Super Tuesday winnowed the 2020 Democratic primary race down to two candidates: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. So how would their presidencies actually differ? Who would staff their administrations? How would they handle Congress? How would they handle key foreign policy decisions? What are their likely points of failure? How would they change the Democratic Party?I asked my friend, colleague, and Weeds co-host Matt Yglesias to join me for this conversation, and it was a good one. We’ve both covered Biden and Sanders for a long time, but come away with somewhat different impressions of each. The points where we differ here were, for me, even more helpful than the points where we agreed.I'll be interested, as always, to hear your thoughts: ezrakleinshow@vox.com.References:Matt Yglesias' case for Bernie Sanders Ezra's piece on what Bernie needs to learn from BidenNew to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Engineer - Cynthia GilProducer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rebecca Solnit is one of the great activist-essayists of our age. Her books and writing cover a vast amount of human existence, but a common thread in her work — and a focus of her upcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence — is what it means to be voiceless, ignored, and treated as a unreliable witness to the events of your own life. “We always say nobody knows, and that means that everyone who knows was nobody,” Solnit says. “Everyone who was nobody knew about Harvey Weinstein.”This conversation is, in part, about what it means to be a nobody and what we’d learn if we listened to the voices on the margins of society. But it goes wide from there, covering the psychic toll of sexual violence, the Weinstein ruling, how visual art infuses Solnit’s journalism, the changing cultural role of San Francisco, what climate change will do to social relations, the different narratives of violence that men and women grow up with, and much more.A quick warning: We spoke just after the Weinstein ruling, and we discuss sexual violence both in terms of specific cases and larger cultural questions. It’s an important conversation, and Solnit’s thinking here is essential and humane, but listeners should be prepared for it.Book recommendations: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean VuongIn the Dream House by Carmen Maria MachadoThere There by Tommy OrangeNew to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Engineer - Cynthia GilProducer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Weeds 2020! Every other Saturday Ezra and Matt will be exploring a wide range of topics related to the 2020 race. Since the Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders has become the clear frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic primary, spurring lots of debate over whether he could win in the general election. We discuss where the electability conversation often goes off-the-rails, why discussing electability in 2020 is so different than 1964 or 1972, the case for and against Bernie’s electability prospects, and the strongest attacks that Trump could make against Sanders and Joe Biden. Then, we discuss Ezra’s favorite topic of all time: the filibuster. Ezra gives a brief history of this weird procedural tool, and we discuss why so many current Senators are against eliminating it.Resources:"Bernie Sanders can unify Democrats and beat Trump in 2020" by Matthew Yglesias, Vox"The case for Elizabeth Warren" by Ezra Klein, Vox"How the filibuster broke the US Senate" by Alvin Chang, Vox"Running Bernie Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity" by Jonathan Chait, Intelligencer"The Sixty Trillion Dollar Man" by Ronald brownstein, Atlantic"The Day One Agenda" by David Dayen, American Prospect"Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys — but it could be a mirage" by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, VoxHosts:Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), Senior correspondent, VoxEzra Klein (@ezraklein), Editor-at-large, VoxNew to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comAbout VoxVox is a news network that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines.Follow Us: Vox.comFacebook group: The WeedsNew to the show? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s the rare podcast conversation where, as it’s happening, I’m making notes to go back and listen again so I can fully absorb what I heard. But this is that kind of episode.Tracy K. Smith is the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, and a two-time poet laureate of the United States (2017-19). But I’ll be honest: She was an intimidating interview for me. I often find myself frustrated by poetry, yearning for it to simply tell me what it wants to say and feeling aggravated that I can’t seem to crack its code.Preparing for this conversation and (even more so) talking to Smith was a revelation. Poetry, she argues, is about expressing “the feelings that defy language.” The struggle is part of the point: You’re going where language stumbles, where literalism fails. Developing a comfort and ease in those spaces isn’t something we’re taught to do, but it’s something we need to do. And so, on one level, this conversation is simply about poetry: what it is, what it does, how to read it.But on another level, this conversation is also about the ideas and tensions that Smith uses poetry to capture: what it means to be a descendent of slaves, a human in love, a nation divided. Laced throughout our conversation are readings of poems from her most recent book, Wade in the Water, and discussions of some of the hardest questions in the American, and even human, canon. Hearing Smith read her erasure poem, “Declaration,” is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful moments I’ve had on the podcast.There is more to this conversation than I can capture here, but simply put: This isn’t one to miss. And that’s particularly true if, like me, you’re intimidated by poetry.References: Smith’s lecture before the Library of Congress Smith’s commencement speech at Wellesley College Book recommendations: Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith Quilting by Lucille Clifton Bodega by Su Hwang New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Engineer - Cynthia GilProducer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the late 90s Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover as a waitress to discover how people with minimum wage full-time jobs were making ends meet. It turned out, they weren’t. Ehrenreich’s book Nickled and Dimed revealed just how dire the economic conditions of everyday working people were at a time when the economy was supposedly booming. It was a wake up call for many Americans at the time, including me who picked up the book as a curious college student. Since then Ehrenreich, a journalist by trade, has written on a vast range of topics from the precarity of middle-class existence to the psychological and sociological roots of collective joy to human mortality to her own attempt, as an atheist, to grapple with mystical experiences. Needless to say, this is a widely ranging conversation. References: Living with a Wild God by Barbara EhrenreichNatural Causes by Barbara EhrenreichDancing in the Streets by Barbara EhrenreichNicked and Dimed by Barbara EhrenreichFear of Falling by Barbara EhrenreichHad I Known by Barbara EhrenreichNew to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Engineer - Cynthia GilProducer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello! I’m Jane Coaston, filling in for Ezra. My guest today is Tim Carney, a commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In the wake of the 2016 election, Carney began traveling across the country and poring through county-level data in an attempt to understand the forces that led to Donald Trump’s victory. The culprit, he argues, is not racism or economic anxiety, it's the breakdown of social institutions.In his new book Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Carney posits that for centuries religious (and other private) institutions formed a much-needed social glue that kept communities together. That social glue, however, has decayed in recent decades, creating a void of despair, alienation, and frustration in so-called “Middle America." Donald Trump did not offer a compelling way to solve these problems, but he was the only candidate willing to name them — and in 2016 that was enough.In this conversation, we discuss Carney's thesis at length, but we also talk about why white evangelicals love Trump so much, how communities of color have responded differently to institutional loss than white communities, the appeal of Bernie Sanders, how Trump's reelection strategy will differ from his 2016 campaign, and much more. I hope this conversation is as interesting for you to listen to as it was for me to have.Book recommendations: Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris ArnadeMy Father Left Me Ireland by Michael Brendan Dougherty The Bible New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Producer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This one was a pleasure. Ta-Nehisi Coates joined me in Brooklyn for part of the “Why We’re Polarized” tour. His description of the book may be my favorite yet. It is, he says, “a cold, atheist book.” We talk about what that means, and from there, go into some of the harder questions raised not so much by the book, but by American history itself. Then Coates asked me a question I never expected to hear from him: Is there anything I could say to leave him with some hope? Don’t miss this one.New to the show? Want to check out Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out the Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide (http://bit.ly/EKSbeginhere)The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Producer/Editor - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello! I’m Sean Illing, Vox’s interviews writer filling in for Ezra while he’s on book tour. My guest today is Martin Hägglund, a philosopher at Yale and the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, which I consider to be one of the most ambitious and important books in the last several years.We begin by discussing what it means to live a free and purposeful life without regret or illusion. For Hägglund, this life is all we have. There is no heaven, no afterlife, no eternal beyond. We live and we die and that means that the most important question any of us can possibly ask is, “What should we do with our time?” We end by talking about the limits of capitalism, namely why it doesn’t really allow us to own our time in the way we ought to. And thus why, for Hägglund, democratic socialism is the only political project that takes the human condition seriously. This is an unusual conversation, but, I have to say, I loved it. I appreciate and admire Hägglund’s willingness to tackle the biggest questions any us can ever ask, and I think by the end of it you will, too.Book recommendations:Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the other animals by Christine KorsgaardOn the Soul (De Anima) by Aristotle Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F Hegel Follow Sean Illing at Vox or on Twitter @seanillingNew to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.Ezra's book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Guest host - Sean Illing Producer - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

 I’ve been a fan of Tim Urban and his site Wait But Why for a long time. Urban uses whimsical illustrations, infographics, and friendly, nontechnical language to explain everything from AI to space exploration to the Fermi Paradox. Urban's most recent project is an explainer series called “The Story of Us." It began as an attempt to understand what is going on in American politics today, and quickly turned into a deep exploration into humanity's past: how we evolved, the history of civilization, and the way our psychologies have come to interact with the world around us. My initial theory of this conversation was that Urban’s work has interesting points of convergence and divergence with my book. But once we got to talking, something more interesting emerged: Based on his reading of human history, psychology, and technological advancement, Urban has come to believe we are at an existential fork-in-the-road as a species. A hundred years from now, Urban thinks, our species will either advance so significantly that we will no longer be recognizable as human beings, or we will so lose control of our progress that the human story will end in a destructive apocalypse. I’m less convinced, but open to the idea that I’m wrong.So this, then, isn’t just a conversation about politics and polarization in the present. It’s more fully a conversation about whether the politics of the present are distracting us from the forces that are, even as we speak, deciding our future.References: Dave Robert’s piece on Tim Urban’s aversion to politics My conversation with Andrew Yang Book recommendations: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu Atomic Habits by James ClearNew to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Producer - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker contributor, the author of These Truths, and one of my favorite past guests on this show. But in this episode, the tables are turned: I’m in the hot seat, and Lepore has some questions. Hard ones.This is, easily, the toughest interview on my book so far. Lepore isn’t quibbling over my solutions or pointing out a contrary study — what she challenges are the premises, epistemology, and meta-structure that form the foundation of my book, and much of my work. Her question, in short, is: What if social science itself is too crude to be a useful way of understanding the political world?But that’s what makes this conversation great. We discuss whether all political science research on polarization might be completely wrong, why (and whether) my book is devoid of individual or institutional “villains,” and whether I am morally obliged to delete my Twitter account, in addition to the missing party in American politics, why I mistrust historical narratives, media polarization, and much more.This is, on one level, a conversation about Why We’re Polarized. But on a deeper level, it’s about different modes of knowledge and whether we can trust them.New to the show? Want to listen to Ezra's favorite episodes? Check out The Ezra Klein Show beginner's guide.My book is available at www.EzraKlein.com.The “Why We’re Polarized” tour continues, with events in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Nashville, Chicago, and Greenville. Go to WhyWerePolarized.com for the full schedule!Want to contact the show? Reach out at ezrakleinshow@vox.comCredits:Producer - Jeff GeldResearcher - Roge Karma Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices