The Argument

For this month's book club, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias read The Death and Life of Great American Cities , the 1961 classic that changed how everyone thinks about neighborhoods. Rereading it as YIMBYs, they find a book that's right about what makes a street feel alive and wrong about almost everything that followed: Jacobs's push to devolve power to the neighborhood level bec...

Should immigrants have to assimilate? Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias take on the growing idea that immigrants shouldn't have to assimilate to belong in America. Jerusalem, the daughter of immigrants, disagrees, and makes the case that assimilation is not only good for the country but that immigrants largely self-select for liking America. The conversation turns to patriotism, and why Jeru...

The Bidens are back in the news, thanks to Jill Biden’s new book and Joe’s apparent difficulties raising money for his presidential library. So Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias do the thing the party keeps avoiding: they rank the worst parts of Joe Biden's presidency, from the economy and inflation to immigration, Israel and Gaza, the Kamala Harris pick, and the decision to run for reele...

Is online dating advice actually making it harder to find love?  This week, Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias wade into the world of online dating advice, from the manosphere influencers coaching men to treat women as opponents to the female-coded content teaching women to read every date as a minefield. Jerusalem and Matt find themselves split on what it's actually doing to us. Is this t...

Is modern environmentalism anti-progress? This week, Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring – the book that launched the modern environmental movement. Jerusalem and Matt find themselves surprised by what's actually in it. Is it a visionary scientific critique or a romantic backlash against modernity? And did Carson's legacy help or hurt the cause s...

AI companies keep promising it will cure cancer. But what does that actually mean — and would an AI capable of doing it be one we'd want to live alongside? Jerusalem Demsas and Kelsey Piper debated the question live in San Francisco, in front of a crowd of researchers, investors, and skeptics who had plenty to say about it. One of them is going to be very wrong. Listen and judge for yourself....

America is on track for its lowest homicide year since 1900, but nobody seems to be celebrating. Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas debate why crime has dropped so dramatically and what caused the pandemic-era highs in the first place. Were the George Floyd and BLM protests to blame for the increase in crime? Were cops holding back because they felt disrespected? Or was it pandemic-era disruptions...

This week on The Argument , Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias debate the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Jerusalem argues that Americans should have access to cheaper, climate-friendly cars, while Matt says industrial policy requires a more cautious approach. They dive into the failure of Trump’s tariffs, what serious industrial policy looks like, and how the climate activists are once a...

Spirit Airlines is dead and the right, true to form, is blaming Joe Biden.  The immediate cause of Spirit's demise is pretty clear: the war with Iran spiked jet fuel costs, and the already-battered airline couldn't absorb the hit to its bottom line. Last we checked, Joe Biden didn't start any wars with Iran.  In this episode, Matthew Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas break down what rea...

Betty Friedan thought Korean POWs were dying in captivity because their mothers were housewives. She thought boy moms were making their sons gay. She wrote a whole chapter comparing suburban kitchens to concentration camps — in 1963, while America was still processing what concentration camps actually were.  "The Feminine Mystique" is one of those important books that everyone "know...

Matthew Yglesias wants to end asylum.  On a new episode of The Argument , Matt argues that the post-WWII asylum framework is not just politically untenable but practically unworkable.  Jerusalem Demsas, true to form, disagrees. New episodes post every Thursday. For an ad-free version, show notes, and full transcript, subscribe at TheArgumentMag.com .  Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube...

For the past century, America's foreign interventions often carried the pretense of liberal idealism – to help bring peace and prosperity to people around the world.  But it doesn't take a history scholar to know that positive outcomes weren't always the result.  In the latest episode of the Argument, Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias debate the merits of liberal hypocrisy, its...

People tend to defend online anonymity by pointing to the long tradition of anonymous speech in American democracy. But modern anonymity is an entirely new beast.  Should we ban anonymity on the internet? That's what The Argument's Jerusalem Demsas and Slow Boring's Matthew Yglesias debate in The Argument's latest episode. New episodes post every Thursday. You can find The Argu...

When the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities in 2023, finding that Harvard and the University of North Carolina practiced race-based discrimination against Asian American students, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote , "eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."  The case, decided along ideological lines, caused a stir among progressiv...

Watch the official trailer for The Argument — a new podcast cohosted by Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias. Has affirmative action gone too far? Should we abolish internet anonymity? Is liberal hypocrisy worth defending? Welcome to The Argument , a weekly podcast from Jerusalem Demsas and Matthew Yglesias, where two friends argue about politics, policy, and whatever else is on their minds. This...

Are men naturally promiscuous and drawn to younger women? Are women obsessed with tall, older, rich men? Dating discourse is littered with pop evolutionary psychology that makes broad claims about how men and women are under a thin veneer of scientific credibility. But how much of it is backed by real science? In this episode of The Argument , host Jerusalem Demsas interviews UC Davis psychology p...

Economists love to say there are no free lunches. Jennifer Doleac thinks criminal justice is one of the rare places where that’s wrong. In this episode, host and Editor of The Argument , Jerusalem Demsas talks with Doleac—economist and author of The Science of Second Chances —about what happens when you treat crime policy like an empirical problem instead of a morality play.  Rejecting the false c...

Trump didn’t just reshape the GOP — he may have ended what we used to call “the conservative movement.”  New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins host Jerusalem Demsas to map the new right: the collapse of fusionism, the rise of nationalism, and a media ecosystem where influencers matter more than institutions. Then they argue about what liberalism can and can’t solve. Can abundance and faster...

Over less than 25 years, the opioid epidemic killed over 800,000 Americans. These deaths and the resulting economic and political ramifications were unequally distributed across the country. Some places were ravaged, others barely noticed what was happening.  In this episode, host Jerusalem Demsas is joined by economist Carolina Arteaga to unpack new research linking the opioid crisis to increasin...

Children are a problem for liberalism -- and it’s one you can see in everything from school-board wars to fights over “indoctrination.” If all individuals are free and equal, endowed with rights by their Creator, then does that include children? Kids are fully human, yes, but they’re also dependent, impulsive, and not yet capable of adult autonomy. So when do rights actually kick in? Rita Koganzon...

NIMBYism is usually explained as selfishness: homeowners protecting property values, or neighbors who just hate change. But a growing body of research suggests something simpler and harder to argue with: aesthetics. What if people oppose new housing not only because of who might move in or what it might do to traffic, but because the building just looks “wrong”? In this episode, Jerusalem Demsas t...

 If we want to address racism, should we talk more about race – or less? Matthew Yglesias argues liberals undermined their own principles when politics shifted from judging people as individuals to sorting them into moral categories based on group identity. We debate “the fox in liberalism’s henhouse,” collective blame, and why “accurate” generalizations can still poison a pluralistic society. The...

A lot of Americans are uneasy about AI,  and so are many of the people building it. Yet we keep scaling and deploying these systems faster than we’re building rules to govern them. Why?  The Argument's Kelsey Piper has a few explanations, from foreign competition to a sense of inevitability to a conservative party terrified of regulation. Even if the incentives are clear, our collective compl...

At the end of the year, I wanted to revisit our very first podcast conversation with some of my favorite liberal journalists.  In our very first live show in Washington, D.C., Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias joined me for a disagreement-ridden conversation to tape the first episode of our new video podcast,  The Argument. We talk about why Matt spends so much of his time arguing with...

Why is far-right populism on the rise? Political scientist Gabriele Gratton has a controversial theory: For decades, technocrats moved policy decisions — on austerity, climate, and more – away from the realm of mass politics and toward independent authorities, courts, and experts. The result? A populist backlash fueled by the desire to reassert control over policy. In Gratton's telling, the p...