Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

Yeah, we’re going there. In one of our mailbag episodes, Chris Hayes joked about doing an hourlong meditation on mortality. Surprisingly, more than a few of you spoke up in favor of the idea, and one of our #WITHpod listeners suggested checking out a book called “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” by philosopher Martin Hägglund. In his book, Hägglund takes on some of the most fundamen...

Y'all - this is a good one. Trust us. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you reflect, it'll inspire...it might even give you that special WITHpod brand of existential crisis. Our second stop of the fall tour brought Chris Hayes to the stunning Theatre at the Ace Hotel with screenwriter and director Adam Mckay along with debut novelist Omar El Akkad. The question at hand - how can we use art and pop...

Over the past few months communication coming in and out of Kashmir, the highly contested land between India and Pakistan, has been increasingly difficult. The Indian government lead by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken steps to blackout the region in to order to once and for all place Kashmir under Indian control. The move has been roundly condemned by international groups, and serves as ano...

CHICAGO! We have a date, we have guests, and we have a SPECIAL PRESALE CODE! Join us Tuesday, November 12th at the House of Blues Chicago with special guests Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi. Presale starts Friday, October 18 at 10am ct and goes until Sunday, October 20 at 10pm ct. Presale code -- withpod Remaining tickets will be released Monday October 21st at 10am central. Sign up for MS...

Listen for details on how to win tickets to our Los Angeles live show! Salman Rushdie is a most singular figure. He’s authored 19 books, accrued countless awards, and spent about a decade in hiding after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for his death. Needless to say, Chris Hayes jumped at the chance to have a conversation with Salman Rushdie about his life and the ways his particular experi...

You’ve likely heard of redlining - the practice of systematizing discrimination based on where you live. You’ve probably even heard us talk about the ways its legacy continues to impact the upward mobility of communities of color. But do you know what happened next? In the wake of urban uprisings in the late 1960s, politicians pushed to end redlining, to lift people up out of poverty and improve t...

What is conservatism in the era of Trump? During the 2016 primaries, Senator Ted Cruz argued that he alone was the true conservative candidate, consistently attacking Donald Trump as a big government liberal. So what does Sen. Cruz make of the conservatives that rejected him and went on to put Trump in the White House? At The 2019 Texas Tribune Festival, Chris Hayes and Sen. Cruz sat down in The P...

Get your tickets today! Listen for details on how to get EXCLUSIVE presale access to tickets for our WITHpod Live event in Los Angeles happening Monday, October 21st with special guests Adam Mckay and Omar El Akkad. Presale is from 10am-10pm pacific time TODAY, September 26th - you can access the website here. Regular sale starts Friday, September 27th at 10am pacific time. And don't forget to com...

Andrew Marantz spent three years embedded in some of the ugliest corners of the Internet. His goal: find out how trolls and  alt-right propagandists were able to so effectively turn social media platforms into a vehicle for taking their fringe opinions into the mainstream. Unable to talk to the gate keepers of the Internet, Marantz went to the gate crashers. What he found is a clear guide to a sor...

What was it like to be in the room for some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration? Samantha Power started as an outsider, a war correspondent who became a voice of moral witness about the failings of the American government. That voice earned her a job in the cabinet of President Barack Obama, helping shape the foreign policy she was once a harsh critic of....

How do you know when it’s time to ask for help? For former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, the moment came just as his political star was rising. October of 2018, in the final stages of what looked like a successful mayoral bid, and while part of conversations about potential 2020 contenders, Kander stepped back. “After 11 years of trying to outrun depression and PTSD symptoms, I have fi...

The Trump administration wants to legalize transgender discrimination in the workplace. This week’s conversation breaks down how we reached this point. From the ways our social system constructs and uses gender, to the law and its limitations, to the political struggles within the LGBTQ community, Chase Strangio discusses many of the complex factors at play in the fight for transgender rights. A l...

Why is it so expensive to go to college? Going to a four-year university and getting a bachelor’s degree is considered the most direct path to the middle class. At the same time, families in the middle class are forced to take extreme and desperate measures to pay for soaring school fees. It’s a broken system that’s taken its toll – we now have more college debt in this country than auto loan or c...

What does it mean to apply for asylum? This is the story of one man, Luis Mancheno, and the events that unfolded in his home country of Ecuador that led him to seek refuge in the United States. His journey is heartbreaking and harrowing and powerful – and best heard in his own words.  RELATED: “Refugee, Immigrant and Citizen” (The New York Times, 2017) Follow Luis Mancheno here Sign up for MS NOW...

Law professor Katie Porter never considered running for office. She worked under then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and had Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a professor and mentor, but the idea of holding office herself was never even on the drawing board. That all changed election night 2016. Two years later Katie Porter flips California’s 45th district, delivering a Democratic victory that h...

Migration is central to the human experience. For as long as we’ve been around, people have been moving from one place to another. Though it’s never been easier to get from point A to point B, the inequality between those places could be as great as they’ve ever been. We’re now on the front edge of a climate crisis, launching the greatest period of human migration that will ever have happened on t...

Last week the Governor of Puerto Rico resigned after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in two weeks of sustained protest. Leaked inappropriate texts between Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and his inner circle provided the spark, but corruption and deeper frustrations on the U.S territory kindled the fury of citizens into mass mobilization. This week journalist Julio Ricardo Varela explain...

Gov. Jay Inslee is running a presidential campaign unlike any other. The Washington governor is basing his run on the fundamental organizing premise that the climate crisis is more important than anything else. It’s a unique strategy that comes at a time when more and more people are recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis. But while climate is moving up on the list of issues voters care abo...

How do you build a movement? How do you connect people across race and religion and identity in order to create a united coalition? This is the work of Rev. Dr. William Barber II, one of the best and most important political voices in America right now. He has dedicated his life to the fight against systemic racism and poverty, and is known for his ability to organize diverse coalitions around eve...

Let’s talk about socialism. There’s a marked generational divide in the way people think about that word, what it means, and what it conjures. For those who were adults during the Cold War, socialism evokes something very different than those who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, there’s a growing part of the left that’s trying to make a case for socialism, inciting a definitiona...

There’s been a heated national debate over what to call some of the migrant detention centers along the southern border. Are these facilities deserving of the label "concentration camps"? Andrea Pitzer has a uniquely deep perspective on this, having written a global history of concentration camps titled “One Long Night”. This conversation details the lineage of concentration camps, from...

After two years of a Donald Trump presidency, voters turned out in the 2018 midterms to deliver Democrats the House by a historic margin. That freshman class has its fair share of rabble-rousers who are using their platforms to shake up Congress from the left of the party.  But those members of Congress aren’t the ones who won Democrats the majority – for that, you have to look at the candidates w...

Got impeachment on the mind? If you do, odds are there are two recent examples of the impeachment process you might be drawing from – Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But what do you know about the first ever presidential impeachment? There is no better time to revisit the case of Andrew Johnson, the white supremacist President whose impeachment reveals a wild truth about the history of this countr...

Liberalism is the ordering principal of American government, and yet liberalism is embattled.  After the end of the Cold War, it was widely believed that liberal democracy would spread inexorably, but instead new challenges to liberalism have emerged. Across the world, authoritarian governments flourish and some countries have begun to backslide away from liberalism. Even here at home, liberalism’...

“Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” In July of 2013, Alicia Garza wrote these words in reaction to a jury’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. That post turned into a hashtag which became the rallying cry for one of the most recognizable social movements of this generation. While it can feel like the nation’s current racial discourse is tren...