Why would two intelligent women running a hugely successful podcast at one of the most respected studios in the audio world, quit to start a small journalism company built on blockchain, a technology very few people have ever heard of?To quote someone on Twitter yesterday paraphrasing Bill Clinton sounding pretty harsh, actually: "It's the business model, stupid."As we keep learning the hard way, as long as we get our journalism from Facebook and 24 hour cable news, we're suckers for infotainment, propaganda, and actual fake news—not the real news Trump is always calling fake, but the real fake news trolls cook up to polarize American culture. And in these raging digital waters, non-profits and public media struggle just to stay afloat.There's got to be a better way, right?Manoush Zomorodi and Jen Poyant thought so. Partners on the podcast Note to Self, they left to start Stable Genius Productions. It's part of Civil, a new blockchain journalism platform. For reasons we'll try to explain, blockchain has the potential to bring us better, more independent media. Better, more independent everything, maybe.That's what Jen and Manoush were betting on, anyway. They document the twists and turns since that fateful decision with refreshing vulnerability on their podcast ZigZag. Its second season started on October 11th.Surprise conversation starter clips in this episode: Maria Konnikova on poker strategyDerek Thompson on what makes a pop song addictive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does it ever strike you as odd that we manage to inhabit two completely different realities at once? On one level, we have common sense and reason that orient us in the world. We make narrative sense of our own life and self and we go about our day with a provisional yet perfectly satisfactory sense of what the hell we're doing. And on another level, we know basically nothing. Forget about dark matter and multiple universes. Just glance into the eyes of that stranger on the train—there's a whole world in there that you know nothing whatsoever about.I'm here today with Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Man Booker prize this year for her book FLIGHTS, and with the book's Man Booker prizewinning translator, Jennifer Croft. Flights is a patterned assemblage of sketches, short stories, fragmentary essays about travel. Motion. And it kept striking me while reading it that her writing is about these two worlds we always waver between: Orientation and disorientation. Trying to map things out and then getting lost inside our own maps.Surprise conversation starter interview clips in this episode:Alissa Quart on coparenting as a growing necessity in AmericaAstronaut Chris Hadfield on risk taking Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As Alexander Hamilton put it, the American Experiment puts to the test the question “of whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice…or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” This question surfaces throughout Jill Lepore’s brilliant new history of the United States: These Truths. Our conversation took place during the live-streamed, virally-watched Senate Judiciary hearing on allegations that nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault while in high school. Jill comments on this historical moment and much more. As she puts it in the book's epilogue: A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you ever see the 1951 Disney version of Alice in Wonderland? Where the caterpillar, voiced by actor Richard Haydn, sits laconically on his giant toadstool, wreathed in hookah smoke, peers at Alice under his drooping eyelids and says:Who….Aaaaaaah…..you….?Even as kid, I felt the existential impact of that question. Not, "hey kid, what's your name?" But who, fundamentally, are you as a person? What are you like? Were you born that way? How much of that can you change? All those chilling, thrilling, bottomless, ego-gratifying questions.But what happens when the murky philosophy and psychology of the self meet good-old American pragmatism and business? Something very weird indeed. I'm here today with Merve Emre—she's an associate professor of English at Oxford University and she's the author of The Personality Brokers. It tells the strange history of The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—a mother-daughter psychological cottage industry that, 70 years in, still has people calling themselves introverts or extraverts, feelers or thinkers, and pondering what that might mean for their lives and their careers.Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Benjamin Hardy, most read person on Medium: Want more happiness, change how you relate to negativity​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I have a confession to make: Literary magazines have always kind of intimidated me. Give me an 800 page, impenetrable work of literature any day. Like Captain Ahab, I’ll pursue it relentlessly unto the ends of the earth until it unfolds its briny secrets. But facing a shelf of lit mags at The Strand Bookstore, I always feel either underdressed or overdressed. Like a dream where you’re naked at the Vienna Opera or in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren at a Sonic Youth concert. Maybe all this started when I wrote a poem on the back of a napkin about a butterfly that “split into bloom from the lip of a rock.”, sent that napkin to the offices of the NYU Violet or whatever it was called, and they somehow failed to publish it.I’d keep this between me and my therapist, but I bet I’m not alone here. And yet—the literary-magazine-industrial-complex is where so many of our greatest writers first see print. The Paris Review, for example, which first appeared in spring 1953, has published Adrienne Rich, Ralph Ellison, Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and the list goes on and on and on. And if you can get over yourself and actually read it, it’s pure pleasure. It’s an immersive, eclectic refuge from the business and the busy-ness of the world.  This summer, Emily Nemens was named the new editor of The Paris Review. She’s a poet, short story writer, essayist and illustrator who previously co-edited the Southern Review. At 34, she’s a fresh new steward for the this venerable old literary gatekeeper. And it’s an opportune moment to ask, or re-ask the questions: who is a literary magazine for, what is it supposed to do, and how can it do that better?Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Miki Agrawal on pushback against marketing for womenVicki Robin on how the economy grew beyond its natural bounds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

