"The main reason we find it difficult to think critically about democracy is that it requires us to think critically about ourselves." That's the view of my guest today, Robert Tracy McKenzie, a historian at Wheaton College. In his recent book We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy , he argues that Americans - and A…

Diverse democracies are new, wonderful, but potentially fragile: that's the claim, the promise and the warning from my guest today, Yascha Mounk. Yascha wears many hats. He is a Professor at Johns Hopkins, the Founder of Persuasion, a publication and community devoted to the maintenance of a liberal society, and host an excellent podcast, The Good …

It's not news that liberalism is under pressure. And one of the most prominent liberals of our era is Francis Fukuyama. As he writes in his latest book, Liberalism and its Discontents, the virtues of liberalism need to be clearly articulated and celebrated once again." In this wide-ranging dialogue, Frank and I discuss how his thinking has evolved …

Something's wrong with our sex lives. That's according to Christine Emba. In her new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation she argues that too many people are having sex that is consenting, but not good. Sex that makes us feel used, or sad, or alienated in some way or another. She argues for an ethic of sex that is based on the Aristotelian definitio…

"Every body is wrong; no body feels right". So says philosopher Clare Chambers, who defends the idea of the unmodified body, both as a political and an ethical concept. It's not that bodies don't change of course - they do all the time, and should, by what we do and eat and so on. But we dig into the three reasons we modify our body: appearance, he…

"Human beings can no more give up narrative than we can breathing or sleeping." So says my guest Jonathan Gottschall. But why are stories so important? He argues in his new book The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down that the primary function of storytelling is to sway the listener in some way, to chang…

What are friends for? To "help us be better versions of ourselves" is Reid Hoffman's answer. He has spent a lot of time thinking about the nature and importance of friendship for human flourishing. Reid is best known for his success as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist: he is co-founder of LinkedIn and PayPal, a partner at Greylock Partners an…

“I am less interested in showing that the Medieval world was modern, than in showing how Medieval, in many ways, the modern world is.” That’s Roland Betancourt, my guest today and a truly fascinating scholar of history, art, theology, sex and gender, liturgy and much more. We discuss his book Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race…

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster.” It took a moment of epiphany on a Brooklyn park bench, and becoming a father, for my guest today, recovering productivity hacker and Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman, to see the truth. We’re all goin…

What should sensible Republicans do now? That’s the question Bill Kristol has been wrestling with since the nomination of Donald Trump - and it’s not going away. A veteran of Republican politics, scholarship and journalism, Bill’s view is that for the foreseeable future, the Republican party at a national level seems like a lost cause. The best hop…

Anne-Marie Slaughter is an optimist, and a patriot, and an advocate for both personal and national renewal. We talk about the difference between renewal and both reinvention (out with the old) and restoration (back in with the old), and what it means for our politics. We also discuss her work on women, men, families and equality, almost a decade on…

My guest today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is one of the most important intellectuals working today on issues of free speech, human rights, feminism and foreign policy. She is no stranger to either controversy or danger, not least because of her fierce criticism of Islam and Islamic culture. We discuss her own journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, via asylum…

If you find yourself saying, perhaps of a political speech, “Well, that’s just rhetoric”, you are getting things exactly wrong. That’s according to my guest today, Philip Collins, former chief speechwriter to Tony Blair and author of “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World - and Why We Need Them”. Phil is an old friend of mine …

I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect a book from someone leading a university to say anything terribly interesting. Maybe my view of higher education has become too cynical. I rather like the description from Clark Kerr, builder of the University of California system, of the modern American university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs hel…

“People should not underestimate Donald Trump’s abilities as a retail politician", says my guest today, fellow Brit-American Fiona Hill. "He knows how to connect with people, he knows how to get people riled up, he knows how to pit people against each other so that they can’t push back against what he’s doing”. Fiona is a Senior Fellow at the Brook…

“Residential segregation not only affects opportunity, it alters politics”. That’s one of the claims of my guest today, Georgetown scholar Sheryll Cashin. In this episode, we discuss Cashin’s new book, titled White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality. She describes her own upbringing as a daughter of civ…

What does “cancel culture” really mean, and how big a problem is it? Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason, has given these questions more thought than most. Nick is one of the leading lights of libertarian public intellectual life, and just wrote an essay, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” that we dig into here. Nick is worrie…

What have genes got to do with inequality? It’s a thorny question. But it one that Kathryn Paige Harden squarely addresses in her book and in this episode of Dialogues. She explains the new science of genetics and how it can help understand outcomes like college completion. Along the way we discuss the importance of the disability rights movement, …

What made America into a tinderbox, ready for Donald Trump's spark? That's the question Evan Osnos, staff writer for the New Yorker, set out to answer in his book Wildland: The Making of America's Fury. Having lived overseas for many years, mostly in China, Evan returned to the U.S. in 2013 and felt something of a stranger in his own land. The even…

