The Ezra Klein Show

With four ongoing criminal investigations, Donald Trump is the most indicted president in U.S. history. After years of defying unwritten norms, he will now be subject to a criminal justice system defined by norms and precedents. What does due process look like for a former president? Ken White is a former federal prosecutor, a practicing criminal defense lawyer and a co-host of the podcast “Serious Trouble.” He writes the popular newsletter The Popehat Report, extensively covering the ins and outs of criminal trials. Among the many commentators on Trump’s unprecedented legal troubles, White stands out for his “lawsplainers,” which analyze the gap between what the law says and what it actually does. This conversation walks through each of the four major criminal cases against Trump. Our guest host David French asks White why he loathes the overuse of the RICO statute and whether it was appropriately used in the Georgia election interference indictment. They also discuss the Florida judge whose “functionally lawless” decision halted parts of the Mar-a-Lago investigation, White’s view that prosecutors can get away with much more in state court than in federal court, how the district attorney in the Georgia case is approaching this “circuslike” indictment, why Trump’s legal intent is both more and less complicated than the public discourse suggests and much more. This episode was hosted by David French, a columnist at The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor and co-founder of The Dispatch and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. This episode contains strong language. Book Recommendations: Pax by Tom Holland The Shadow Docket by Stephen Vladeck The Enchanters by James Ellroy Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones.

Love it or hate it, self-care has transformed from a radical feminist concept into a multibillion-dollar industry. But the wellness boom doesn’t seem to be making a dent in Americans’ stress levels. In 2021, 34 percent of women reported feeling burned out at work, along with 26 percent of men. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist, has observed how wellness culture fails her patients, who she says are often burned out because of systemic failures, from the stresses that come with financial precariousness to the lack of paid family leave. In her book “Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included),” she encourages people to look beyond superficial fixes — the latest juice cleanses, yoga workshops, luxury bamboo sheets — to feel better. Instead, she argues that real self-care requires embracing internal work, which she outlines as four practices: setting boundaries, practicing self-compassion, aligning your values and exercising power. Lakshmin argues that when you practice real self-care, you not only take care of yourself, but you can also plant the seeds for change in your community. In this conversation, the guest host, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Lakshmin discuss how the pandemic opened up a larger conversation about parental burnout; how countries with more robust social safety nets frame care as a right, not a benefit; why it’s fair to understand burnout as a type of societal “betrayal”; how to practice boundary-setting and why it can feel uncomfortable to do so; the convenient allure of “faux self-care”; and more. This episode was hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a columnist for Times Opinion, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of “Thick: And Other Essays.” Cottom also writes a newsletter for Times Opinion that offers a sociologist’s perspective on culture, politics and the economics of our everyday lives. Mentioned: More information about Ezra’s Jefferson Memorial Lecture “We Don’t Need Self-Care; We Need Boundaries” by Pooja Lakshmin “How Society Has Turned Its Back on Mothers” by Pooja Lakshmin “Our Obsession With Wellness Is Hurting Teens — and Adults” by The Ezra Klein Show with Lisa Damour “A Legendary World Builder on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Souls’ of Cities” by The Ezra Klein Show with N.K. Jemisin Book Recommendations: Living Resistance by Kaitlin B. Curtice The Emotional Lives of Teenagers by Lisa Damour The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. The senior engineer is Jeff Geld. The senior editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. The show’s production team includes Emefa Agawu and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Public libraries around the country have become major battlegrounds for today’s culture wars. In 2022, the American Library Association noted a record 1,269 attempts at censorship — almost double the number recorded in 2021. Library events like drag story times and other children’s programming have also attracted protest. How should we understand these efforts to control what stories children can freely access? Emily Drabinski is the president of the American Library Association and an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. She is steering an embattled organization at a moment when libraries — and librarians themselves — are increasingly under fire. This conversation unpacks the political and cultural anxieties fueling the attacks on libraries. The guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses with Drabinski how libraries are a bulwark against the increasing class divides of American life, how the “small infrastructure” of the public library differs from big infrastructure like highways and bridges, how library classification systems can entrench the status quo, the parallels between political attacks on the library and the U.S. Postal Service, how censorship attempts fit in the broader landscape of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation and much more. This episode was hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, a columnist for Times Opinion, a professor at U.N.C. Chapel Hill and the author of “Thick: And Other Essays.” Cottom also writes a newsletter for Times Opinion that offers a sociologist’s perspective on culture, politics and the economics of our everyday lives. Mentioned: More information about Ezra’s lecture at UC Berkeley Book Recommendations: The Promise of Access by Daniel Greene Flamer by Mike Curato How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. At the same time, it looks like we are at the start of a green revolution: Decarbonization efforts have gone far better than what many had hoped for just a few years ago, and renewable energy is getting cheaper. How should we make sense of these seemingly mixed signals? What does it mean to hold the pessimism of climate disaster and the optimism of climate action together? There are few individuals better suited to navigate these questions than Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown. In a conversation with guest host David Wallace-Wells, Marvel explores whether climate change is “accelerating,” why reducing air pollution will lead to more warming before it leads to less; how the human response to a changing climate can be more unpredictable than the climate itself; how witch burnings increased during the last major change in climate; what the relationship is between hotter weather and social unrest; how decarbonization sets us on track to avoiding the worst-case climate models; why, despite all the challenges ahead, there are still immeasurable benefits to fighting for a cleaner planet and much more. This episode was hosted by David Wallace-Wells, a writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” He also writes a newsletter for New York Times Opinion that explores climate change, technology and the future of the planet and how we live on it. Mentioned: Beyond Catastrophe by David Wallace-Wells Book Recommendations: “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges Macbeth by William Shakespeare Troubled Waters by Mary Annaïse Heglar Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Should schools have been closed down? Were lockdowns a mistake? Was masking even effective? Was the economic stimulus too big? These are the questions that have defined the national conversation about Covid in recent months. They have been the subject of congressional hearings led by Republicans, of G.O.P. candidate stump speeches and of too many Twitter debates to count. Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’ve entered a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: “pandemic revisionism.” In her telling, the revisionist impulse seduces us into swapping cheap talking points for the thorny, difficult decisions we actually faced — and may face again with the next novel virus. So this conversation centers on the myths — and realities — associated with how we remember the pandemic. It explores what the evidence on the effectiveness of masking says, the fact that the United States was locked down for less than two months, the surprising consensus over social-distancing policy among Democratic and Republican governors early in the pandemic, why the tale of Sweden’s controversial approach to the pandemic is misleading, why the American media paid so much more attention to the first 100,000 U.S. Covid deaths than to the next 900,000, why school closures weren’t as wrongheaded a policy as often portrayed in hindsight, whether Donald Trump gets enough credit for Operation Warp Speed and more. This episode was hosted by David Wallace-Wells, a writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” He also writes a newsletter for New York Times Opinion that explores climate change, technology, the future of the planet and how we live on it. Book Recommendations: Lessons from the Covid War by Covid Crisis Group Open by Andre Agassi Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the so-called critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt and graphite, that are essential to building out clean energy technologies. There is no clean energy revolution without China. What would happen if China decided to weaponize its clean energy resources in the same way Russia recently weaponized its oil and gas? Is it possible for the U.S. to end its energy dependency on China by investing in clean energy at home? What does this geopolitical reality mean for the prospect of meeting the world’s climate goals? Over the past few years, Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan have been at the forefront of mapping out the ways decarbonization will upend the world’s economic and geopolitical order. Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former senior director for energy and climate change for the National Security Council under Barack Obama. O’Sullivan is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration. In Bordoff and O’Sullivan’s view, decarbonization won’t just affect what kinds of cars we drive or how we power our homes. It will transform everything from the nature of international markets and trade relations to the global balance of military and diplomatic power. And it will create new economic superpowers, new alliances and new sources of geopolitical conflict in the process. This conversation explores the contours of this transformation and what it will mean for the future of the climate and world politics. Mentioned: “The Age of Energy Insecurity” by Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan “A Critical Minerals Policy for the United States” by Meghan L. O’Sullivan and Jason Bordoff “Biden’s Historic Climate Bill Needs Smart Foreign Policy” by Jason Bordoff “The Nuances of Energy Transition Investments” by Columbia Energy Exchange, with Larry Fink Book Recommendations: The Prize by Daniel Yergin Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates This episode is guest-hosted by Rogé Karma, the senior editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. At Vox, he also wrote and conducted interviews on topics ranging from policing and racial justice to democracy reform and the coronavirus pandemic. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

You can’t understand the modern Republican Party without understanding the complete collapse of trust in mainstream institutions that has taken place among its voters over the last half-century. In 1964, 73 percent of Republicans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing always or most of the time. Today, that number is down to 9 percent. And it’s not just government. Pew found that only 35 percent of Republicans trust national news and 61 percent think public schools are having a negative effect on the country. Many of the issues animating the modern right — from fights over school curriculums and learning loss to media bias and Covid vaccines — are connected to this deep distrust. Mary Katharine Ham is a journalist and conservative commentator who has appeared on CNN, Fox News and ABC News. In Katharine Ham’s view, America’s institutions have “earned” her party’s rampant distrust. Across her writings, she has leveled scathing critiques of numerous mainstream institutions, from the media to the C.D.C. and universities, arguing that these institutions have consistently failed to serve ordinary Americans. So this is a conversation that explores Katharine Ham’s critique in order to understand the distrust at the heart of the Republican Party. Mentioned: “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Coalition of the Distrustful” by Michelle Goldberg End of Discussion by Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Benson Book Recommendations: Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor Rules of Civility by Amor Towles The Right by Matthew Continetti Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

The 2024 Republican presidential primary is officially underway, and Donald Trump is dominating the field. But this is a very different contest than it was in 2016. Back then, the Republican Party was the party of foreign policy interventionism, free trade and cutting entitlements, and Trump was the insurgent outsider unafraid to buck the consensus. Today, Trump and his views have become the consensus. The primary, then, raises some important questions: How has Donald Trump changed the Republican Party over the past eight years? Is Trumpism an actual set of policy views or just a political aesthetic? And if Trump does become the nominee again, where does the party go from here? Ben Domenech is a longtime conservative writer who served as a speechwriter in George W. Bush’s administration and co-founded several right-leaning outlets, including RedState and The Federalist. He’s currently a Fox News contributor, an editor at large at The Spectator and the author of the newsletter The Transom. From these different perches, he has closely traced the various ways the Republican Party has and, crucially, has not changed over the past decade. This conversation explores whether Donald Trump really did break open a G.O.P. policy consensus in 2016, the legacy of what Domenech calls “boomer Republicanism,” how to reconcile Trump’s continued dominance with his surprisingly poor electoral record, the rise of “Barstool conservatism” and other new cultural strands on the right, whether conservatives actually want “National Review conservatism policy” with a “Breitbart conservatism attitude,” what Domenech thinks a G.O.P. candidate would need to do to outperform Trump and more. This episode contains strong language. This episode was hosted by Jane Coaston, a staff writer for Times Opinion. Previously, she hosted “The Argument,” a New York Times Opinion podcast. Before that she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G.O.P. Mentioned: The Revolution with Steve Kornacki Book Recommendations: The War on the West by Douglas Murray The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver Running the Light by Sam Tallent Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

