The Ezra Klein Show

“Make America Healthy Again” is a great idea — somebody should try it. A lot of the concerns animating the MAHA movement — chronic disease, the unhealthiness of the American diet, how profits warp our health care system — are serious issues. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hasn’t taken major actions to address them. Instead he’s gutted funding for scientific research, including nearly $500 million dedic...

I do my best to respond to your critiques of some of our recent episodes. We got an overwhelming response to my interviews with the Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the national conservativism theorist Yoram Hazony and the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. So in this subscriber-only Ask Me Anything I answer some of the biggest critiques we rec...

What is going on with the economy right now? There are a lot of mixed signals. President Trump slashed taxes, but he’s also bringing in a lot of money through tariffs. Inflation is creeping up, but the stock market keeps rising. Eye-wateringly large investments are flowing to A.I., which could lead to an explosion of productivity but also mass job loss. And then Trump fired the head of the Bureau...

In December 2023, when South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice, I thought it was wrong to do so. Israel had been attacked. Its defense was legitimate. The blood was on Hamas’s hands. But over the last year, I have watched a slew of organizations and scholars arrive at the view that whatever Israel’s war on Gaza began as, its mass assault on Palestinian civ...

Mahmoud Khalil was a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests. In March, he was arrested by ICE agents and held for more than 100 days in a Louisiana detention facility. The Trump administration claims Khalil is deportable — even though he has a green card, married to a U.S. citizen — because he poses a threat to U.S. foreign policy goals. Khalil’s alleged offense here is speech. K...

Vice President JD Vance gave a speech recently that deserved more attention than it got. Accepting an award at a right-wing think tank, he argued that there’s a fundamental brokenness in how we define who is an American. He explained that this is the root of many of our country’s problems: a national identity that has become too broad. That was also a core idea of the 2018 book “ The Virtue of Nat...

“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is one of those “country people,” as well as a literary legend in her own time, who set out to write the “great Appalachian novel.” And I think she did.  “ Demon Copperhead ” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and we taped this conversation later that year. And I wan...

Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energy in America? Where does the climate movement go from here? And is it too late for us to avert climate catastrophe?  To answer these questions, I invited onto the show two climate experts: Jesse Jenkins, who is a leading climate modeler and a profess...

The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down.  That consensus, roughly, was this: What is good for Israel is good for the Jews; anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism; and there will someday soon be a two-state solution that reconciles Zionism and liberalism — or, at the very least, Israel is seeking such a solution. Every single component of that consensus has...

MAGA has been infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein files. And that’s because the conspiracy theories around Epstein hit at the very core of MAGA’s whole worldview. Today’s episode looks closer at that worldview. Will Sommer has been tracking conspiracies for years now. He was a reporter at The Washington Post and is now at The Bulwark, and he’s the author of “ Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and...

I have had a meditation practice for about 15 years now. I started hoping it would calm me down, and it has. But it’s also made me more aware of the strangeness of my mind. Certain thoughts emerge seemingly out of nowhere. Many of them return again and again. Why? And what relationship should you have to your thoughts when you realize you’re not the one controlling them? Mark Epstein is a psychiat...

Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the crypto market, A.I. venture capital, and how people, especially Gen Z, are making career decisions. Kyla Scanlon has emerged as a leading theorist on the economics of attention and is herself a member o...

President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a bad piece of legislation. It includes trillions of dollars in tax cuts that are very much tilted toward the rich, along with savage cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance and green energy. And on Tuesday, July 1, the Senate passed it in a 51-50 vote, with Vice President JD Vance as the tiebreaker. But bad policy only matters if people know about it, and...

Zohran Mamdani created a new anti-establishment playbook — in his use of social video, his focus on affordability and his position on Israel.    His assumed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, trouncing the former governor Andrew Cuomo, was one of the biggest political upsets in years. And while the electorate in this case is pretty specific, I think it still points to some tect...

For decades, Israel has wanted American support to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. But U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have resisted — until President Trump. So, what changed? And what are the likely consequences of that decision? Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime diplomat in the region. He joins me to discuss recent e...

Kevin Roberts, Kellyanne Conway, Ben Rhodes and I battled it out a few weeks ago on a stage in Toronto.  This was for a Munk Debate on the motion: “Be it resolved, this is America’s Golden Age.” It might not surprise you that I was arguing the negative, alongside Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama and the co-host of “Pod Save the World.” Roberts and Conway were on the other side. Robe...

President Trump’s actions against transgender Americans have been stunningly wide-ranging. They’ve also been popular. Trump has sought new restrictions on trans people in sports, schools, the military, prisons and medical care, and in government documentation. And a recent poll found that a majority of Americans approve of how Mr. Trump is handling trans issues — far above how he is handling his p...

It is impossible to overstate how hellish life in Gaza has been for the past 20 months. The death count is above 50,000 people — more than 15,000 of whom are children — and at least 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced over and over again. Starvation is rampant. Hospitals are either damaged or closed; there are only 2,000 remaining hospital beds. Nearly two years after the...

This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing control of your identity in the world. This happened to Rushdie in the most extreme way. But many of us know some milder version of this — and increasingly so in the age of social media. Rushdie’s story is hard to wrap your mind around. When he publish...

Trump has been making some foreign policy moves I didn’t entirely expect. He seems determined to get a nuclear deal with Iran. He’s been public about his disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu. He called Vladimir Putin “crazy.” And he keeps talking about wanting his legacy to be that of a peacemaker.  So what, at this point, can we say about Trump’s foreign policy? What is he trying to do, and how...

This is a bit of a strange episode. It’s an attempt to explore the difficulty of everything we’re supposed to feel in a day. We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — ones that are a world away, others that are growing ever closer, or perhaps have already made landfall in our lives. And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do...

Steve Bannon famously talked about using “muzzle velocity” as a strategy: doing so much so quickly that you overwhelm the ability of the media to cover it. I think what the Trump family is doing with crypto is muzzle velocity for corruption. What they’re doing isn’t necessarily illegal. It would be if these were official campaign donations; the sums involved are so large, and the buyers include fo...

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the cruelest and most irresponsible piece of domestic legislation to be seriously proposed in my lifetime. When you think about this bill, you should think about risk. It would increase our risk of a fiscal crisis by adding a hefty sum to our nation’s debt, at a time when we’re alienating the countries that typically buy our debt. It would slash food stamps and str...

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “ Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again ” details how Biden’s top advisers closed the circle around him and tried to conceal the extent of his decline. But I think the story here is more complicated. If...

Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference? Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called...