Frames of Space

Lyman Stone is a Substack writer and a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is a pronatalist, which means that he wants society to have higher birth rates and more children. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the nature of his online persona, the gap between desired and actual fertility rates, and the correlation betw...

Announcement: this podcast will be returning to its traditional biweekly upload schedule for the foreseeable future. But I really enjoyed the run of weekly episodes that I've been able to pull off for the past few months, and I hope to do it again some time :) Damon Linker is a senior lecturer of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and the writer behind the Substack "Notes from the...

Victor Kumar is an associate professor of philosophy at Boston University and the writer behind the Substack "Open Questions." He is known for his writing on political polarization, and the cultural reasons behind the state of civil culture in America. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why he believes in the importance of a large Overton window, the positions he held about lo...

Elena Bridgers is the writer behind the Substack "Motherhood Until Yesterday." She is known for her writing on evolutionary biology: specifically, the nature of hunter-gatherer societies, and how that explains why motherhood is so difficult in the present. In the episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the tradeoffs that come with gender equity, how parenting has changed her conception of...

Lars Doucet is the President of the Center for Land Economics and the writer behind the Substack "Progress and Poverty." Lars is a Georgist, which means he believes that land is fundamentally different from other forms of property. From his point of view, we shouldn't be taxing what people build, earn, or produce—we should be taxing the value of the location itself. In this episode, I got a chance...

Blaise Brosnan is a good friend of mine, and I've had many conversations with him over the years about the divisions within the MAGA movement. He currently studies as a PhD candidate at UCLA, and I brought him onto my podcast to better understand the civil war that's happening within the Republican Party right now. So in this episode, we spoke quite a bit about the recent interview between Tucker...

Announcement: this podcast will be going on holiday for the rest of December, so this is the last new episode you'll be seeing on this feed in 2025. But I'll be back to regularly scheduled episodes beginning on January 1st of the new year :) Rana Mitter is the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and an expert on understanding the nature of Chinese politics: government,...

Joseph Heath is a political philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and the writer behind the Substack "In Due Course." He is known for his commentary on critical theory, the nature of capitalism, and how our psychological tendencies influence our political beliefs. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about the differences between intuitive thinking and analytical reasoning...

Habib Fanny writes the Substack "Politidoc." He used to write about politics on the Q&A site Quora, where he amassed over 100k followers from writing there for over a decade about topics such as electoral trends, race relations, and how negative polarization affected his ideology. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why non-white voters swung away from the Democratic Party...

Lakshya Jain is a political data analyst and co-founder of Split Ticket, a data journalism project known for its sharp election modeling and nonpartisan vote breakdowns. He currently leads the polling operation over at The Argument, a magazine devoted to making the persuasive case for liberal democracy—not by avoiding political conflict, but by engaging it head-on. In this episode, I got a chance...

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is one of the rare journalists today whose work moves seamlessly between politics, theology, and ethics, and grief—without flattening any of them. There’s a line of hers I keep coming back to: Beauty tells you where to look. That's how she writes. And it's how she sees the world. In t...

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Francis Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that liberal democracy represented the endpoint of humanity's ideological evolution. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about whether his end of history thesis holds up by modern standards, the nat...

Marshall Kosloff is a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and the host of the podcast The Realignment. His work covers the nature of coalitional change in American politics since the rise of Donald Trump, and how Democrats can accomplish the policies of the Abundance agenda at the state level. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about his journey from the center-right to the center-...

Steve Teles is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He is one of the main advocates of the abundance agenda, which champions supply-side solutions to many of the problems of modern economies, including housing unaffordability, clean energy, public infrastructure, and more. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about how...

Allie Volpe is a correspondent at Vox. She writes extensively about the science of human connection—friendship, conversation, community, and the invisible threads that tie our well-being to the relationships around us. And let me tell you, these connections are vital. Take loneliness, for instance. Loneliness isn’t just a feeling; it’s a state of being that affects us both psychologically and phys...

David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. Formerly a senior editor at The Dispatch and staff writer at National Review, David is known by many for his understanding of mainstream conservatism, and how Republican culture has changed significantly over the past decade. In this episode, I spoke with him about the history of populism within Evangelical America, the ways that Evangel...

Jeremiah Johnson is the co-founder of The Center for New Liberalism , host of The New Liberal Podcast , and the writer behind the Substack Infinite Scroll . His writing lives at the strange intersection of serious policy and unserious online discourse—and he’s one of the few people I’ve come across who is willing to take both seriously. One day he’s writing about marginal tax rates or housing vouc...

Bret Devereaux is a military historian and a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. He writes the blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry," which covers Roman history, the nature of power and violence in society, and the best sci-fi/fantasy stories. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about how George Washington prevented a military coup, the unwritten ru...

Karin Tamerius is a psychiatrist, a political psychologist, and the founder of Smart Politics. She writes the Substack "The Smart Politics Way," which has quietly become one of the most thoughtful guides to how we talk about—and think about—politics. The truth is, we’re living in a time where the news cycle is relentless. It’s not just a daily onslaught of information; it’s a constant barrage of d...

Mónica Guzmán is the author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. She is also host of the podcast "A Braver Way," and an advisor for Public Practice at Braver Angels. Her beat is bridging political divides, and how to model good-faith political disagreements across the aisle. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her a...

Stephanie Murray is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the author behind the Substack "Family Stuff." Her beat involves covering many of the intricacies and data points behind parenting and child-rearing, particularly the decline in birthrates throughout much of the developed world. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the explanations for why people aren't having as man...

Charlotte Swasey is the writer behind the Substack "Medium Data," which examines the intricacies of polling and political analysis to generate upcoming election forecasts and predictions for Democratic politicians. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the Senate forecast for the 2026 Elections, the gap between the perception and reality of Democratic policies, and how politician...

Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent at Vox and one of the key writers behind Future Perfect, a section of the site dedicated to exploring ways to make the world better through evidence, reason, and moral philosophy. If you look at his body of work, you’ll find that he’s written about everything from AI risk to tax policy to foreign aid spending. And that eclecticism is part of what makes him...

Matthew Adelstein writes the Substack "Bentham's Newsletter" under the alias "Bentham's Bulldog." He is the rare thinker who will, in one breath, defend a rigorous logical case for the existence of God, and in the next insist that we should worry more about shrimp than about most public-policy debates. His outlook isn’t contrarian for sport; it’s the consequence of three guiding hunches he’s writt...