The Politics of Everything

What’s it like to be wrong? We have no idea. On Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss being right all the time. TNR staff writers Walter Shapiro and Matt Ford review their spot-on analyses of Trump and the Republican Party; Wired columnist Paul Ford talks about how the internet today looks exactly as he would have predicted in 2000; and the social psy...

In late 2016, staff at the American embassy in Havana began hearing strange noises and experiencing a range of odd symptoms: headaches, dizziness, ringing in the ears. Suspicion arose that they had been targets of a secret weapon. In the years since, doctors, scientists, journalists, and government officials have tried—with limited success—to get to the bottom of the illness that came to be known...

As its boosters have long argued, remote work offers any number of obvious benefits. Companies save money on rent; employees don’t have to waste time commuting; and everyone, without the distractions of the office, can be more efficient. But for decades, telecommuting simply failed to take hold. On Episode 23 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk with the writer Ri...

On December 11, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer to begin distributing its vaccine for Covid-19. The triumphant moment comes on the brink of a grim winter, amid record case levels across the United States, and it is accompanied by countless unknowns. For Episode 22 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and socio...

The country with the most powerful military in the world likes to pretend it has no choice in the matter. If the United States didn’t maintain order, the story goes, disorder would prevail. But as decades of messy wars drag on, this justification grows less and less plausible. On Episode 21 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to the historian Stephen Wertheim abo...

Who should President-elect Biden ask to join his cabinet? Everyone has an opinion, and most of the opinions are terrible. On Episode 20 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene interpret our cabinet dreams. What do they say about us, and what do they say about Joe Biden? Jason Linkins, a deputy editor at The New Republic, and Osita Nwanevu, a staff writer at the magazine,...

In the early 2000s, a group of libertarians moved to a small town in New Hampshire, where they set about slashing the municipal budget. The newcomers wanted to be free from taxes and government regulation, and they envisioned an experiment that would show the world the virtues of their political philosophy while allowing them to live as they liked. But before long, they found themselves fighting o...

With the likely confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett this week to the Supreme Court, conservatives will secure a majority they can use to strike down liberal legislation for years to come. Why do nine people who are not elected hold so much power over laws in this country? And what do you do when the justices favor one party so strongly over another? On Episode 18 of The Politics of Everything, hosts...

What will it take to save California? Around the world, fire season is growing increasingly severe and increasingly lethal. This year, wildfires have destroyed more than five million acres in the American West alone. The August Complex fire, which is burning California’s Mendocino Forest, has become the largest in the state’s history. On Episode 17 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh...

While Democrats pin their electoral hopes on turning wealthy suburbs blue, Donald Trump tells “Suburban housewives” on Twitter that Joe Biden will “destroy” their “American dream.” But who are suburban voters really? On Episode 16 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene speak with four guests about how the suburbs have transformed since the 1960s, and what those changes m...

Why is the period between Election Day and inauguration so long in the United States? What kind of trouble have past outgoing presidents made during the interregnum? And in the event Joe Biden wins, how can we expect Donald Trump to behave? On Episode 15 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene interview six guests about the presidential transition and how we might prepare...

Teachers feel frustrated and afraid. Parents are overburdened. Guidance from officials has been scant. For the schools preparing to welcome students back next month, nothing about the planning process has been easy. On Episode 14 of The Politics of Everything, the writer Keith Gessen joins hosts Alex Pareene and Laura Marsh to talk about why the city’s fight to safely return kids to public schools...

As we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment this month, it’s tempting to assume that women’s suffrage is complete. Yet millions of women—because they are incarcerated or on parole, because their legal name doesn’t match certain documents, because the polls are open only during the hours they are at jobs or caring for their families—still don’t have the franchise, either i...

The economy as we know it is populated by gigantic corporations, behemoths that have bought up not only their competition but also the businesses supplying or otherwise supporting them. Such monopolies act as a “rival form of government,” explains Zephyr Teachout, the author of Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. On Episode 12 of The Politics of Everything, h...

The mess of hystrionics and misinformation that passes for right-wing media these days didn’t spring from nowhere. How did this increasingly influential and well-funded sphere become what it is? On Episode 11 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk with Moira Weigel, a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a founding editor of Logic magazine, abo...

After three weeks of protests against police violence, the energy of the demonstrations remains undiminished. Episode 10 of The Politics of Everything explores what is motivating the actions, the political effects they’ve already had, and what’s to come. Hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the founder of the African American Policy Forum and a regular contributor...

Victory in the so-called race for a coronavirus vaccine rests on the skills of a handful of private companies whose primary motivation is hardly the public good. Can the Big Pharma deliver what we need to recover from this pandemic and prevent others from occurring? On Episode 9 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene interview Alexander Zaitchik, a regular contributor to...

Will the United States get a baseball season this year? Do we deserve one? What is at stake—economically, emotionally, mortally—in the effort to start up sports again? On Episode 8 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to David Roth, a former editor of Deadspin and a frequent contributor to The New Republic, about the challenges and questionable wisdom of reopening...

The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the usual functioning of the national economy with shocking speed and violence. Now, as states around the country move to “reopen”—in most cases far earlier and faster than is safe—and politicians hold forth about how best to restart economic activity, it seems imperative to consider the nature of the economy getting restarted. Do we really want to go back to the...

Political polarization is something liberals have grown fond of naming as an obvious societal ill. And it is bad—but does it need to get worse before it can get better? On Episode 6 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk to Osita Nwanevu, a staff writer at The New Republic, about the history of polarization, its role in politics today, and what gets lost when you to...

Much of the emotional power of a march or demonstration comes from being there. Successful labor organizing likewise depends in part on the intimacy and convenience of working near other people. Can you trust that your colleagues will risk their jobs for a strike when, as with many gig workers, you’ve never met? Is it logistically possible to organize when social distancing measures prevent you fr...

You may remember Emily Atkin from the first episode of The Politics of Everything, "Are Kids Bad for the Planet?" Emily has launched a new limited-run podcast, HEATED, that shows how Covid-19 and the climate crisis cannot be separated. Here is Episode 2 of HEATED. On the show, The New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff shares some creative policy solutions to the climate and pandemic crises. We co...

How does an outbreak evolve into an epidemic and finally a pandemic? In Episode 4 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss how the coronavirus crisis has been mishandled by the Trump administration, as well as the history of institutional and governmental response to public health crises. Their guest, Laurie Garrett, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer and t...

It’s impossible to know whether a political candidate is electable until they’ve actually been elected—but that hasn’t stopped pundits from speculating ad nauseam about the question. Episode 3 of The Politics of Everything investigates where the concept of electability comes from, the nature of the historical moments in which it crops up, and the risks we invite by using the term. How central to J...

A class of supplements bills itself as neuroenhancers or nootropics—compounds you don’t need a prescription for that promise to augment your mental functioning without side effects. A notable subset of the people interested in these brain pills—and sometimes hawking them—are on the right. It’s not hard to see how today’s pressures might make a person want to amplify their cognitive abilities, but...