The world economy has experienced many shocks over the past few years: A pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Skyrocketing inflation. These are the stories that have dominated headlines — and for good reason. But they’ve also overshadowed a set of deeper, more fundamental shifts — the rise of China as an economic superpower, the fracturing of trade relations, the realities of the climate crisis — that are transforming the global economic order and prompting ambitious policy responses from leaders across the world. Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator at The Financial Times, a former senior economist at the World Bank and the author, most recently, of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Across his writings, Wolf has developed some of the clearest frameworks for thinking about how the global economy is changing and some of the sharpest critiques of how policymakers are responding to those changes. We discuss how China’s meteoric economic rise has shaken the foundations of the global economy, why globalization has remained far more resilient than so many predicted, why Wolf is skeptical that President Biden’s industrial policy agenda will succeed, the debate between “onshoring” and “friendshoring” that is dividing the Democratic Party, why a recession in the United States is looking far less likely than it did six months ago, the virtues and vices of Biden’s “foreign policy for the middle class,” why China’s recent economic troubles could signal a more foundational decline, why the U.S. economy has remained so much more stronger than most economists anticipated, and more. Mentioned: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s speech “The I.R.A. Passed a Year Ago. Here’s a Progress Check” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Robinson Meyer “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” by David H. Autor, David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson “Is the Global Economy Deglobalizing?” by Pinelopi Goldberg and Tristan Reed “Climate Progress and the 117th Congress: The Impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” by REPEAT Project Book Recommendations: The Narrow Corridor by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon This episode is guest-hosted by Rogé Karma, the senior editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. He works closely with Ezra on everything related to the show, from editing to interview prep to guest selection. At Vox, he also wrote and conducted interviews on topics ranging from policing and racial justice to democracy reform and the coronavirus pandemic. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Kristin Lin. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Efim Shapiro.

As I head into a three-month book leave, I wanted to take some time to address a wide array of listeners’ questions. My column editor, Aaron Retica, joins me for a conversation that ranges from the content of my forthcoming book and President Biden’s climate record to the simulation hypothesis and legalized psychedelic therapy. We also discuss what the I-95 collapse — and remarkably quick repairs — tell us about government’s ability to build quickly, the problems with everything-bagel liberalism, what it would mean to treat climate change like the emergency that it is, why I dislike analogies between Biden and Franklin Roosevelt, why health care reform has receded from the center of American political debate, whether liberals are being too soft on Hunter Biden, why I am staunchly against term limits for Congress, what kinds of work are most undervalued in American society, why I’ve become less pessimistic about artificial intelligence disinformation, why I left Twitter but have been enjoying Threads, the challenges of keeping a Sabbath practice and more. This episode contains strong language. Note: Starting next week, “The Ezra Klein Show” will be releasing episodes only once per week, every Tuesday, until Ezra returns from his book leave in early November. These episodes will be hosted by a range of guest hosts. Mentioned: “The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism” by Ezra Klein “The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Jennifer Pahlka “Two Theories of What I’m Getting Wrong” by Ezra Klein “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J. B. Ruhl and James E. Salzman “Not Everyone Should Have a Say” by Jerusalem Demsas We’ve Got You Covered by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein “This Is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading.’ It’s Pretty Magnificent.” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Maryanne Wolf “Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter” by Ezra Klein “Sabbath and the Art of Rest” by The Ezra Klein Show, with Judith Shulevitz Music Recommendations: “Orange” by Caroline Shaw and Attacca Quartet Fred again..: Tiny Desk Concert on NPR Music “USB” by Fred again.. “Midas” by Maribou State Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

When Barbara Kingsolver set out to write her latest novel, “Demon Copperhead,” she was already considered one of the most accomplished writers of our time. She had won awards including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a National Humanities Medal, and had a track record of best-selling books, including “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Unsheltered.” But she felt there was one giant stone left unturned: to write “the great Appalachian novel.” Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and lives in southwestern Virginia. Appalachia is her home. So when national coverage of her region started increasing in the years since 2016, with a focus on the region’s problems — like deep rural poverty and the opioid epidemic — she felt something was missing. She wanted to write a novel about Appalachia from the inside, as someone who is a part of it and who grew up in it. “The story I wanted to tell was not about the big guys, but about the little people,” she told me. And if major awards are any indication, Kingsolver succeeded. “Demon Copperhead” won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been widely acclaimed for the nuanced portrait it paints of life in rural America. So I asked Kingsolver to talk about her background and the book, and to explore the often chasmic dissonance between how many of us city-dwellers think about Appalachia and the reality of living there. Mentioned: Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason Book Recommendations: Landings by Arwen Donahue Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy Pod by Laline Paull Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

