Honestly with Bari Weiss

Today, on our inaugural episode of Second Thought, Suzy Weiss sits down with one of the most influential people in YouTube’s history: Casey Neistat. Casey has millions of followers and billions of views to his name—and he saw early on that YouTube would change everything. It certainly changed his own life. In this conversation, Casey talks about riding the wave of the YouTube tsunami, his love of...

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This past year wasn’t easy—but it was certainly eventful. Donald Trump returned to the White House, issued a record number of executive orders, deployed the National Guard to American cities—like LA and D.C.—imposed sweeping tariffs on all our trading partners, gutted the government with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and unleashed a massive crackdown on immigration. But that was...

It's Christmas Eve. A holiday celebrated by 2.4 billion people around the world, which centers on a 2,000-year-old story about a Jewish man born in Bethlehem who became a rabbi, who the Romans would later execute in Jerusalem.  But what most people don’t know is that the first people who believed in Jesus did not think they were starting a new religion. They were a small group of Jews who thought...

Last week, Bari sat down with Erika Kirk for an hour-long town hall in front of a live audience on CBS. It was an extremely powerful conversation. Erika and Bari spoke about a lot—rising political violence in this very divided country; the way some people justified or excused Charlie’s murder; what Erika thinks about some of the controversial things Charlie said in his lifetime; her response to Ca...

One of the most complex medical, ethical, moral, and religious questions of our era is that of physician-assisted suicide—also known as Medical Aid in Dying, or MAID. Eleven U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have legalized some form of MAID for terminally ill patients. And New York might join them. Over the summer, a Medical Aid in Dying Act passed New York’s state legislature. It is now sitting on...

All parents know what goes into raising children: the time spent changing diapers in inopportune places; the hours of worrying—about what to feed them, how to educate them, how to protect them and keep them healthy; the countless hours devoted to dance classes, summer camps, pediatricians, and piano lessons—all investments meant to give them the best chance in life. Most of us would do anything to...

Few lines in the Constitution have provoked as much passion—or confusion—as this one: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What did the Founding Fathers mean by “well regulated”? What did they mean by “Militia”? And, do any of those definitions hold in 21st-century America? Guns are one o...

You probably know Jonathan Haidt as the guy trying to save your kids from smartphones and social media apps. Likely you’ve read The Anxious Generation, which has been translated into 44 languages and sold nearly 2 million copies. One might say that Jon is Elvis for 21st century moms who don't understand Discord.  But when Haidt gets written about decades from now, it will be for much more than thi...

Who owns the future of the Democratic Party? That’s the question on everyone’s mind since last Tuesday night—when the richest city in America elected 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as its mayor. You can see Mamdani’s win as a one-off—a charismatic contender facing a rival mired in controversy. But the other way to see it is as emblematic of something larger: a sign about the state...

Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history?  The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss. My brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth...

It’s no secret that young men are sort of unwell. They are four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to struggle with addiction, and 12 times more likely to be incarcerated than women. If that weren’t enough, record numbers of men are not getting married, not dating, not enrolling in school or working, and struggling with serious mental health issues. In response, a cottag...

A former Senate staffer recently told our friend, reporter Dexter Filkins: “The last socialist systems in the world are in Cuba and the Pentagon.” My guest tonight is trying to do something about that. And good luck to anyone trying to get in his way. When people think of defense tech titans, they might not think of my guest tonight, Palmer Luckey. He looks more like Jimmy Buffett than George S. P...

On October 21, 2023, beloved Detroit community leader Samantha Woll was found brutally stabbed to death outside her home—two weeks to the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. It looked like an open-and-shut case—a hate crime. But swiftly the police ruled that out. Instead they eventually found themselves with two unrelated suspects. When they charged one with murder, the case took a turn tha...

If you’re listening to this, you probably know someone who has struggled with alcohol addiction, or maybe you’re an alcoholic yourself. It’s one of the most universal human experiences. In 2023, 10 percent of the U.S. population met the criteria for alcoholism. That’s 30 million people. And throughout the past hundred or so years, there’s basically been one solution: total sobriety, talk therapy,...

At 3:22 a.m. ET on October 7, 2023, Bari texted her producer: “Candace, there’s war in Israel.” At that moment, Hamas men still roamed southern Israel, and the details were far from clear. What we knew was that Israel had been attacked and that videos were beginning to make their way from Telegram to X: scenes of dozens of Palestinian terrorists breaking through the security fence and rushing into...

Congratulations are not usually in order for someone who has been forced into hiding, someone whose children are scattered across continents for their safety, someone whose supporters are sitting in prison cells for the crime of believing in democracy.  But our guest today, María Corina Machado, just won the Nobel Peace Prize—joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Dal...

This week commemorates the two year anniversary of October 7, 2023. That morning, Hamas invaded Israel. They slaughtered some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. Forty-eight hostages, some alive and some dead, are still being held in Gaza. In these last two years, the world has changed. In many ways, the past two years have felt like two decades. The world feels like it has tilted on its ax...

Two years ago today, five terrorists broke into Eli Sharabi’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri. He had been sheltered there for hours with his wife, Lianne, and teenage daughters, Noiya and Yahel, reading horrific texts flooding in from neighbors and hoping somehow his family would be spared. They were not. The terrorists shot and killed their dog, then dragged Eli away, leaving his family behind. As t...

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Leland Vittert is one of America’s most recognizable television correspondents. You’ll know his face from years of frontline reporting in places like Egypt, Libya, Israel, and Ukraine.  You may have followed his tumultuous exit from Fox News in 2021, after clashing with the network over its coverage of Donald Trump—and then his redemption arc, becoming the host of On Balance and the chief Washingt...

If you’re anything like us, you’re a sucker for a good spy show: Homeland, Tehran, Fauda, The Bureau. We’re fascinated by the life of spies—the secret meetings in Beirut cafés, the wigs and false identities, the double and triple lives, always one step away from exposure, risking everything for their country. Most of the time, those TV characters are pure fiction and the stories are the stuff of H...

You know the name Woody Allen. Everyone does. He’s made some of the most acclaimed films ever made: Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors—he list goes on and on and on. He’s made an astonishing 50 movies. You see his influence everywhere, from sitcoms to stand-up to just about every rom-com made since Annie Hall premiered in 1977. And in the process, he turned himself into Am...

Yesterday, in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of 3,000 people at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was shot dead. Kirk was not just a husband, not just a father, and not just one of the most prominent young conservative voices in the country. He made his name doing something fundamental to the American project: disagreeing out loud.  He famously said, “When people stop talking, bad stuff ha...

When Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court, she was in some ways an unlikely choice. She was living in South Bend, Indiana, not New York or D.C. She went to Notre Dame Law School, making her the only justice that didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She’s the mother of seven kids. And, at the time of her appointment, she’d largely spent her career as a professor, with just under three year...