Uncommon Knowledge

Amy Zegart is  a fellow at the Hoover Institution , a professor of political science at Stanford University, and the author of a new book,  Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence . In this frank conversation, Zegart grades American intelligence-gathering operations, recent and historical, and compares them to their counterparts in China and Russia. Professor Z...

Recorded on February 15, 2022 Bari Weiss began her career as a mainstream media prodigy, landing coveted positions at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in her early twenties. In 2020, she famously resigned from the Times when conditions there became intolerable for her, famously writing  in a public resignation letter  that “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Tw...

Last month, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson  asked Princeton Professor and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin 5 questions , all in the foreign policy and history realm. Since then, the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable just 3 weeks ago. So we asked Professor Kotkin to come back for a second round of questions, this time all dedicated to one topic: the Russian inv...

Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his planned three-volume history of Russian power and Joseph Stalin,  Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928  and  Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 . The premise of this show is simple: Peter Robinson poses fiv...

In what has now become an annual tradition on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, law professors John Yoo and Richard Epstein join the show to opine on a newly minted Supreme Court. For the first time in decades, today’s court is dominated by a majority of originalist justices—justices who believe the Constitution means today just what the document meant when it was ratified more than 200 year...

In his long and distinguished career, British historian Andrew Roberts has produced world-class biographies of  Winston Churchill , and  Napoleon ,  several histories  of  World War II  and  the men who led the countries  who fought that war,  and other great conflicts in world history . Roberts’s new book is  The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III , a biography of the mon...