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The Ezra Klein Show

The Ezra Klein Show

Podcast | United States | Left
www.nytimes.com/column/ezra-klein-podcast

Political and policy conversations exploring ideas that shape our world. Hosted by Ezra Klein for The New York Times.

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Articles

Discussions from The Ezra Klein Show

Economy

Why Jeff Bezosā€™ Tax Rate Is Lower Than Yours

Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett are three of the richest people in the world, but they pay little in income tax relative to their wealth. In 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on leaked tax documents that reveal what some of the richest Americans really pay ā€” or donā€™t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent. Jeff Bezos: 0.98 percent. Michael Bloomberg: 1.3 percent. Ultra-wealthy Americans have essentially been written out of the tax system. ā€œItā€™s wro...

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Geopolitics

Reckoning With Israelā€™s ā€˜One-State Realityā€™

For decades, most discussions of Israel and Palestine were framed around the eventual creation of a two-state solution. That effort has been dead for years. What has emerged in its place is what the political scientists Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami call the ā€œone-state reality.ā€ Their book on this ā€” edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown ā€” came out before Oct. 7, 2023. Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: Thereā€™s been a record pace of settlement construction in the...

Global
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Geopolitics

The Civilization Trump Destroys May Be Our Own

When President Trump didnā€™t annihilate ā€œa whole civilizationā€ on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements ā€” a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the worldā€™s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes ā€” continues to linger in the shadow of an uncertain cease-fire. Trump did not destroy Iran, but he may be destroying another civilization: ours. Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNNā€™s ā€œFareed Zakaria GPSā€ and the author of ...

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Geopolitics

I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War

Iā€™m opposed to this war. The Trump administration did not consult the American public or try to persuade Congress before authorizing the strikes on Iran. I donā€™t think the administration is prepared for what the strikes might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand President Trumpā€™s decisions from the perspective of somebody much friendlier to his foreign policy. Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and served as a deputy national security adviser during Trumpā€™s first ...

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Geopolitics

Why Iran Believes It Has the Upper Hand

In a prime time address on Wednesday, President Trump proclaimed that America was ā€œon the cusp of ending Iranā€™s sinister threat.ā€ But he also kept open the option of boots on the ground. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also about to start really biting ā€“ as countries get hit with shortages, which would spike prices across the globe. So what are Trumpā€™s options? What would happen if he just declared victory and walked away from the fight? What kinds of military operations are ...

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Culture

Michael Pollanā€™s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. Itā€™s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We donā€™t know what itā€™s made of or how it works or why it exists. But scientists and theorists have been trying to answer those questions, and have made some startling discoveries. The science writer Michael Pollan, known for books like ā€œThe Omnivoreā€™s Dilemmaā€ and ā€œHow to Change Your Mind,ā€ spent five years on the va...

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Politics

Will Iran Break Trumpism?

Is Trumpism crashing on the shoals of the Iran war? That is what Christopher Caldwell thinks. Caldwell is a prominent thinker on the right. Heā€™s a contributing editor at the conservative publication the Claremont Review of Books,and heā€™s one of the people whoā€™ve been trying to define, and even craft, a coherent Trumpism. So his recent article in The Spectator, ā€œThe End of Trumpism,ā€ sparked a lot of debate on the right. At the core of this debate are some fundamental questions that I think re...

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Politics

Naomi Klein on Trumpism and Our Age of ā€˜Unlikely Bedfellowsā€™

Naomi Klein saw where our politics was headed before most people on the left. Her 2023 book ā€œDoppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror Worldā€ is hard to describe. But among other things, it traces the new coalitions Klein saw forming on the right, the ways they were co-opting issues long associated with the left, and finding huge audiences and influence outside existing institutions. The people and coalitions that Klein wrote about run our world now. We are all living in the mirror world. As she p...

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Geopolitics

What Trump Didnā€™t Know About Iran

The Trump administration miscalculated how Iran would respond to this war. And the United States, Iran and Israel were brought to the brink of war in the first place because of a whole series of misjudgments and miscalculations going back decades. Ali Vaez is the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was involved in the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, and is in fact himself a nuclear scientist. Heā€™s also an author of ā€œHow Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impa...

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Politics

Who Should Control A.I.?

Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagonā€™s contract with the A.I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk ā€” a designation for companies so dangerous, they canā€™t exist anywhere in the U.S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropicā€™s A.I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran. This ...

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Technology

How Quickly Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy?

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era ā€” where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I. It isnā€™t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it ...

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