Uncertain Things

The Personal, The Political, and The Urban . Adaam and Vanessa discuss the episodes from the year that stuck with them most — and reflect on the unexpected ways these conversations are thematically linked together.  With Mark Lilla , they continued mulling on the questions they began considering back in season one with Tom Holland and Tomer Persico — i.e. where do we derive morality in a post-reli...

Robin Hanson is an economics professor who kept running across conundrums of human behavior in his research. Why do we spend so much of our GDP on medicine —  even when studies show that more medicine does not lead to better health outcomes? Why have we spent years perfecting methods of instruction — yet educational institutions keep resisting the very reforms that would help us learn better? Alon...

Eli Lake — host of The Re-Education Podcast , contributing editor to Commentary , and columnist for the New York Sun — is a Neo-Conservative, Neither-Trumper as comfortable talking about the FBI  as the musical genius of Ye. Eli was game to debate ideas, have his opinions challenged, and cover a wide-range of topics — from the Israeli elections and American midterms, to the legitimacy (or lack the...

Andrew Heaton, host of The Political Orphanage and our favorite “tepid grab bag” of political punditry, returns to the pod to help us understand the big issues at stake before the midterm elections: abortion, inflation, and culture war stuff. Along the way, Heaton explains why having sex on the hood of a car isn’t always a good idea, why dating in our era of partisan politics is exhausting, and wh...

Scientist-turned-historian Peter Turchin is best known for a dire prediction he made in 2010: we were headed for serious unrest, circa 2020. Peter came to this (as-so-happened) accurate prediction by treating the soft science of history like a hard one — what he calls cliodynamics. He and his team quantified indicators of social unrest in previous historical periods, generating a database of infor...

Urbanist, architect, and professor Vishaan Chakrabarti joins us to explain how the f*** cities got so expensive — and, while we’re at it, ugly. Vishaan is both a doer and a thinker — he’s the founder and creative director of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism as well as a writer of books, talker of TEDs, and a collaborator of journalists (see: "Not Your Car" ). In this conversation, we dig int...

Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead’s new book —  The Arc of a Covenant — kept Adaam up at night with its unique insight into the American-Israel relationship and its gripping historical anecdotes (Stalin! Truman! Roosevelt, oh my!). In this conversation, we investigate the culpability of “THE JEWS,” explore why gentiles catalyzed the creation a Jewish nation-state, discuss the ways anti-Sem...

Christine Rosen is the best kind of opinion writer — one we love to disagree with. Senior fellow at AEI, senior writer at Commentary magazine, and co-host of the Commentary podcast, Christine joined us for a conversation ostensibly about trauma, a word/concept that is proliferating in art and life (and getting dangerously diluted in the process). However, this fun conversation sprawled over much c...

In his latest book, Matthew Continetti — the right’s pre-eminent intellectual historian — traces the rich history of America’s 20th century conservative moment. In this conversation, we don’t dive into the details of history itself (for that, pick up a copy of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism ), but rather discuss the origins and repercussions of some of the right’s more u...

The yin to David French’s yang, lawyer Kreesa Lancaster gives us her perspective on how and why the Supreme Court came to the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. Along the way, Kreesa breaks down the legalese, explaining such terms as substantive due process, stare decisis, and strict constructionism / originalism, for good measure. But we also discuss why all the legal wonkery can be a distraction from what...

David French, conservative thinker, podcaster, and author of Divided We Fall, returns to the pod to talk about friendship , or the lack thereof, and why Americans are so goddamn lonely. David unpacks the link between loneliness and the rise of radical and authoritarian groups, and we ponder why Americans just don’t seem to prioritize friendship and connection (including in the built environment —...

Back from a delicious month-long detachment from the news cycle, Adaam sits down with political vagabond and comedian Andrew Heaton, host of The Political Orphanage podcast, to relearn how to do audio rambling. In a more light-hearted discussion than normal (still need to warm up!), we talk the subtle art of political comedy, the glory (and pains) of arguing, and the implacable hardships of having...

Angel Eduardo, author and co-host of the Fair Perspectives podcast, insists that we can rise above this polarized moment and have real – difficult but vitriol-free – debates with each other. Steelmaning is for beginners. We’re talking starmanning! How to do that is what we try to figure on this episode. Adaam and Angel argue about the merits of compassion versus cognitive dissonance and how best t...