THIS IS CONGO, a new documentary film, attempts to wrap its mind around the incomprehensible realities of the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 60 years after it was founded. At one point, commenting on one of the more incomprehensible recent events, a high-ranking military officer remarks: “They will say, “This is Congo”But when will they ask “Why? why is Congo like this?”Where do we begin? Where can we begin? For as long as I can remember, the news out of Congo has been bad. But my memory of the news only goes back about two decades, to when I started paying attention. The cycle of violence is a funny thing. It has its own momentum. People get swept up in it for personal reasons, or manipulated by politicians fanning the flames of old resentments. Ask anyone on either side of a blood feud where it started—who threw the first stone, and when the sun goes down, they’ll still be talking. Where does Congo’s trouble begin? Why is the country in a seemingly unending state of war between marauding rebel groups and marauding government soldiers, the people’s lives torn to shreds in between? And even if the people of Congo could fully trace this nightmare to its roots, how could they save the tree?My guest today is documentary filmmaker Daniel McCabe. His new film THIS IS CONGO asks all of these questions and more. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Steven Pinker on democracy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My grandmother used to tell a story about coming to America from Poland. How she sang God Bless America to cheer up all the grownups on the ship. She was 5 or 6 years old, traveling alone with her mom. For her, it must have been a big adventure. I can hardly imagine what it was like for her mom— my great grandmother — how bad things must have been for Jews in their home town of Bialystok for her to pick up and leave like that, without her husband, heading toward some distant cousin in the undiscovered country of Vineland, New Jersey. My guest today left Egypt as an adult for the US, also under politically grim circumstances.  During the Arab Spring, as his country convulsed toward revolution, he became a leading voice of dissent. A trained surgeon, he made an unlikely transition to famous tv satirist for millions of viewers on his nightly political comedy show. Bassem risked jail, helped facilitate the toppling of a dictator who’d been in power for 30 years, and after all that change decided it was time to start a new life in America. And just yesterday I was complaining that I’m sick of New York City, but I don’t see how I could possibly leave . . . Bassem Youssef is a comedian, writer, and the smart, funny host of the podcast ReMade in America.Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Alvin Hall on being black in the US vs. the UKMichio Kaku on the new economics of space explorationAlice Dreger on social media slacktivism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I started college at New York University in 1990, nobody lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was the dark side of the moon. At least that’s how we NYU students thought about it. Lots of people lived in Brooklyn, of course. Just not us. It’s 2018, and Brooklyn has become an international brand, synonymous with artisanal pickles, gastropubs, and luxury condos. It’s the place even former NYU students can’t afford to live anymore. But in a couple of Brooklyn neighborhoods, people are still dressing and living in many ways like it’s the 18th century, and adhering to laws that date back centuries, even millennia earlier. I’m talking about Hasidic Judaism, and particularly, today, about Borough Park, Brooklyn, where this community thrives. And even more particularly about one woman—Rachel “Ruchie” Frier—who, in spite of being religiously observant as most humans would define it has nonetheless become a thorn in the side of the more conservative elements of this already deeply conservative community. The all-female volunteer ambulance corps she started was a radical move for Borough Park, and it’s the subject of 93Queen, a new documentary by Paula Eiselt.Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Reza Aslan on religious faithMichael Hobbes on myths and realities of the millennial generation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The impulse to make art is with us from childhood. It’s the desire to play.  To say “hey! Look what I made!” It’s the wild fun of making a big mess that’s nobody else’s but your own—and not having to clean it up. Above all else, art is wild. It’s independent. It’s free. And that’s one reason why the art industry is a very weird thing. In order to make money “at scale” as the Silicon Valley kids like to say, movie studios, fancy galleries, and concert promoters have to quantify, systematize, and package that sense of freedom. If it sounds like a paradox, that’s because it is. I’m just gonna say it: the more money at stake, the less breathing space for everything that draws us to art in the first place. I’m here today with an actor whose name is basically synonymous with creative freedom. Parker Posey has created unforgettable characters in indie films like Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim, and Christopher Guest’s Best in Show, and in big studio productions like You’ve Got Mail and Netflix’s Lost in Space. Wherever she  shows up, Parker fills the screen with an energy teetering between hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. A sense of chaos barely contained. Her new memoir – her first book – captures that same wonderfully unpredictable honesty and humor. It’s called You’re On An Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Danny Sjursen on how Americans value the lives of non-AmericansNick Offerman on staying balanced in an insane industry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The other day I was at a kid’s birthday party and a fellow dad was joking that “When we were kids, it was all ‘bang-bang-bang!’ and now it’s all ‘pew-pew-pew!’”He was talking about video games and lasers as opposed to, I’m guessing, cowboys? Actually, as I remember childhood, it was all “wowm…wowm!” The sound of lightsabers. I was 5 years old when Star Wars: A New Hope came out, and like everyone who grew up back then, I had sci-fi seeping into my very pores. Alien civilizations. Cyborg killers. The dark, unfeeling menace of advanced technology…Because there can never be too many Jasons, my guest today is the Hugo-award winning writer Jason Heller.  He’s here to tell the eerie and fascinating tale of how sci-fi seeped into the pores of popular music in the 1970s, and how, along with psychedelic drugs and electronic instruments, it produced and was transformed by David Bowie and others into something rich and strange. Something that changed the face of music and pop culture forever. His new book is Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci Fi Exploded.Surprise conversation-starter clips in this episode: Reza Aslan on how religious believers describe godDambisa Moyo on 3 ways to make American politicians better Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices