Episodes
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Are young men becoming radicalized? Could they be further to the right than even their fathers and grandfathers? These questions have yet to be answered definitively, but in some countries, electoral results and polls suggest that a meaningful group of young men may be finding a home in radical spaces. In this encore episode, host Jerusalem Demsas speaks to Dr. Alice Evans, a researcher at King’s College London, who has been traveling the world, trying to uncover the reason some societies are more equal than others. Her insights help explain why some young men may be turning against the tide of egalitarianism.
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The key idea behind democracy is that if politicians pass good policy, people will reward them with votes. But is that actually true? The political scientist Hunter Rendleman looked at what happened when governors extended a social-welfare benefit that has lifted millions of working-class Americans out of poverty.
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New Zealand was in a major housing crisis. But then the Pacific nation actually took ambitious steps to address it. The researcher Eleanor West recounts the policy wins and political pitfalls of what happened—and what lessons the United States and other countries could learn.
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Four years ago, the murder of George Floyd—and the international protests that followed—amplified calls to defund or abolish the police. But what do we actually know about the relationship between policing and public safety?
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Last year, nearly half of childless adults under 50 told the Pew Research Center that they didn’t want kids. As the birth rate in the United States continues to decline, the philosopher Anastasia Berg wanted to know: Where is this ambivalence coming from?
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Was leaving behind our nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles a mistake? If so, why did so many different groups of people make the switch to farming? The researcher Andrea Matranga spent more than a decade looking at the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era and found that humanity’s decision to settle down was driven by climactic shifts and the need to insure against famines.
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What exactly happened to the Kamala Harris campaign in this year’s presidential election? Host Jerusalem Demsas and Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and the host of The Bulwark Podcast, tick through the competing narratives about why the Democrats lost and which ones actually hold up.
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Do higher levels of immigration lead to lower wages? The Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma breaks down the misconception that immigration creates an economic burden—when actually the opposite is true: Immigrants are a source of economic growth.
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Grocery store prices are up. Politicians have tried to pin it on supply-chain problems, price gouging, and corporate greed—or “greedflation.” But Ernie Tedeschi, a former chief economist of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, wonders if something else is going on. And it might just have to do with store-brand mac and cheese.
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How is party ideology formed? Is it based on political strategy to garner the most votes? Or is it based on ideas and beliefs? The Georgetown professor Hans Noel traces the shift from the Civil War to the civil-rights movement to understand how Democrats and Republicans seemingly flipped sides during the 20th century—and what that says about the parties today.
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Are tariffs good? Or bad? And why do politicians love to talk about them so much? Scott Lincicome lays out the high costs of tariffs and who really bears the brunt.
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How does a nation pull its residents out of poverty and into the developed world? The researcher Oliver Kim looked into how Taiwan, and a few other East Asian countries, managed to rise from a poor nation to the ranks of the global elite in just a short amount of time.
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Would you donate a kidney? Would you do it for $50,000? Vox’s Dylan Matthews gave his to a stranger. But it made him wonder: Shouldn’t he have been paid?
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Crime peaks during the summer for adults. But the economist Ezra Karger found that the same can’t be said for kids: It peaks during the school year.
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When do fact-checks work? And when do they backfire and cause someone to dig in? Yamil Velez, a political scientist at Columbia University, set up an experiment using chatbots and found that people can change their mind, even on deeply held beliefs. Except under one condition: when the chatbot is rude.
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Police rarely move between jobs and departments. But according to a paper co-authored by the University of Chicago law professor John Rappaport, officers aren’t necessarily choosing to stay in the same place—a lot of policies have made it costly for them to switch. And that lack of mobility can have all kinds of ripple effects.
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Americans love local government. In a December 2023 Pew Research survey, 61 percent of respondents had a favorable view of their local government while 77 percent had an unfavorable view of the federal government. But behind this veneer of goodwill is a disturbing truth: Local government is driving a housing crisis that is raising rents, lowering economic mobility and productivity, and negatively impacting wages.
Host Jerusalem Demsas talks to Atlantic deputy executive editor Yoni Appelbaum and Yale Law professor David Schleicher about how local government is fueling the housing crisis.
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There’s a traditional line of thinking about the history of Black people and the law. It describes how slaves were entirely shut out of the legal system, disenfranchised and bereft of even a modicum of legal know-how or protection.
But research from the UC Berkeley professor Dylan C. Penningroth (in his book Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights) upends that narrative by tracing the overlooked history of how Black people used the law in everyday life: through rights of contract, property, marriage, and more—even under slavery and Jim Crow.
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The 2010s saw attitudes—on issues such as race, immigration, and gender—shift to the left. Liberals became more liberal. And then a "wokeness" backlash began.
The backlash, though, didn’t just come from conservatives. It came from people all over the political spectrum. Host Jerusalem Demsas talks with the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the death of "wokeness"—and whether we might miss it when it’s gone.
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Is there such a thing as “balancing the ticket”? How much can a vice-presidential nominee influence the election? Host Jerusalem Demsas talks with political commentator and journalist Matt Yglesias about Kamala Harris’s recent pick of Tim Walz as her running mate and whether that choice could sway undecided voters.
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