Slow Boring

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, I grew up in Greenwich Village. My dad was a novelist, and my mom was a graphic designer and an artist. Lots of their friends were eccentric Village artists and intellectuals. In that milieu, Jane Jacobs was an icon. She saved the Village from Robert Mos...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com In this week’s episode of The Argument , Jerusalem Demsas just wants to buy a car and is mad as hell that the American government has de facto banned imports of the Chinese electric vehicles that are setting world markets on fire. I am annoyed that the climate movement, which is constantly imposing politically and eco...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com Spirit Airlines is dead, and the right, true to form, is blaming Joe Biden . But the proximate cause is very clear: The war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs , and the already-battered airline couldn’t absorb the hit to its bottom line. Spirit also had fundamental problems — a Pratt & Whitney engine recall that grounded...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com Jerusalem and I had an idea. What if we went back and read a classic, massively influential, widely discussed political book that neither of us had actually read? The kind of book that we suspect lots of people mention frequently without having actually read. Our first choice was Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminin...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com Donald Trump practices a form of foreign policy without much in the way of high ideals. He’s nakedly transactional, speaks openly of stealing other countries’ oil, and has no time for the promotion of democracy or human rights around the world. He’s a terrible president, but I kind of appreciate his frank casting of w...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com One nice thing about podcasting is that you can talk through ideas that seem important but where your own thoughts are a bit unsettled. Jerusalem thinks the internet would probably be better if everyone had to use their real names. I don’t want to engage in apologetics for the actually existing internet or for the ave...

The Supreme Court formally rejected affirmative action in college admissions in the 2023 case of Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard , but the legal case did not resolve the larger dispute in American society or necessarily end schools’ efforts to manipulate the ethnic composition of their classes . New research from David Broockman and Josh Kalla indicates that moving to the center on this to...

Starting next Thursday, April 9, I’m going to be doing a brand new podcast with my friend Jerusalem Demsas. It’s called The Argument — like the magazine, The Argument — and we’re going to argue about some stuff. Is affirmative action a good idea? Should we miss the hypocrisy of liberal idealism in foreign policy? Should we get rid of anonymity on the internet? And much more. Jerusalem and I overla...

I was still semi-addled with an MLK Weekend case of the flu this afternoon when I recorded with Nate Silver about what has and hasn’t surprised us so far in the Trump administration. So it’s possible that my points do not make any sense. But I think I was reasonably cogent, and I definitely agree with where Nate left us at the end which is that Trump seems to be doing more potentially irreparable...

It was a lot of fun to chat with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett , mostly about American students’ falling test scores and the ways that post-Obama Democrats have gotten away from talking about the core function of the K-12 school system. We were going to shift gears into a more expansive conversation but tech woes stymied us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribe...

Noah Smith is probably the number one source of articles that hit my feed where I think “damn, I wish I’d written that.” So it was great to grab a chance to sit down and chat with him for almost 90 minutes today. We started out talking about the rising importance of batteries and electric motors, the Biden administration’s efforts to keep America in the game with China on this, and how Trump is sq...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my live video with Katelyn Jetelina ! She writes the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter which is a great source of information and advice related to all things infectious disease. We covered a lot of good stuff including some of the scientific and public policy aspects of the ongo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com Thanks for everyone who joined yesterday’s live interview with Rep. Ritchie Torres, I thought it was a fascinating discussion. Torres is young, he’s dynamic, and he has a pretty safe blue seat. He could take the path of least resistance and go along to get along. But he’s also ambitious enough to be thinking about the...

I sat down at around 11pm Eastern time yesterday with my friend Brian Beutler of Off Message to record a special live episode of our podcast Politix and thought I would make it our official content for this morning. We were of course dealing with some uncertainty about the election outcome but as you’ll see the assumption pretty swiftly turns to a Kamala Harris loss and a potentially large GOP gai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.slowboring.com We talked for 75 minutes but the upshot is just that the election is close.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.slowboring.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.slowboring.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.slowboring.com/subscribe