When most people think about war, they think about senseless killing, brutality, violence and horror. But when journalist Sebastian Junger thinks about war — even though he has witnessed firsthand how war is all of those things — he also thinks about meaning, purpose, brotherhood and community. It's why, he posits, so many veterans actually miss war when they return home. As Junger argues, war gives people all of the things that religion aspires to impart to people and often fails. War, he says, delivers.Junger was a war correspondent for many decades. His reporting on the front lines of Afghanistan was captured in his best-selling book, War, and was made into an Academy Award winning documentary, Restrepo, which follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers in one of the bleakest, most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. Through his raw, unfiltered, on the ground reporting, perhaps no one has done more to illuminate the full picture and reality of war.One of those realities is that men seek and need danger. They have a deep desire to prove their valor. They find community and meaning in crisis. And yet, much of the Western world lives without any kind of high-stakes, high-risk danger at all. It is, of course, a great blessing we don't live in constant crisis. But our comfort, safety and affluence, he argues, come with unexamined costs. So for today, a conversation with Sebastian Junger about reporting from the most dangerous regions of the world, his new book Freedom, what it means to be human, and how danger is inextricably tied to living a meaningful life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Honestly presents Chapter 1 of The Witch Trails of J.K. RowlingHost Megan Phelps-Roper writes a letter to J.K. Rowling—and receives a surprising invitation in reply: the opportunity for an intimate conversation in Rowling’s Scottish home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month, Nikki Haley announced she is running for President. Haley is someone who has consistently proven doubters wrong: she was the first female governor of South Carolina, she has never lost a race, she’s self-made, and she survived as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during a turbulent, chaotic Trump White House without so much as a scrape.For the latter, some see her as a savvy, smart player of politics. Others see her as having dodged an important question, as she allied herself with Trump enough to stay in his good graces, but also stayed away from him just enough to appease his critics.Her position on Trump is just one of many challenges that Haley will have to face in the Republican primaries. The other big issue is that in a post-Trump political landscape, can Haley’s oldschool Republican worldview resonate with the base of the party, which is increasingly isolationist and populist? On the flip side, perhaps Haley can be a breath of fresh air for the Republican party: a normal candidate who – as the Midterms seemed to prove – voters are more than ready to support. On today’s show, a conversation with Nikki Haley about why she’s running for president, who the Haley constituency is, how she responds to her fiercest critics (Don Lemon, we’re looking at you), her vision for the future of the country, and why she thinks she has what it takes to be the next President of the United States.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past two weeks, tens of thousands of people, most of them college students, poured into a small chapel at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. Some drove from South Carolina and Oklahoma. Others flew in from Canada and Singapore. They waited in line for hours to stand next to people they share nothing in common with except for a single conviction: God was visiting a two-stoplight town in Kentucky.Religion has been on the decline in America for years. But last year, for the first time in American history, house-of-worship membership dropped below 50%. And nowhere is the decline in religion and faith more dramatic than when you look at our youngest generation. Gen Z is the most likely generation ever to say they don’t believe in God, and they are the least religiously affiliated and the least likely to attend church.Zoomers are also a generation riddled with anxiety and depression, and inundated with nihilistic and fatalistic messages – TV shows, movies, pop songs – throughout the culture. In poll after poll, they are the generation with the least positive outlook on life. The CDC recently published a report stating that “almost 60% of female students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year.”And yet, in this tiny chapel in Kentucky, God, faith, meaning and hope have been on full display.What moved so many young people to nonstop prayer – more than 250 hours – at a moment like this? How did this revival come to be? And why is it happening now? Today, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold explains from the chapel at the Asbury Revival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ozempic, the brand name drug for a medication called semaglutide, is one of the most popular drugs on the market right now. Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, the injectable drug has recently boomed in popularity for its off-label use to help people lose weight... fast. Celebrities and public figures have admitted they're taking it. Instagram influencers are showing off remarkable before and after photos. It's been called "TikTok's favorite weight loss drug." As one doctor said, "we haven't seen a prescription drug with this much cocktail and dinner chatter since Viagra came to the market."But alongside the rise in Ozempic prescriptions come many questions still unknown: Who should be taking it? Is it safe for longterm use? Who is it safe for? Should children be prescribed it to treat childhood obesity, as the American Academy of Pediatrics recently advised? Is Ozempic a permanent solution to the obesity epidemic? Or is it more like a bandaid, a quick fix that does little to address the root causes of obesity? And, to that end, what is the root cause of obesity? Is it a "brain disease," as one Harvard doctor recently declared on 60 Minutes that warrants medication? Or do diet, exercise, willpower and other behavioral lifestyle choices still matter?These are questions that my guests do not agree on. Dr. Chika Anekwe is an obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and a professor at the University of California San Francisco. His most recent book is Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer. And Calley Means is a former consultant for food and Pharma companies who now works to expose their practices and instead incentive healthy food as the foundation of health policy.Today, Dr. Anekwe, Dr. Prasad, and Means debate: will Ozempic solve obesity in America? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many parents, the last few years have been eye-opening, as they saw the education system in America crumble under the weight of the pandemic. School closures that went on far too long, ineffective zoom school for kids as young as kindergarten, and other stringent policies that we’re still just beginning to understand the devastating effects of. But like many things during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with. Nowhere is that more clear than in our episode today about why 65% of American fourth grade kids can barely read. And about how during the pandemic, parents, for the first time, came face to face with just how bad and ineffective the reading instruction in their kids’ classrooms is and started asking questions about why.That is the subject of Emily Hanford's new podcast from American Public Media, Sold a Story, where she investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a flawed idea and a failed method for teaching reading to American kids. It’s an expose of how educators across the country came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended. Today, guest host Katie Herzog talks to Emily about her groundbreaking reporting and what we can do to make things right.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the last decade, the internet has devolved into a playground for influencers who sell and show off anything and everything you could ever imagine. But my guest today, Helen Lewis, says it isn’t all just superficial TikTok stars telling you how to properly contour your face to look like a Kardashian. Helen argues that the internet has actually become a digital revival tent, and that it’s full of new gurus. In fact, she says, we’re living in a golden age of gurus. Helen Lewis is a writer for The Atlantic and the host of the new podcast for the BBC, The New Gurus, which explores what it means to be a 21st century guru and how the internet got completely overtaken by them. She profiles productivity hackers, dating coaches, wellness influencers, crypto bros, diversity experts, and heterodox intellectual heroes, all of whom are making a living captivating millions of people with their unconventional ideas (like drinking your own urine to get healthy or paying $5000 to go to a dinner where you’ll be told you’re racist.)So today, a conversation with Helen about why these figures are so appealing right now, what it is about our current moment that is so ripe for people to believe in the most outlandish ideas, the limits of individual experts, why we still need institutions, and what, if anything, she’s learned about fighting our worst instincts that the internet makes so easy to indulge.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past 5 decades on historical and cultural subjects like the Civil War (which is the most streamed film in public television history), baseball, jazz, the Roosevelts, Jefferson, Vietnam, Benjamin Franklin, the Statue of Liberty, Muhammad Ali... and many, many more. But of his most recent film, The U.S. and The Holocaust, he said: "I will never work on a film more important than this one."Even if you've seen many movies or read many books on the Holocaust, Burns' new film, which focuses on the U.S.'s response to the worst genocide in human history—what America did and didn't do, could have done and didn't, and the way the Nazis derived inspiration from ideas popular in America at the time—is bound to both horrify and surprise.So today, on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I talk to Burns about why a filmmaker of American history takes on the Holocaust and what this dark period of history tells us about the chasm between America's ideals and our actual reality. And later, we get into an intense and rich discussion about the responsibilities of telling American history, the uses and misuses of the Holocaust as a political metaphor, and what pitfalls we face when drawing parallels between history and now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The debate about immigration brings out some of the deepest anxieties and biggest disagreements in America. And right now, all of it feels like it’s coming to a head. In 2022, there were over 2.76 million illegal migrant crossings at the Southwest border. That’s roughly the population of Chicago, America’s third largest city. To address this unprecedented surge, President Biden recently announced tougher restrictions and made a show of visiting the border himself. But unlike a decade or two ago, when the immigration debate was mostly about economics, today it’s an issue that’s subsumed by the culture wars and our polarized discourse. Republican governors bus migrants to sanctuary cities and they’re called “xenophobic” and “cruel” by the left. But what happens when a Democratic governor does much the same thing, bussing migrants from Colorado to New York City and Chicago? Is it still a heartless political stunt? Or is all of this just an inevitable consequence of our broken immigration system? So today: a debate moderated by guest host Kmele Foster between Alex Nowrasteh and Jessica Vaughan. Are current levels of immigration helping or hurting America? How do we balance humanitarian concerns with America’s economic and security needs? Should we be trying to enforce more or less restrictions at the border? And what exactly should we do to fix our immigration policies?Alex is the director of Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Jessica is the director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that describes themselves as “pro-immigrant but low immigration.”While Alex and Jessica couldn’t be more opposite in their approach – Alex favors free immigration, while Jessica argues for restrictionist policies – today on Honestly we look for common ground, debate the facts, and search for solutions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Biden getting on board the classified documents train to the raw milk revolutionaries who are skeptical of Big Dairy, today we bring you a roundtable to discuss, debate and pull apart the news of the week beyond the headlines.New York Sun columnist Eli Lake hosts this week's conversation with guests Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and writer at The Atlantic, and Honestly's very own Bari Weiss, with a special appearance by Free Press columnist, Suzy Weiss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices