Apple News In Conversation

Samantha Irby is many things: blogger; essayist; and writer for shows like Shrill, And Just Like That …, and Work in Progress. Above all, she is a master of transforming seemingly mundane moments of everyday life into high comedy. Irby sat down with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu to talk about her new book, Quietly Hostile, her writing process, turning herself into a TV character, and why frivolous things matter.

Around 2013, author and cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar started noticing some worrying changes in his father. He would forget the code to their safe; he couldn’t remember what he did the day before and would get lost driving home. Eventually, his father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In his new book, My Father’s Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s, Jauhar chronicles the challenges of caring for a sick parent and explains where medicine is today when it comes to treatment for this incurable illness.

Electric vehicles may be better for the planet in a lot of ways, but there are huge, often-unseen environmental and human costs associated with harvesting the minerals needed to make EV batteries. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Washington Post reporters Rebecca Tan and Evan Halper about the paper’s series “Clean Cars, Hidden Tolls.”

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author, discusses the difficulty of changing beliefs and the importance of being open-minded. They explore why people resist changing their minds, the fetishization of hypocrisy, growth mindset, and the challenges of changing people's opinions on vaccines and climate change.

Recent allegations of ethical violations have reignited a debate about establishing an enforceable code of conduct for Supreme Court justices. University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck argues the latest revelations concerning several justices speak to a much larger breakdown in the way the court operates today. He writes about this in his new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. Vladeck spoke with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu about the absence of accountability on the court — and how reforming it could lead to a stronger, more trusted institution.

Documents marked “top secret” have been turning up in a lot of unexpected places recently. But America has another problem with classified documents: There’s too many of them. By some estimates, it would take 250 years for these documents to be reviewed and released to the public. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Matthew Connelly, author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, about the government’s culture of secrecy.

Nearly 30 years ago, James Bernard Belcher was sentenced to death for raping, strangling, and drowning 29-year-old Jennifer Embry. Recently, he was given a second chance: a resentencing, this time with new evidence unearthed by a mitigation specialist. These life-history investigators seek to contextualize a defendant’s violent crimes, often by surfacing childhood traumas. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Maurice Chammah, a reporter for the Marshall Project, about shadowing one specialist as she excavates Belcher’s past in a bid to spare his life.

The Showtime documentary series Couples Therapy allows viewers to watch real-life therapy sessions. Couples hash out their conflicts and challenges with Dr. Orna Guralnik as their guide. Guralnik is a psychoanalyst who prompts people to examine their instincts, listen to their partners, and do some deep self-discovery. Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu spoke with Guralnik about her approach to therapy — and her relationship advice.

What would a future look like where climate change has become a truly unavoidable part of all of our daily lives? This is one of the questions the new Apple TV+ show Extrapolations tries to answer. Series creator Scott Z. Burns was a producer of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the writer behind the eerily prescient 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic. Burns, along with one of the stars of the series, Sienna Miller, spoke with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu about the making of Extrapolations — and how dystopian portrayals of the future can mobilize and motivate people to take serious action.

The Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News is set to begin on April 17. At the core of Dominion’s case are pages of internal messages showing that many people at Fox didn’t believe the election lies they were promoting on the air. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Brian Stelter, the former chief media correspondent at CNN who spent years talking to people at Fox, mostly as anonymous sources, about the inner workings of the organization. He’ll also be covering the trial for Vanity Fair. Stelter breaks down the case, what’s at stake, and the potential consequences.