California has around half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless population. The state’s homelessness crisis has become a talking point for Republicans and a warning sign for Democrats in blue cities and states across the country. Last month, the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, released a landmark report about homelessness in the state, drawing from nearly 3,200 questionnaires and 365 in-depth interviews. It is the single deepest study on homelessness in America in decades. And the report is packed with findings that shed new light not only on California’s homelessness problem but also on housing affordability nationwide. Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic who has written extensively about the interlocking problems of housing affordability and homelessness in America. So I asked her on the show to walk me through the core findings of the study, what we know about the causes of homelessness, and what solutions exist to address it. We discuss the surprising process by which people end up homeless in the first place, the “scarring” effect that homelessness can have on their future prospects, the importance of thinking of homelessness as a “flow,” not a “stock,” the benefits and limitations of “housing first” approaches to end homelessness, why Republican proposals for being tougher on the homeless can make the problem worse, why neither generous social safety nets nor private equity firms are to blame for homelessness, and more. Mentioned: We're looking for a senior editor for the show. Learn more and apply here. Book Recommendations: Homelessness Is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. The senior engineer is Jeff Geld. The senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

There are few actors as widely beloved as Tom Hanks. Hanks has acted in over 75 films in his 46-year career, winning the best actor Academy Award two years in a row, for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump.” And more recently, he’s the author of the short story collection “Uncommon Type” and the novel “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” What is the source of Hanks’s near-universal admiration? In playing roles including Chesley Sullenberger, Mister Rogers and World War II heroes, Hanks reflects back to audiences what we could be at our very best. He’s an uncannily wise interpreter of America: what our country has been, and what it could be if we activated our potential to be kind, compassionate, even heroic toward one another. That’s just one of many topics we traverse in this truly delightful conversation. We also discuss how working on typewriters helps fuel Hanks’s creativity, why there’s such a huge global appetite for superhero stories, why America has become so cynical and how Hanks endeavors to defy that cynicism, how Hanks’s complicated family upbringing influences how he approaches his film roles, what America learned about itself — and didn’t — through Vietnam, Watergate and other historical events, how Hanks understands the complexity of heroic figures he’s played, why he views kindness as an active practice and more. Book Recommendations: Beartown by Fredrik Backman The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt Trust by Hernan Diaz Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Pat McCusker.

Since the release of ChatGPT, huge amounts of attention and funding have been directed toward chatbots. These A.I. systems are trained on copious amounts of human-generated data and designed to predict the next word in a given sentence. They are hilarious and eerie and at times dangerous. But what if, instead of building A.I. systems that mimic humans, we built those systems to solve some of the most vexing problems facing humanity? In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system that uses deep learning to solve one of the most important challenges in all of biology: the so-called protein-folding problem. The ability to predict the shape of proteins is essential for addressing numerous scientific challenges, from vaccine and drug development to curing genetic diseases. But in the 50-plus years since the protein-folding problem had been discovered, scientists had made frustratingly little progress. Enter AlphaFold. By 2022, the system had identified 200 million protein shapes, nearly all the proteins known to humans. And DeepMind is also building similar systems to accelerate efforts at nuclear fusion and has spun off Isomorphic Labs, a company developing A.I. tools for drug discovery. Demis Hassabis is the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the leading architect behind AlphaFold. So I asked him on the show to talk me through how AlphaFold actually works, the kinds of problems similar systems could solve and what an alternative pathway for A.I. development could look like. Mentioned: “The Curse of Recursion” by Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson “DeepMind’s CEO Helped Take AI Mainstream. Now He’s Urging Caution” by Billy Perrigo Book Recommendations: The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch Permutation City by Greg Egan Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest piece of climate legislation ever passed in the United States, setting aside hundreds of billions of dollars for decarbonizing the economy. But the money was always just a first step. The fate of the act’s goals hinges on whether those investments can build the energy system of the future — everything from transmission lines and wind farms to electric vehicle factories and green hydrogen hubs. It’s now been almost a year since the I.R.A.’s passage. So, how’s it going? Are we on track for a decarbonized economy? Robinson Meyer is a contributing writer to Times Opinion and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a new publication covering the ins-and-outs of decarbonization in America. We discuss why estimates of the I.R.A.’s investments vary so drastically, whether the Biden administration is being too timid in how it gives out the money, the collision between the investments we need to decarbonize and the laws intended to protect the environment, why permitting has proved to be such a debilitating obstacle, why red states are projected to attract almost double the I.R.A. investments compared to blue states (and how that could pose a thorny political problem for the Biden administration), whether the country can decarbonize while competing with China and much more. Mentioned: “Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Clean Hydrogen” by U.S. Department of Energy “The Greens’ Dilemma: Building Tomorrow’s Climate Infrastructure Today” by J. B. Ruhl and James E. Salzman Book Recommendations: The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen Climate Shock by Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman Shorting the Grid by Meredith Angwin Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. The show’s production team includes Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

It’s hard to think of a more celebrated figure of the 20th century than Martin Luther King Jr. He has a national memorial in Washington, D.C. His birthday is one of just 11 federal holidays. His words and legacy are routinely evoked by politicians of both major parties. I would go as far as to say he should be considered one of America’s founding fathers, which is one reason why I wanted to revisit this episode on Independence Day. But the paradox of King’s legacy is that while many revere him, very few actually read him. Most of us can cite a handful of his most famous quotes, but King’s actual teachings span five books, countless speeches and sermons, and years of detailed correspondence. There’s perhaps no scholar working today who studies Dr. King’s political philosophy as deeply as Brandon Terry. Terry is the John L. Loeb associate professor of social sciences at Harvard, where he specializes in Black political thought. He is the co-editor of “To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” the editor of “Fifty Years Since MLK,” and the author of numerous popular and academic articles on King’s political thought. His work is committed to rescuing the nuances of Dr. King’s philosophies and forcing a confrontation with what King actually said and believed, rather than what he’s come to represent. In this conversation, taped in January, we follow the commitment that animates much of Terry’s work: to take King seriously as a philosopher, rather than as purely a political actor. And it turns out that King understood a lot about politics that we’ve lost sight of today. We’re taping an “Ask Me Anything” episode soon. If you have a question for Ezra, send it to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with the subject line, “AMA.” Mentioned: “Imagining the nonviolent state” by Ezra Klein “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” by Martin Luther King Jr. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Elizabeth Hinton “Rethinking the Problem of Alliance: Organized Labor and Black Political Life” by Brandon M. Terry and Jason Lee The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson Book recommendations: Where Do We Go From Here by Martin Luther King Jr. The Trumpet of Conscience by Martin Luther King Jr. The Sword and the Shield by Peniel E. Joseph A More Beautiful and Terrible History by Jeanne Theoharis Dark Ghettos by Tommie Shelby Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Last weekend, in the course of about 36 hours, Vladimir Putin faced — and then survived — one of the most serious challenges to his rule in over 20 years. An armed rebellion led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian mercenary group, took control of a southern military town, and then advanced toward Moscow, coming within about 125 miles of the city. Then, as suddenly as the rebellion began, it was over: Prigozhin was quickly exiled to Belarus without facing criminal charges — an outcome that shocked many Russia watchers. Why did Prigozhin stage this rebellion in the first palace? Why did Putin respond the way he did? What are the implications for the future of Putin’s rule — and the broader war in Ukraine? There are few people who understand the Putin regime as deeply as Stephen Kotkin, a pre-eminent scholar of Russian history at Stanford. We discuss Prigozhin’s complex motivations, why Putin didn’t shut down Prigozhin’s critiques before they escalated to the point of armed rebellion, how to interpret reports that members of Putin’s inner circle were aware of the rebellion plot, how Prigozhin’s march created an “unwitting referendum” that could threaten the stability of Putin’s regime, the bizarre cease-fire arranged by Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko, why Putin didn’t kill or jail Prigozhin, how this series of events could impact the outcome of the war in Ukraine and more. (Note: This episode was recorded on Wednesday, June 28. It does not reflect any news developments that have emerged since.) Book Recommendations: Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager Invisible China by Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell Classified by David Bernstein Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Engineering by Jeff Geld and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

