeline. Her eye goes back to ancient days in Athens and Rome, especially to her friend Aristotle, who wrote the book on democracy and its corruptions—in oligarchy and other ways.

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We’re with the writer Paul Elie, recalling the moment when popular culture came to sound like public prayer. There was Madonna in 1989, singing her number one hit “Like a Prayer.” The song is a marker for what Paul Elie calls crypto-religion. Let’s call it the artistic underground where unlabeled church themes took root in our lifetimes. It’s where religious mystery went, but not to die—almost the opposite. Crypto-zone is where pop culture stars found a space for moods and visions they had known growing up.

Paul Elie and Chris.

Think Leonard Cohen and his all-time hit with “Hallelujah.” Think Prince singing “I Would Die For You.” Think Bob Dylan and his gospel period with “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And it’s not just songs. Crypto-religion is the zone where the filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, imagined The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s where the pop artist Andy Warhol, himself a Catholic, made endless versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples.

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We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

John Cassidy.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives to capitalism that might still work better, or even rescue it.

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We’re staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the People’s Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to.

Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff.

We’ve been bracing for a universal trade war, not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it—uninhabited islands (where only penguins and seals live) will be touched. President Trump’s ultimate weapon of choice in such a war is a 125% tariff, on most of what comes from China, raising prices, of course, but the Trump line also says the flood of new tariff income could pay for what he calls his big, beautiful tax cut.

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We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he stands for by now is a sort of MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

Sarah Churchwell.

The book makes every list of great American novels, but it’s more than that. It’s a high-style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self, but a whole cast of rich, mostly repellent characters and wannabes all around him—those famously careless people who smash things up for as long as they can and then let other people clean up their messes. Our guest, Sarah Churchwell, is not the first to make the Gatsby-Trump connection, but nobody has mapped it as broadly as she has.

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We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian Gospels. The title is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.

Elaine Pagels.

By the way, we’re in history class, not Sunday school, but she’s tackling the big questions about just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, who got crucified for his ambition in his battle with the chief priests of the temple and the Romans who ruled Jerusalem at the time.

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We’re tracking President Trump’s squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 million in federal funding. Then Princeton said, “No way, we’ll fight your flimsy charges to the end.” And then Harvard, with $9 billion at stake, tried gentle engagement with the Trump inquiry, until 800 of its professors and staff said, “No way, when free expression and democracy are at risk.”

Ryan Enos.

What’s required, they said, is open, coordinated resistance, which gives the rest of us time to learn what this fight is all about. Ryan Enos is a young professor in Harvard’s government department, among the first of the 800 signers of that petition.

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We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we’re meeting for the first time, in Cambridge.

Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon.

In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.

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