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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

Politics

I Have Some Questions for the Democrats Who Want to Run California

On Friday, I moderated a forum with the top Democratic candidates for California governor, focusing on the state’s housing crisis. California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office in 2019 promising to build millions of homes. And in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, designed to cut red tape and spur more construction. And yet the number of homes being built in California is basically the same as when he took office, and the state’s housing crisis remains, a...

United States
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Culture

This Is Why I Find Pema Chödrön So Essential

What do you do when you feel anxious or insecure? Many of us try to push the feeling away, or we ruminate on it, or try to solve it, or avoid the thought altogether. But what would happen if we did the exact opposite? The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön is the author of many beloved books, including “When Things Fall Apart,” “Welcoming the Unwelcome” and — my personal favorite — “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” And she has a way of inviting people to befriend the parts of life that typic...

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Politics

Is It Time to Break the Two-Party System?

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will e...

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Culture

What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

“Abundance” came out a little over a year ago. It’s been exciting — and a little disorienting — seeing how it’s rippled out into the world, and the ways it’s been embraced and debated and critiqued. So I wanted to take a moment to talk through what’s really happened in the last year – with Derek Thompson, my “Abundance” co-author, and Marc Dunkelman, whose book “Why Nothing Works” came out around the same time, and circles the same ideas. What has the abundance movement actually achieved in t...

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Culture

Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 3...

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Politics

Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

Leading the Future, a super PAC whose funders include the founders of companies like Palantir and OpenAI, is spending millions of dollars this election cycle, and a considerable amount of that money is going toward attack ads against Alex Bores – even though Bores himself used to work for Palantir. Bores is a New York state assemblyman who is running for Congress to represent New York’s 12th District. His campaign includes an extensive A.I. policy platform, including demands for A.I. companie...

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Economy

Why Jeff Bezos’ 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 — or don’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. “It’s wro...

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Geopolitics

Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality’

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 “one-state reality.” Their book on this — edited with Michael Barnett and Nathan Brown — came out before Oct. 7, 2023. Since Oct. 7, that reality has become further entrenched: There’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 didn’t annihilate “a whole civilization” on Tuesday, as he had threatened to do, much of the world exhaled. But the damage of his statements — a U.S. president, the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military, threatening to commit war crimes — 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 CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and the author of ...

Global
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Geopolitics

I Asked a Former Trump Official to Justify This War

I’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 don’t think the administration is prepared for what the strikes might unleash. But I wanted to try to understand President Trump’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 Trump’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 “on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat.” 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 – as countries get hit with shortages, which would spike prices across the globe. So what are Trump’s options? What would happen if he just declared victory and walked away from the fight? What kinds of military operations are ...

Global
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Culture

Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Consciousness is this amazing, mind-bending riddle. It’s the only thing any of us truly knows. We experience everything else in life through it. And yet we barely understand it. We don’t know what it’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 “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind,” spent five years on the va...

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