We’ve been wanting to have political theorist, writer, and podcaster Yascha Mounk on the show for a while now, and the wait was so worth it: his new book, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure , is not only timely, it’s quite Uncertain Thingsy. He explains the three main ways that diverse democracies fall apart — and to what extent the U.S. is already und...

When writer and podcaster Meghan Daum released her book The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars in 2019, she didn’t get canceled, per se. But its reception among her liberal friends was… frosty. Readers charged that Meghan had been captured by the IDW; reviewers painted her as out of touch; event organizers sent nary an email. Meghan has since made a new media home for...

After covering the 2016 elections, podcaster and journalist Jody Avirgan (FiveThirtyEight, 30 for 30) was tired. Damn tired. Of the news cycle, the click bait, the politics. He felt pulled to history as a way of making sense of the present in a more complex, thoughtful way — and so he reached out to Nicole Hemmer, a historian who studies right wing media and occasional opinion writer/cable. The tw...

Jacob Mchangama — author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media , lawyer, and founder and director of the Copenhagen-based think tank Justitia — has uncovered an unfortunate, though not too surprising, historical pattern, across cultures and societies: the second we feel under threat in a society, free speech (that supposedly sacrosanct value) goes swiftly by the wayside. In this...

After studying neurobiology in college, Daniel Roy became a professional sleight-of-hand artist slash YouTube magician. He joined us to explore how illusionists exploit our innate psychological and social tendencies in order to make us unwillingly suspend our disbelief. In this in-person conversation, we dive into the topics of misdirection, deception, and illusion — and the ways they resonate wit...

Author and political philosophy professor Mark Lilla joined us to debate morality (what makes something good, and how much of it is enough?), innocence vs. ignorance, reactionary passions and nostalgia, the importance of maintaining a private sphere of moral inquiry, and the psychoses of current American politics. We usually ask our “blindspots” question at the end. This time, it captured the enti...

You’d think author and speaker Helen Russell — whose professional obsession for the past few years has been happiness — would be loathe to discuss the topic of sadness. Au contraire. As she’s learned more about what it takes to be happy, she’s discovered it relies on perfecting the lost (at least in America) art of being sad. We talk with Helen about her book How to be Sad, discuss why American cu...

People Love Dead Jews. That's the title of novelist and literary scholar Dara Horn's provocative book , which explores the ways in which non-Jewish societies exploit Jewish histories and atrocities to "flatter" themselves and erase Jewish realities. In an episode filled with more ghoulish humor than usual, we follow Dara’s journey of uncovering a troubling (and often truly absurd) history. We also...

Matt Taibbi thrives on the absurd. He used to revel in journalism's culture: caustic, independent, collaborative, and adversarial to those in power. Now, the former Rolling Stone writer and author of Hate Inc. sees little to love in the toxic, "credentialist" media world. We discuss Matt's transition to Substack (the future!), the psychotic break Trump inspired in "mainstream" media, and the futur...

Anthony Gottlieb is a historian of ideas, the former executive editor of The Economist, the author of The Dream of Reason and The Dream of Enlightenment , and the George R.R. Martin of the history of philosophy. He tells us why he kept a poster of Wittgenstein in his dorm, how journalism forced him to unlearn the bad prose of academia, what is the quality that defines a successful philosopher, and...

Film critic, YouTube influencer, and sci-fi author Lindsay Ellis joins us to talk about her new novel and the complexities of human-alien relationships. But, in typical Uncertain Things fashion, we couldn't help but ask Lindsay about the f*ed up nature of today's social media landscape — one that cripples artists and rewards very bad behavior indeed. Plus, Lindsay gives us her guide for distinguis...

Nancy Rommelmann is a fiery (but mostly peaceful) writer and reporter. She’s also the co-founder (along with Matt Welch ) of Paloma Media — a home for "the growing number of misfit creators who no longer fit neatly in our cramped categories of media, politics, and culture." Nancy made the trek to Queens for an in-person (!) conversation where she shared her journalism war stories, her ire about Do...