One of the oldest human ideas is that we are somehow different from animals, somehow superior to them. That’s a mistake, argues the environmental philosopher Melanie Challenger. “Many of the things we most value — our relationships, the romantic sensations of attraction and love, pregnancy and childbirth, the pleasures of springtime, of eating a meal — are physical, largely unconscious and demonstrably animal,” she writes in her book “How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human.” The consequences of resisting our fellowship with other species, she argues, have been devastating to them and to the planet. Challenger’s arguments are fascinating in their own right, but they also have a particular resonance at this moment of tremendous technological advancement. Humans have long defined ourselves by our cognitive intelligence, yet the machines we’re building are rapidly surpassing our minds. What does it mean to be human in a world where we are no longer superior by the standards we’ve created? Have we set ourselves up for a specieswide existential crisis? And how can embracing our status as animals help us navigate this bizarre future? Book Recommendations: Love’s Work by Gillian Rose Summertime by Danielle Celermajer Lighthead by Terrance Hayes Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.

“Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic prosperity and well-being,” says the economist Darrick Hamilton. He’s right. Policy analysis tends to focus on income, but it is wealth that often determines whether we can send our kids to college, pay for an illness, quit a job, start a business or make a down payment on a home. Wealth is also the source of some of our deepest social inequalities: The top 10 percent of households in the U.S. own about 70 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the typical Black family has about one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Hamilton is an economist at the New School who has spent decades studying the origins of the United States’ wealth disparities and how to close them. His “baby bonds” proposal — which would give poor children up to $50,000 in wealth by the time they become adults — has been put forward as national legislation by politicians like Senator Cory Booker and Representative Ayanna Pressley, and a state-level version of it is about to be established in Connecticut. So I asked him on the show to walk me through the structure of wealth in America today, the policy decisions undergirding that structure and the kinds of policies we could pass to dismantle it. Mentioned: “Can ‘Baby Bonds’ Eliminate the Racial Wealth Gap in Putative Post-Racial America?” by Darrick Hamilton and William Darity, Jr. “A Birthright to Capital” by Darrick Hamilton. Emanuel Nieves, Shira Markoff and David Newville “Hidden in Plain Sight” by The Corporation for Enterprise Development “Umbrellas Don’t Make it Rain” by Darrick Hamilton, William Darity, Jr., Anne E. Price, Vishnu Sridharan and Rebecca Tippett Book Recommendations: When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson Racial Conflict and Economic Development by W. Arthur Lewis Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Nate Golden, Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.

Earlier this month, a news outlet called The Debrief published a story that included, to put it mildly, some explosive material. The story, reported by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, centered on David Grusch, a decorated former combat veteran who has worked in multiple government intelligence agencies and served on the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. In the story, Grusch said he had decided to come forward as a whistle-blower, testifying under oath to Congress that there are longstanding covert programs within the U.S. government that possess crash materials of “nonhuman origin.” His claims are backed by multiple on-the-record sources from the intelligence community. The main reactions to this story have been to either embrace it as definitive truth or dismiss it out of hand. I wanted to approach it differently. What is actually being claimed here? Which claims have evidence, and which don’t? How does this story fit into the broader context of U.F.O. revelations over the past few years? There is a lot to be curious about here. There is also a lot to be skeptical about. Leslie Kean is an independent investigative journalist who has contributed reporting to many of the major U.F.O. stories in recent years, including this most recent one, and she is the author of the 2010 book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.” I asked her on the show so I could get some of my questions answered, and hopefully yours as well. Editor's Note: An earlier version of this episode and transcript misstated how David Grusch gave information to Congress. He provided information to the general counsels for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. He did not testify directly before members of Congress. Mentioned: "Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin" by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean "‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects" by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean "No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public" by Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean Book Recommendations: The UFO Experience by J. Allen Hynek The UFO Evidence by Richard H. Hall American Cosmic by D.W. Pasulka Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Jeff Geld and Isaac Jones. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Garrett Graff and Kristina Samulewski.