The Cross Section

White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is now on sale! Ayelet and Paul welcome Paul's co-author Tom Schaller to discuss the book: What doing their reporting was like, what's going on with the politics of rural America, and whether democracy can be saved.  

What happened to liberal Zionism? This issue is personal for Ayelet and Paul: Their father was a committed Zionist and socialist who fought in the War of Independence and founded a kibbutz. Reading from letters he wrote home in 1948, they explore the leftist origins of Zionism, its blind spots, and what happened to the dream. With David Myers, professor of Jewish History at UCLA.

Ayelet and Paul are joined by Monica Potts, senior politics reporter at FiveThirtyEight and author of The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Potts’s book tells the story of her childhood in rural Arkansas and how her fate diverged from that of her childhood best friend, who suffered through many of the struggles that are damaging and shortening rural lives today. They discuss how much luck matters in rural communities, what holds women back, and how the image of rural America differs from the reality.

With the war in Gaza still raging, Ayelet and Paul are joined by Avner Gvaryahu, the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization dedicated to exposing the reality of the occupation. Through the testimony of soldiers who have served in the West Bank and Gaza, BtS forces Israelis to confront the ongoing cost of occupation not only to Palestinians but to the Israelis who administer oppressive policies and come home asking what it does to them and their society.

Why are we so attracted to misinformation, oversimplified narratives, and questionable ideas that reinforce our beliefs? When we venture into the online world, what are we communicating about ourselves? Ayelet and Paul discuss these questions with University of Delaware professor Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, author of Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation.

Welcome to Boundary Issues! In this brief preview episode, siblings Ayelet and Paul Waldman introduce themselves and discuss their plans for the show.