Slate Daily Feed

Donald Trump owes his political career to saying what no other politician would. But now that he’s standing alone in full-throated support of data centers and artificial intelligence, he looks less like a populist, and more like a liability for Republicans trying to win elections. Guests:  Jim Newell , Slate senior politics writer and author of The Surge . Patrick Reis , Slate politics editor...

Stefan’s mother said he was too smart for public school and took him out of 4th grade. But instead of studying, Stefan’s homeschool curriculum was organized around keeping his mother company and pretending he wouldn’t grow up and leave her. In this episode, Stefan Merrill Block talks about his five year homeschool experience, how it shaped him as a father and writer, and the ambivalence of loving...

What it means that Macklemore decided he’d rather keep speaking out for Palestine than continue opening for Ed Sheeran. Guest: Soraya Nadia McDonald , cultural critic and writer.  Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top...

This week: Everyone is talking about A.I. safety as OpenAI shares more alarming security breaches. Felix Salmon , Elizabeth Spiers , and Emily Peck examine the complicated reality of trying to slow down the A.I. frontier. Then, the hosts discuss Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s unexpected vote to raise rates—in defiance of Donald Trump. And finally, with the SEC opening the door to tokenized equities, they...

David Plotz talks with journalist Annie Lowrey about her new book The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It , an investigation into the hours Americans lose to broken bureaucracy, from 12-hour tax filings to multiyear waits for housing vouchers and building permits. Lowrey traces the waste to what she calls the “ordeal mechanism,” the deliberate friction built into some pr...

You’ve seen the headlines about the lists, the claims, the THREE times this same executive order about voting by mail has gone to the Supreme Court. But is Trump’s interference with  mail-in voting settled—at least with respect to the midterms? Our go-to election law expert, Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law, joins Dahlia to unpack what just happened and how this postal chaos alters voters’...

A former Anthropic employee claimed AI would lead to the end of humanity, and soon. In the weeks since, the “whistleblower” has done a full press tour, with even Anthropic and OpenAI themselves seeming to cosign this claim. As a result, hysteria has ensued—and that’s exactly what these AI companies want. On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Better Offline host and #1 AI Hater Ed Zitr...

Don Trump Jr.’s wedding had everything: a private island, fireworks, a Funfetti cake airlifted in from Florida—everything but the groom’s dad. But that’s the advantage of being rich, you can pay for the wedding of your drea—oh wait, one of Putin’s buddies was footing the bill. Ah well, nevertheless… This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not on...

Why did the “Hugging Face Incident” scare A.I. researchers so much? And if they are so confident artificial intelligence needs to be slowed down, why aren’t they slowing it down? Guest: Nate Soares, President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, co-author of “ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies ” Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole W...

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss whether this week's Supreme Court intervention rejecting Trump's mail-in ballot restrictions will prevent midterm chaos, explore the fast-evolving dynamics of public and political anxieties about AI, and dissect remarkable new reporting from ProPublica exposing the Putin-adjacent Russian oligarch who paid for much of Donald Trump Jr...

Those concerned that the Trump administration will interfere with the upcoming midterm elections can breathe a little easier this week, as the Supreme Court threw out their plan to have the Post Office muck up mail-in voting. But are we out of the woods yet? Guest: Ari Berman , Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listen...

Childcare is expensive and who wouldn’t want to spend more time with their kids? Giving parents money to stay home, on its face, would seem to make sense. But a proposal from the Trump administration isn’t enough to help most stay-at-home parents—and it comes with some glaring downsides. Guests: Dr. Jessica Calarco, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of four b...

Pregnant werewolves and surprise quadruplets are just two of the tropes you might find while watching what might be the next evolution of TV: vertical microdramas . Told in 90 second clips, these stories are soap operas for the smartphone era, and are keeping the industry afloat during an otherwise turbulent time for Hollywood. On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Yahoo senior cultur...

In this Money Talks: Roy Swan joins Elizabeth Spiers to turn the assumption of a zero-sum economy on its head. Swan, the director of the Ford Foundation’s mission investments program, explains why the idea that someone has to lose in order for you to win is not just costing societally, but economically—and how positive impact and positive returns aren’t mutually exclusive. Swan’s new book is Posit...

Anna Blake started an OnlyFans account, not as a pleasure project, but to achieve some financial stability. When she found out she hated the work and made little money, her relationship to sex – and to money – had to change.  This week on the show, she talks to Anna Sale about being homeschooled as a kid, having few job prospects as a young adult with a G.E.D., and the class conversation that...

The GOP just held a midterm convention that was centered around the one thing their base seems to really like: Donald Trump.  The only problem is that pretty much everyone outside the GOP is blaming Trump for rising inflation, a foreign war, and a stagnating economy—and, oh yeah, Trump won’t be on the ballot.  Guest: Greg Sargent, host of “ The Daily Blast ” podcast and a staff writer at...

There are thousands of people protesting the Trump family every day—but they aren’t Americans, and they aren’t protesting Donald. Guest: Imogen West-Knights , Slate contributing writer based in London. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try...

Capitulation under Trump 2.0 has been devastating to the rule of law. To review a couple of lowlights: One of the nation’s leading lawyers, Brad Karp, cut a deal with Donald Trump in the first days of the bully-in-chief’s second administration that turned out to constitute five flabby bullet points on an unsigned piece of paper. Chief Justice John Roberts is pretending the president is a generic R...

This week: The new book Money to Burn goes deep on private-equity behemoth Apollo Global Management and its billionaire cofounder and former CEO, Leon Black. Felix Salmon , Elizabeth Spiers , and Emily Peck are joined by author William D. Cohan to talk about his reporting on Black’s investment empire and what it means for Wall Street to be dominated by private equity. They also get into Black’s tr...

“ Curtain for Zoosha! K-smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt. ” If that’s also what every headline sounds like to you, then you’re in the right place. Alex Earle and Stella Lefty are taking over For You Page discourse, but are two pop culture figures we somehow know everything and nothing about. On today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by Hip Replacement ’s Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick to ge...

After OpenAI agents hacked a rival company this summer, the word from Silicon Valley was “That’s it! They’re almost ready to kill us all!” But…are they? Really? Guest: Paul Ford, co-founder of the AI start-up Aboard , technology writer.   Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts....

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss why Republicans are holding an unusual midterm convention and what it says about the state of the race at the homestretch, talk about the new book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era with author Jacob Weisberg , and reflect on memories and historical consequences on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terro...

On this week’s episode, Elizabeth, Lucy and Zak share their epic summer triumphs but not before making a big announcement about the future of the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

America didn’t start down the path to a president who is unaccountable to even the Constitution under Trump. He’s the culmination of a change that dates back to September 11, 2001. Guest: Ben Wizner , Deputy Legal Director and Director, Center for Democracy ACLU Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate...

Podcasts are everywhere. They’re more popular and influential than they’ve ever been. But at the same time, what makes a podcast a “podcast” has never been more confusing. Until recently, the definition of “podcast” was clear: audio distributed over the internet. A podcast was something you listened to, not something you watched. But now, almost all of the most popular podcasts have video, too. An...