Say More

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raged for decades, but this time it’s different. The brutal killing of more than 1,400 Israelis by Hamas has shocked the country, precipitating a relentless counterattack by the Israeli military, which has killed thousands and displaced a million people in Gaza. The US has always had a central role in the conflict, and many are asking how that role should evolv...

For generations, the car has been a powerful emblem of American freedom. Now, with self-driving cars, freedom means letting robots do the work. Relying on a web of sensors, radar, and artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles are currently navigating cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. But are they safe? Can they actually do a better job than us? Laura Major, chief technology off...

The messaging platform Slack has become an indelible part  of the modern workplace. Since the start of the pandemic, the company’s rise feels intertwined with the seismic changes in how we work and communicate — so much so that Slack, like Google, is now widely understood as a verb. This week, Say More’s Shirley Leung speaks to Slack CEO Lidiane Jones about how technology is reshaping the workplac...

One of the main tenets of journalism is this: Don’t become the story. But that’s been difficult for Marty Baron, who, as editor of The Washington Post during the Trump years, often found himself at the center of the storm. Following his tenure at The Boston Globe, where he helped uncover rampant clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Marty led the Post through a tumultuous time in American po...

For a minute there, it really felt like cryptocurrency was going mainstream. Exchanges were thriving and generating billions of dollars for investors. Now, the industry is facing dozens of lawsuits and bankruptcies, and billions of investor dollars have been lost. The industry is struggling to scrape back legitimacy, while government regulators scramble to catch up. On this week’s episode of Say M...

The 2024 election season is in full swing in New Hampshire and other key primary states. While a Trump-Biden standoff may feel inevitable, recent history has shown us anything is possible in politics. A gaggle of GOP candidates are running to beat Trump, who is fighting legal battles on multiple fronts. President Biden is flagging in the polls and facing constant questions about his age. On today’...

When it comes to the crush of the American daily news cycle, Heather Cox Richardson has always taken the long view. The New England-based historian gained wide popularity writing casual, history-informed summaries of the news — a perspective millions of readers were hungry for. Her new book is called “Democracy Awakening.” Shirley sits down with Heather to talk about the evolution of the GOP, the...

Many scientific advances can be traced back to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university has long been a leader in engineering and technology. But with great power comes great responsibility. What role should places like MIT play in determining how science is developed and used? Shirley sits down with the new president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, to discuss the ethics of controversial...

What do Richard Nixon, Thomas Paine, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have in common? All of them pushed for guaranteed income programs, where the government would just give people money on a regular basis. So that idea has been around for a long time. But it's now being tested and adopted in cities all over the country — with the prospect that AI-driven automation will force humans to find...

Kara Swisher knew the internet would be a big deal long before it was obvious to the rest of us. For more than two decades, Swisher has had a front row seat to the rise of the Silicon Valley tech titans – people she's covered in various columns and podcasts, always incisively. Her foresight about the rise of technology and her sharp insights have made her a leading voice among tech and media entre...

Before Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman president of Harvard University, she was a historian of white supremacy and civil rights in the South. And before she studied it, she lived it. Faust was raised in a conservative family in segregated Virginia, where women and people of color were expected to know their place. She joins Shirley to discuss her new memoir, “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at...

In the nearly 15 years she’s written the Love Letters advice column for The Boston Globe, Meredith Goldstein has fielded just about every question imaginable. Love, dating apps, marriage, divorce, long-distance relationships, sex, cheating, jealousy, unhinged in-laws — you name it, she’s been asked about it. Today Shirley has Meredith on the show to explore why the Love Letters column and podcast...

It’s arguably the most important number in the US economy: the federal funds rate, better known simply as the Federal Reserve’s “interest rate.” The Fed picks a rate eight times a year, which dictates how easy it is for consumers and businesses to borrow money for entrepreneurship, home buying, credit cards, and more. But Susan Collins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston — the first w...

What if your doctor were a computer program? With recent quantum leaps in artificial intelligence, that’s now a possibility in our lifetime. The use of AI in medicine is expanding rapidly, bringing the potential for incredible innovations – such as unprecedented access to specialized medical knowledge for rural areas – as well as big risks, like unregulated bots entrusted with too much power. Toda...

The US-China relationship seems to grow more contentious every day, with spying, hacking, economic warfare, and high-stakes military exercises in the Pacific. It almost feels like we’re sliding toward a Cold War with China — if we’re not in one already. Few know this story better than investigative reporter David Barboza, who spent 12 years in China for The New York Times, focusing on business. He...

Joan Donovan first saw extremism up close more than 20 years ago as the vocalist of a punk band in the Boston underground scene — when she got punched in the face by a neo-Nazi. Today, Joan is a sociologist at Harvard who studies disinformation and how it colors American society, including the outsized influence that white supremacists and other fringe groups hold in online forums and social media...

Since the founding of the Republic, Greater Boston has been a center of American thought, culture, politics, innovation, and science. On Say More, longtime Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung builds on that grand tradition by bringing you intimate conversations with the doers and thinkers behind the biggest ideas and debates of our time. Find us online at bostonglobe.com/opinion. See Privacy Poli...