The Delve

Season 9 took The Delve to 75 countries. Season 10 takes it somewhere else entirely. New sound design. New format. Cinematic, story-driven episodes that will make you feel like you're inside the story — not just hearing about it. Brothers to the Rescue. The Strait of Hormuz. No Limits. Puerto Rico. These are the stories Season 10 is built on. We'll see you very soon.

As a junior at Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Chalin took an African Liberation Movements class at the University of Pittsburgh. It changed how he saw the world. This week, a conference called the World Decolonization Forum opens in Istanbul — organized by a Turkish think tank, partnered with Al Jazeera and a Chinese government-adjacent university, held in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. Its agenda dedicates a roundtable exclusively to Palestine. The Uyghurs don't have one. The Kurds don't have one. The Rohingya don't have one. The Sahrawi — whose cause is being actively undermined by the conference's own funders — don't have one. The question this episode asks is simple: if decolonization is the cause, why are tens of millions of colonized people missing from the conversation?

When Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope in history — entered a public dispute with the White House over the war in the Middle East, Chalin was surprised. When JD Vance, a Catholic convert, started citing Catholic just war doctrine to justify a war the head of the Catholic Church says doesn't qualify, he was floored. Then he found an article. Turns out popes have been going toe to toe with the most powerful leaders of their era for fifteen centuries. From Attila the Hun to Napoleon to Hitler — the pattern is remarkably consistent. And it doesn't tend to end well for the world leader.

Two French soldiers killed in Lebanon by Hezbollah sends Chalin down a rabbit hole. France has had troops in Lebanon since 1978. In those 48 years, Hezbollah went from a nascent militia to the most powerful non-state armed group in the Middle East. France was there for all of it. This is the story of a country that designed Lebanon, embedded its language and laws into its DNA, and then watched from the sidelines as everyone else tore it apart. With Hezbollah at its weakest in 40 years, Lebanon's government declaring its military actions illegal, and Israel and Lebanon talking for the first time since 1983 — the window is open. The question isn't whether France should leave. The question is whether France has the will to finally show up.

Chalin talks with former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and Forward Party Chairwoman Kerry Healey about what it actually looks like to govern from inside a broken system — and why she finally walked away from the Republican Party on January 7th. They dig into how primaries have been engineered to reward extremism, why 50,000 elected offices in America are sitting completely empty, and what the Forward Party is building to fill the gap. Plus: what John Adams understood about democracy in 1780 that we've somehow managed to forget.

“Freedom Cities” are being sold as a way to unlock innovation: fewer rules, faster building, and a clean-slate approach to growth. But what is a Freedom City—really—and who would it answer to?

In this episode, Chalin is joined by Rick McGahey, economist at The New School and former Clinton-era Assistant Secretary of Labor, to break down the Freedom Cities idea and the paradox at the center of it: cities are governed by states, so why is this being pushed at the federal level? Rick argues the answer is the point—Freedom City proponents want zones that can dodge not only state constraints, but also wide swaths of federal rules, from taxation to labor protections to environmental regulation.

We also zoom out to the bigger story Rick explores in his work on inequality: metro areas generate the overwhelming share of U.S. GDP, yet both federal and state policy often treat cities with suspicion or hostility—making it harder for them to deliver the basics (schools, housing, transit, safety) that keep a city healthy.

If “Freedom Cities” are built near thriving metros to siphon their economic gravity—while trying to opt out of the rules that protect the people living around them—what exactly are we building: a housing solution, an innovation lab… or a modern company town?

This week, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for deliberately designing their platforms to addict children. The verdict didn't come out of nowhere — the science has been building for over a decade. Chalin talks with Dr. Jean Twenge, psychologist and author of iGen, about what the data has been saying since 2012, why the law protecting kids online was written in 1998 before social media existed, and what it means that the next version of this problem isn't an app — it's an AI that will date your teenager.

What does it mean to “own” something in 2026?

More and more, we buy devices—and then discover we’re renting access to them: app stores that take a cut of everything, software locks that block repairs, and platforms that decide what you’re allowed to install, use, or fix.

In this episode, Chalin is joined by Cory Doctorow—science fiction writer, journalist, and one of the sharpest critics of concentrated tech power—to unpack his idea of techno-feudalism: a system where the biggest companies don’t just compete in a market… they act like landlords, extracting rent from the roads everyone else has to travel.

We talk about the App Store economy, antitrust, “interoperability” as a real-world escape hatch, why right-to-repair is a power issue (not a hobbyist issue), and what it would actually take to make the digital world work for users again.

The “trad wife” aesthetic is everywhere: immaculate kitchens, from-scratch meals, and a kind of calm that feels like an antidote to a chaotic world. But what happens when a performance starts to look like a blueprint?

In this episode, Chalin is joined by Bridget Todd—host of There Are No Girls on the Internet—to break down how the trad wife trend spreads, what it’s really selling, and why it resonates so strongly in a moment of economic anxiety and social instability. We talk about the difference between fantasy and advice, how the algorithm turns lifestyle content into ideology, and the fine print that often gets left out of the “soft life” pitch—money, risk, power, and what happens when reality doesn’t match the reel.

We also dig into a crucial dimension that gets overlooked: how this content shows up differently for Black women, and why “traditional” roles carry a different historical weight depending on who you are.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Kevin Carnahan, we go from TikTok theology to the deep end of the biblical pool.

Chalin and Kevin dig into some of the big, nerdy questions that fuel both faith and conspiracy theories:

1. Is “Elohim” really a plural word—“gods” or “the powerful ones”—and what does that mean for how we read the Old Testament?
2. Was YHWH originally one god among many in a divine council, like we see hinted at in Psalm 82?
3. How do stories like Noah’s Flood echo older Mesopotamian myths—and does that undermine scripture, or give us a richer sense of how these texts came to be?

Along the way, they talk about what makes a claim fringe vs. faithful, how scholarship actually works, and whether admitting that the Bible sits inside a larger ancient Near Eastern story makes belief weaker or more honest.

If Part 1 was about recognizing bad religious information, Part 2 is about what to do when the good information is more complicated than the Sunday School version.

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series with Dr. Kevin Carnahan. If you haven’t heard Part 1 yet—start there.)