Should feminists be pro-life? Should conservatives support more welfare for families? Who is Mary Wollstonecraft? What did RBG get right and wrong? I dug into these questions with my guest today, the legal scholar Erika Bachiochi. Our discussion centers on Erika’s new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, which argues for a form of f…

How should we approach decisions about children, especially our own? That's the question that motivates my guest today, Emily Oster. She is a Professor of Economics at Brown University and currently a visiting Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Through her books and newsletter, Emily has become something of a data guru…

Who broke America? Quite likely, you did. David Brooks, my guest today, describes how the new elite, the "bobos" as he once labelled them (bourgeois bohemians) have created a hereditary meritocracy, failed the leadership test, condescended to the less successful, and actively contributed to inequality and segregation. We talk about what class means…

“To be free is to be white, and to be white is to be free. In this reading, therefore, freedom and race are not just enemies but also allies”. That’s my guest today, the historian Tyler Stovall on the idea that animates his new book White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. It was an idea, Tyler says, that “kept him awake at night”. We talk abo…

What makes a man? My guest, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, has a one-word answer: testosterone. She is the author of the new book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Carole describes her own difficult educational journey, her own suffering as a result of male behavior; how an obsession with human …

"I do not believe the United States can now claim to be a liberal political culture". That's just one of the big claims made by the philosopher John Gray during our wide-ranging discussion of the history of philosophy, liberalism - and of course, cats. John does not think liberalism has “gone astray”; he thinks it contains the seeds of its own dest…

America is either a plural republic or it dies. Right now, the judiciary is keeping pluralism shielded from attacks from both the political left and right. David French, one of our most thoughtful conservative public intellectuals, describes his own journey from partisan to a man without a tribe; how fighting in real war changed his view of the so-…

What made some societies so individualistic, so democratic, and so rich? The short version of Joe Henrich’s answer is: religion. By undermining kin-based networks, universalizing religions (especially Western Christianity) prompted the “big innovation” of impersonal trust, altered the Western brain and laid the foundations for free markets, geograp…

What is the difference between a liberal, a neoliberal, a new liberal, and a progressive? In this joint episode with The Neoliberal Podcast, hosted by Jeremiah Johnson, you'll get all the answers you want and probably a few more besides. This is a pretty wide-ranging discussion on the state of liberalism in the world today, how to lean into identit…

Societies always have an elite - but my guest today thinks we need a better one. Philosopher Jennifer Morton says we draw our leaders from too narrow a pool of institutions, especially educational ones, and that affirmative action does little or nothing to improve genuine representation. In what is at times quite a personal conversation, we discuss…

How do you know what's true? Who do you trust? These are questions that are no longer academic, philosophical ones, but at the heart of our politics and society. My friend and colleague Jonathan Rauch has a brilliant new book out, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, and that's the basis for our dialogue here. He describes the CoK as …

Facebook just imposed a two-year ban on Donald Trump for inciting the Jan 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. I talked to Nick Clegg, VP for Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook, about the decision - and how the company will handle public figures on the platform from now on. We also discuss the challenges of striking a balance between free spe…

If bail decisions were made by an Artificial Intelligence instead of judges, repeat crime rates among applicants could be cut by 25%. That is because an AI is consistent in its judgements: human judges are not. This variation in in bail decisions, as well as in sentencing, and many medical diagnoses and underwriting decisions are all examples of wh…

Is Islam compatible with liberal values, like human rights and gender equality? Mustafa Akyol, my guest today, believes so: but only if Islam itself becomes more liberal. In other words, there is a theological argument to win first. I think Mustafa is one of the most important Islamic intellectuals at work today. In our conversation, we focus on hi…

My guest on this episode is an intellectual giant, the philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum. Her work has been kaleidoscopic in scope, covering Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Aristotle, as well as liberalism, feminism, human rights, forgiveness, justice, the arts, the role of emotions and much, much more. Our conversation is mostly…

Chris Mason is a Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, and works with NASA on the impact of space travel on the human genome. Chris is a really big and really interesting thinker and has a book out, The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, in which he argues that humans have a moral duty to es…

The federal death penalty returned with a vengeance at the end of Donald Trump's term, with 13 of the 17 executions of the last 60 years taking place in 2020. The New York Times opinion writer Liz Bruenig has been reporting and reflecting on this shift in policy. Here she shares her experience of witnessing the execution of Alfred Bourgeois in Dece…

My very first guest is NYU Professor and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, best known for his books The Righteous Mind in 2012 and The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Luckianoff, in 2018. Jon and I talk about what has been described as a crisis of epistemology - in the very ways in which we discover and generate knowledge and truth. Why h…