The Ezra Klein Show

By New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture

What's The Ezra Klein Show about?

*** Named a best podcast of 2021 by Time, Vulture, Esquire and The Atlantic. ***
Each Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike?

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A Lot Has Happened in A.I. ...

12.01.2023

Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several ...

The Ezra Klein Show episodes:

12.01.2023 A Lot Has Happened in A.I. Let’s Catch Up. Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several ...
11.28.2023 Best Of: This Is Your Brain on Deep Reading. It’s Pretty Magnificent. Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In ...
11.21.2023 The Best Primer I’ve Heard on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Efforts It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is ...
11.17.2023 The Sermons I Needed to Hear Right Now This is a conversation about the relationship between Jewishness and the Jewish State. About believing some aspects of Israel have become indefensible and also believing that Israel itself must be defended. About what it means when a religion built on ...
11.14.2023 Are Democrats Whistling Past the Graveyard? A New York Times and Siena College poll released Nov. 5 showed Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in five of the six key swing states, with a notable jump in support among nonwhite and young voters. In response, Democrats freaked ...
11.10.2023 What Israelis Fear the World Does Not Understand Earlier this week, we heard a Palestinian perspective on the conflict. Today, I wanted to have on an Israeli perspective. Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of ...
11.07.2023 An Intense, Searching Conversation With Amjad Iraqi Before there can be any kind of stable coexistence of people in Israel and Palestine, there will have to be a stable coexistence of narratives. And that’s what we’ll be attempting this week on the show: to look at both ...
11.03.2023 She Polled Gazans on Oct. 6. Here’s What She Found. The day before Hamas’s horrific attacks in Israel, the Arab Barometer, one of the leading polling operations in the Arab world, was finishing up a survey of public opinion in Gaza. The result is a remarkable snapshot of how Gazans ...
10.31.2023 If Not This, Then What Should Israel Do? “Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible.” So writes Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox. Almost a month has passed since Hamas fighters slaughtered over 1,400 people in Israel and the ...
10.27.2023 The Conflicted Legacy of Mitt Romney After factional infighting dominated the G.O.P.’s struggle to elect a House speaker, it feels weirdly quaint to revisit Mitt Romney’s career. He’s served as governor, U.S. senator and presidential nominee for a Republican Party now nearly unrecognizable from what it ...
10.24.2023 The Jewish Left Is Trying to Hold Two Thoughts at Once Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is still ongoing. So ...
10.18.2023 Israel Is Giving Hamas What It Wants Oct. 7 was Israel’s Sept. 11. That’s been the refrain. I fear that analogy carries so much more truth than the people making it intend. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more ...
10.10.2023 We Need Better Narratives About Gender It’s a time of contrast and contradiction for gender queerness in America: At the same time that about 5 percent of Americans under 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary, over 20 states have passed some sort of restriction on gender-affirming ...
10.03.2023 Meet the ‘Angry, Aggrieved’ New Right The New Right has been associated with everyone from Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to right-wing influencers and Catholic integralists. The breadth of the term can make it hard to define: Is the New Right a budding ideological movement or ...
09.26.2023 Two Attorneys Rank the Severity of Trump’s Indictments With four ongoing criminal investigations, Donald Trump is the most indicted president in U.S. history. After years of defying unwritten norms, he will now be subject to a criminal justice system defined by norms and precedents. What does due process ...
09.19.2023 Boundaries, Burnout and the 'Goopification' of Self-Care Love it or hate it, self-care has transformed from a radical feminist concept into a multibillion-dollar industry. But the wellness boom doesn’t seem to be making a dent in Americans’ stress levels. In 2021, 34 percent of women reported feeling ...
09.12.2023 America’s Top Librarian on the Rise of Book Bans Public libraries around the country have become major battlegrounds for today’s culture wars. In 2022, the American Library Association noted a record 1,269 attempts at censorship — almost double the number recorded in 2021. Library events like drag story times ...
09.05.2023 What Have We Learned From a Summer of Climate Reckoning? This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. At the same time, it looks like we are at ...
08.29.2023 It’s Time to Talk About ‘Pandemic Revisionism’ Should schools have been closed down? Were lockdowns a mistake? Was masking even effective? Was the economic stimulus too big? These are the questions that have defined the national conversation about Covid in recent months. They have been the subject ...
08.22.2023 When Great Power Conflict and Climate Action Collide The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the ...
08.15.2023 This Conservative Thinks America’s Institutions ‘Earned’ Their Distrust You can’t understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the complete collapse of trust in mainstream institutions that has taken place among its voters over the last half-century. In 1964, 73 percent of Republicans said they trusted the federal government ...
08.08.2023 A Conservative on How His Party Has Changed Since 2016 The 2024 Republican presidential primary is officially underway, and Donald Trump is dominating the field. But this is a very different contest than it was in 2016. Back then, the Republican Party was the party of foreign policy interventionism, free ...
08.01.2023 How Martin Wolf Understands This Global Economic Moment The world economy has experienced many shocks over the past few years: A pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Skyrocketing inflation. These are the stories that have dominated headlines — and for good reason. But they’ve also overshadowed a set of ...
07.25.2023 Biden, Psychedelics, Twitter, My New Book — and So Much More As I head into a three-month book leave, I wanted to take some time to address a wide array of listeners’ questions. My column editor, Aaron Retica, joins me for a conversation that ranges from the content of my forthcoming ...
07.21.2023 Barbara Kingsolver Thinks Urban Liberals Have It All Wrong on Appalachia When Barbara Kingsolver set out to write her latest novel, “Demon Copperhead,” she was already considered one of the most accomplished writers of our time. She had won awards including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a National Humanities Medal, ...
07.18.2023 What We Learned From the Deepest Look at Homelessness in Decades California has around half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population. The state’s homelessness crisis has become a talking point for Republicans and a warning sign for Democrats in blue cities and states across the country. Last month, the Benioff Homelessness ...
07.14.2023 What Tom Hanks Thinks of America There are few actors as widely beloved as Tom Hanks. Hanks has acted in over 75 films in his 46-year career, winning the best actor Academy Award two years in a row, for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” And more recently, ...
07.11.2023 A.I. Could Solve Some of Humanity’s Hardest Problems. It Already Has. Since the release of ChatGPT, huge amounts of attention and funding have been directed toward chatbots. These A.I. systems are trained on copious amounts of human-generated data and designed to predict the next word in a given sentence. They are ...
07.07.2023 This Taught Me a Lot About How Decarbonization Is Really Going The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest piece of climate legislation ever passed in the United States, setting aside hundreds of billions of dollars for decarbonizing the economy. But the money was always just a first step. The fate of ...
07.04.2023 Best Of: A Revelatory Tour of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Forgotten Teachings It’s hard to think of a more celebrated figure of the 20th century than Martin Luther King Jr. He has a national memorial in Washington, D.C. His birthday is one of just 11 federal holidays. His words and legacy are ...
06.30.2023 What’s Really Going On in Russia? Last weekend, in the course of about 36 hours, Vladimir Putin faced — and then survived — one of the most serious challenges to his rule in over 20 years. An armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of ...
06.27.2023 How ‘Being Animal’ Could Help Us Be Better Humans One of the oldest human ideas is that we are somehow different from animals, somehow superior to them. That’s a mistake, argues the environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger. “Many of the things we most value — our relationships, the romantic sensations ...
06.23.2023 Why This Economist Wants to Give Every Poor Child $50,000 “Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic prosperity and well-being,” says the economist Darrick Hamilton. He’s right. Policy analysis tends to focus on income, but it is wealth that often determines whether we can send our kids to college, pay ...
06.20.2023 What the Heck Is Going on With These U.F.O. Stories? Earlier this month, a news outlet called The Debrief published a story that included, to put it mildly, some explosive material. The story, reported by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, centered on David Grusch, a decorated former combat veteran who ...
