Honestly with Bari Weiss

I want to tell you the story of a kid, born in 1937 into segregated Washington, D.C. He’s 9 when his father dies and 13 when his mother has a mental breakdown, disappears, and is institutionalized. He’s effectively orphaned. This is how George Raveling’s story begins. Despite being dealt one of the worst cards imaginable, George, now 87, went on to become the most revered basketball coach in the w...

Sometimes we have a guest who needs no introduction. You know Dana Perino. She took on the job of White House press secretary when President George W. Bush was at his most unpopular—back in 2007 and 2008, as the Iraq War dragged on. She did not receive a warm welcome from those covering the White House—outlets like The New Republic called her clueless, and she was even injured after an Iraqi repor...

President Donald Trump has been in office for 100 days. Israel has been at war with Hamas in Gaza for 570, and Russia and Ukraine have been at war for over 1,000.  Douglas Murray has had a front-row seat to all three of these unfolding stories, bringing us reportage and analysis that have illuminated the most urgent issues of our time.  His reporting and willingness to call out bad actors across t...

Today marks President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office. What to make of this dizzying first hundred days? As Bret Stephens put it: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a more disastrous first 100 days of any presidency in American history. . . all of the wounds are self-inflicted.” Even some of Trump's most ardent supporters are struggling to understand and support his actions. As Rod Dreher wrote for...

Yesterday, The Free Press had a major scoop: The State Department is launching the biggest shake-up in decades in an effort spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Today, Rubio joins us on Honestly to discuss his goals for restructuring the Department and also how the U.S. is responding to manifold crises at home and abroad, from controversial deportations to the American attempt to end the...

In the past few weeks, Bari has done two episodes on religion—one asking, “Do we need a religious revival?,” and then a follow-up conversation with Ross Douthat asking how people who grew up in the secular West can actually find faith. Today, we have the last installment of this intellectual and religious inquiry, and we are asking a new question: What is the role of religion as a political force...

You may have noticed on this show that Bari Weiss is always asking her guests, “Do you believe in God?,” “What is your favorite biblical character?,” or “Do we need a religious revival?” And you might be wondering why she keeps knocking on this door? It’s partly because we’re curious about people’s metaphysical beliefs. But it’s also because we think something profound has gotten lost in our socie...

In 2025 it seems like there are two types of people—those who are insanely diligent about health, the people who learn everything there is to know about ingredients, the people who run every beauty or cleaning product through the EWG Working Group (a database where you can check for the presence of alleged toxins in household ingredients)—And then there are the rest of us. The people who go about...

If your head has been spinning since Donald Trump walked into the White House Rose Garden  and declared “Liberation Day” last Wednesday, we don't blame you. And not just because it was nauseating watching the stock market or your 401(k) crash down, but because it wasn't clear what exactly we were looking at.  As our guest today, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, wrote in...

Depending on who you talk to, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are either the swampiest of swamp creatures—the epitome of all that is wrong with political journalism—or, alternatively, two of the most interesting, successful entrepreneurs in the new media landscape. In 2006, VandeHei left The Washington Post to co-found Politico, where he was executive editor. His first hire was Mike Allen, then of Tim...

John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language—and many others, too. He’s an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and he’s an unsung Broadway aficionado. He once told us he could not do an interview because he was busy rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It all sounds like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. M...

A few years ago Jay Bhattacharya was an obscure Stanford professor—a medical doctor who also had a PhD in economics. Then Covid hit, the lockdowns began, and “Doctor Jay”—as he is known—became a pariah in the medical community. That’s because, along with colleagues from Harvard and Oxford, Jay questioned whether the lockdowns were a good idea. They did this in an open letter called the Great Barri...

For the last quarter century, an Italian macher from New Jersey has been one of the most powerful people in the United States. If you’re a certain type of nerdy, obsessive, legally inclined conservative, he’s basically Taylor Swift. But most people don’t know who he is because he doesn’t want them to know. He has never held or sought political office. He does not hail from Silicon Valley or Wall S...

The morning of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was detained at his apartment in New York City. Khalil is a 30-year-old Algerian citizen. He was born in Syria and is of Palestinian descent. He came to this country on a student visa in 2022, married an American citizen in 2023, became a green card holder in 2024, and finished his graduate studies at Columbia University in December 2024. Mahmoud was also the...

The other week Bari traveled to Austin, Texas, to host a debate on a simple little topic: religion and whether we need more of it. There’s a line from Proverbs that has guided believers for at least the past 2,000 or so years. It goes like this: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” But for most of our lives, this message has been turned on its head. We can’t entirely blame the so-cal...

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic. Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power. To see their way out of the political wilderness, the Democrats need a vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump....

Alex Karp is many things: a cross-country skier, a long-range shooter, a tai chi expert who might be the only man who knows how to wield a sword but doesn’t know how to drive. He’s also a collector of extremely prestigious degrees. His PhD thesis was called “Aggression in the Life-World: The Extension of Parsons’ Concept of Aggression by Describing the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Cu...

Each one of us has a different conception story. For some parents, it’s a romantic night out, maybe over a candlelit dinner. For others, like Bari and Nellie, it involves a trip to a fertility clinic in a mall that doesn’t even validate parking.  And of course, for some it’s a long, challenging, emotional process involving needles, hormones, and many false starts. We know a lot of our listeners ca...

You may have never heard of Sarah Wynn-Williams, but that’s about to change.  She’s written a memoir about her nearly seven years at Facebook, the company that has since rebranded as Meta. In doing so, she’s become the company’s highest-ranking whistleblower.  Until around 72 hours ago, the book’s existence itself was a secret. Wynn-Williams, a onetime New Zealand diplomat, was effectively the com...

Earlier this week on Honestly, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Brianna Wu, and Christopher Caldwell shared their views on President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s showdown with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and on the Russia-Ukraine war more generally. Simply put, Batya and Chris made the case that Russia is not an American adversary in the way China is and that Trump’s seeming sympath...

It’s been four days since the diplomatic earthquake went down in the Oval Office between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian president Zelensky. The world is still feeling the aftershocks. In Europe, leaders have been jolted into action. Ukraine’s European allies, including British prime minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, met in London on Sunday to forge t...

Have you ever gone on the internet and stumbled onto this combo of words, or perhaps non-words?: “Dogecoin.” “Shiba Inu.” “Hawkcoin.” “Bored Ape NFT.” If that sounded like gibberish, don’t worry—we’ll explain. And also, time to start learning, because these terms come out of a new financial ecosystem—the world of crypto, a market that started 15 years ago and is now worth about $3.3 trillion. This...

Over the past year, right-wing parties across the West have been sweeping elections. Donald Trump in the United States, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and now Germany. On Sunday, 83 percent of Germans went to the polls—the highest turnout since the Cold War. The Christian Democrats, the country’s center-right party led by Friedrich Merz, won. But that...

I’m sure you remember the images of Kfir and Ariel Bibas. They were just nine months and four years old when they were kidnapped by Hamas along with their mother, Shiri, on October 7, 2023. It was impossible to look at the image of her shielding them, her eyes full of terror, the children clinging to her, and not think of the Holocaust.  For more than 500 days, people around the world prayed for t...

A lot of people are wondering if things in LA would look different if Rick Caruso had won the mayoral race against Karen Bass in 2022. If he had been mayor when devastating fires began in the city last month, would he have prevented them from consuming about 40,000 acres, which is more than twice the area of Manhattan? At the time he ran, many quietly supported the billionaire real estate mogul—sc...