06.16.2023 Why Do So Few Democrats Want Biden to Run in 2024? A recent AP-NORC poll found that just a quarter of voters, including only around half of Democrats, want to see Joe Biden run for president again. Many voters are concerned about his age in particular. That’s a problem for Biden, ...
06.13.2023 What We Learned Reading Ron DeSantis's Books Although 12 candidates have entered the Republican presidential race so far, only Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is polling anywhere close to Donald Trump. What does DeSantis actually believe? How has he governed? And what case will he make to ...
06.09.2023 What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal “Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through ...
06.06.2023 The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read My pitch for this episode is simple: Jennifer Pahlka has written one of the best policy books I’ve ever read. Pahlka served as deputy chief technology officer in the Obama White House, and she’s the founder and a former executive ...
06.04.2023 Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Mind Some thoughts on how humans think, how economies grow and why the technologies we think will help so often hurt. Column: “Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Mind” by Ezra Klein Episode Recommendations: Maryanne Wolf on how reading shapes our ...
06.02.2023 Fareed Zakaria on Where Russia’s War in Ukraine Stands — and Much More A lot about the world has changed since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The war itself has brought a number of surprises, from the tenacity of Ukraine’s resistance to the limits of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, competition between the United ...
05.30.2023 Matter of Opinion: A Look at the 2024 G.O.P. Primary Field Today we’re bringing you an episode from the latest New York Times Opinion podcast, “Matter of Opinion.” It’s a chat show, hosted by my colleagues Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen. Each week, they discuss an issue ...
05.26.2023 If You’re Reading This, You’re Probably ‘WEIRD’ Here’s a little experiment. Take a second to think about how you would fill in the blank in this sentence: “I am _____.” If you’re anything like me, the first descriptors that come to mind are personal attributes (like “curious” ...
05.23.2023 The Teen Mental Health Crisis, Part 2 The data is clear: Levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide have spiked for American teenagers over the last decade. Last Friday’s episode with the psychologist Jean Twenge sifted through that data to uncover both the scale of the crisis ...
05.19.2023 The Teen Mental Health Crisis, Part 1 We’re in the midst of a serious teen mental health crisis. The number of teenagers and young adults with clinical depression more than doubled between 2011 and 2021. The suicide rate for teenagers nearly doubled from 2007 to 2019, and ...
05.16.2023 A Libertarian and I Debate the Debt Ceiling On Jan. 19, the United States officially hit its debt limit. In response, the Treasury Department began using accounting maneuvers known as “extraordinary measures” to continue paying the government’s obligations temporarily. But according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that money ...
05.12.2023 Best Of: A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the great living science fiction writers and one of the most astute observers of how planets look, feel and work. His Mars Trilogy imagined what it might be like for humans to settle on ...
05.09.2023 Best Of: Why Adults Lose the ‘Beginner’s Mind’ Here’s a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. This isn’t just habit hardening into dogma. It’s encoded into the way our brains change as we age. And it’s ...
05.05.2023 Best Of: How the Fed Is ‘Shaking the Entire System’ On Monday, First Republic Bank folded before being sold by regulators to JPMorgan Chase. At the time, it was the 14th largest bank in the U.S. and it is the second-largest American bank by assets to ever collapse. The story ...
05.02.2023 The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters. In recent months, we’ve witnessed the rise of chatbots that can pass law and business school exams, artificial companions who’ve become best friends and lovers and music generators that produce remarkably humanlike songs. It’s hard to know how to process ...
04.28.2023 Democrats: Pay Attention to What’s Happening in California California is a land of contrasts. The state is home to staggering wealth, world-remaking tech companies, and some of the world’s boldest climate policy. It also has immense income inequality, arguably the worst housing crisis in the country, and the ...

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