“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.”Glaude is the chair of Princeton University’s department of African American studies, the president of the American Academy of Religion, and the author of the powerful book Democracy in Black. And this is a conversation about some of the hardest issues in American life: the way racism is intertwined with America’s political system, the worldviews we force ourselves to adopt to justify racial inequality, and the way white fear sets boundaries on black politics.These aren’t easy topics to discuss, but they’re necessary ones. As Glaude says, “We have to have a politics that can interrogate it honestly, and do it in such a way that is mature, that opens up space for us to imagine ourselves otherwise.”Book recommendations:The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action by John Dewey James Baldwin: Collected Essays by James BaldwinNo name in the street by James BaldwinMore Beautiful and More Terrible by Imani Perry  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

First off. Hello! I’m back from paternity leave. And this is a helluva podcast to restart with.Pete Buttigieg is a Rhodes scholar, a Navy veteran, and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s a married gay man, a churchgoing Episcopalian, and a proud millennial. He’s also, according to CNN, “the hottest candidate in the 2020 race right now.”There’s been plenty of discussion of Buttigieg’s biography, and of whether a midsize-city mayorship is appropriate experience for the presidency. But I wanted to talk to him about something else: his theory of political change. How, in a broken system, would he get done even a fraction of what he’s promising? To my surprise, he actually had an answer.Before I did this podcast, I was surprised to see Buttigieg catching fire. Now that I’ve had this conversation, I’m not.Book recommendations:Ulysses by James JoyceArmageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey introduced a Green New Deal resolution, outlining a bold effort to decarbonize the US economy and forestall the worst effects of climate change. Ever since, it has been the talk of the town in Washington, drawing praise and criticism from all quarters.But most critics completely misunderstood the resolution. It is not a policy document. It is a set of goals and principles meant to guide the development of policy.The work of fleshing out the policy details is largely in the hands of Rhiana Gunn-Wright, working out of a think tank called New Consensus. Gunn-Wright is busy consulting a broad slate of experts, with the goal of assembling a policy framework that will be ready to go when/if Democrats take power in 2021.Vox staff writer David Roberts sat down with Gunn-Wright to chat about how she’s approaching this monumental task, why the Green New Deal includes social and economic goals (like full employment) alongside environmental goals, and what she makes of the criticism that the plan is “unrealistic.”Book recommendations:The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana MazzucatoFear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira KatznelsonWe are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, sits down with Vox senior politics reporter Jane Coaston to discuss intellectual conservatism, the legacy of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, neoconservatism, and the role Donald Trump is playing in both the GOP and conservatism more broadly.Book recommendations:Crisis of the House Dividedby Harry V. JaffaNixon's White House Wars by Patrick J. BuchananWe are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I’m Vox’s interviews writer, Sean Illing. Lately, I’ve been interested in the following question: Is the decline of institutionalized Christianity making our politics worse? The answer may be yes, but I’m not convinced it’s for the reasons many people suppose.Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist for the New York Times who has been one of the more thoughtful writers on this topic. Douthat believes that Christianity’s collapse has not only helped destroy civic bonds in America, it’s also amplified our tribalism problem. As more and more Americans lose any connection to a shared religious or moral worldview, he argues, they’re increasingly drawn to transgressive movements like the alt-right or to the vulgar politics of Donald Trump.My sense is that Douthat’s view of Christianity is somewhat nostalgic and overlooks the racial hierarchy that undergirded previous eras of American politics. But I’m open to his point of view, and admit I might be mistaken. In this conversation, we discuss the forces behind the decline of Christianity, how it’s fueling tribal politics, and why he thinks the left should really be worried about the post-Christian right.Book recommendations:Religion: If There Is No God-- : On God, the Devil, Sin, and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religionby Leszek KolakowskiBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca WestThe Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vox senior politics reporter, Jane Coaston speaks to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee at South by Southwest about climate change, his 2020 candidacy, why it's time to eliminate the filibuster, and the Green New Deal.We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For this episode of The Ezra Klein Show, we're digging into the archives to share another of our favorites with you!*At least in politics, this is an era of awful arguments. Arguments made in bad faith. Arguments in which no one, on either side, is willing to change their mind. Arguments where the points being made do not describe or influence the positions being held. Arguments that leave everyone dumber, angrier, sadder. Which is why I wanted to talk to Julia Galef this week. Julia is the host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, a co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, and the creator of the Update Project, which maps out arguments to make it easier for people to disagree clearly and productively. Her work focuses on how we think and argue, as well as the cognitive biases and traps that keep us from hearing what we're really saying, hearing what others are really saying, and preferring answers that make us feel good to answers that are true. I first met her at a Vox Conversation conference, where she ran a session helping people learn to change their minds, and it's struck me since then that more of us could probably use that training. In this episode, Julia and I talk about what she's learned about thinking more clearly and arguing better, as well as my concerns that the traditional paths toward a better discourse open up new traps of their own. (As you'll hear, I find it very easy to get lost in all the ways debate and cognition can go awry.) We talk about signaling, about motivated reasoning, about probabilistic debating, about which identities help us find truth, and about how to make online arguments less terrible. Enjoy!Recommended books: Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer Seeing Like a State by James Scott The Robot's Rebellion by Keith Stanovich We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What draws someone into an extremist movement? Is it about ideology? Race? Politics? So many of our discussions about extremism try to explain away the problem by reducing its complexity, but that brings us further and further away from actually solving it.Deeyah Khan is a British documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She’s the creator of two extraordinary films airing on Netflix right now, White Right: Meeting the Enemy and Jihad: A Story of the Others. The films do a remarkable job of showing why these opposing brands of extremism are both similar and reciprocal, and why the people they attract mirror each other in so many ways.Khan spent hours with the most extreme figures she could find, and made a real effort to understand what’s motivating them. She sat down with Vox’s interviews writer, Sean Illing, for a conversation about what she discovered, why the roots of fanaticism are much deeper than we suppose, and what we have to do win the battle against hatred.Recommended reading:It's Not About the Burqa by Mariam KhanFrom Fatwa to Jihad by Kenan MalikFaith and Feminism in Pakistan by Afiya S. ZiaWe are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For this episode of the Ezra Klein show we're digging back into the archives to share another of our favorite episodes with you!***On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, "When this election is finally over, I'm planning to celebrate with an orgy of...serious policy discussion.”  Then, of course, Donald Trump won the election, and serious policy discussion took a backseat to alternative facts, at least for awhile. But now it’s time! In this podcast, Krugman and I cover a lot of ground. We talk taxes, net neutrality, universal basic incomes, job guarantees, antitrust, automation, productivity growth, health care, climate change, college costs, and more. Krugman explains why more information doesn’t make people better thinkers, the “kitchen test” for assessing how much technological progress a society is really making, and what the role of policy analysis is when the policymakers don’t care about evidence.  Enjoy! Recommended books: The Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume Plagues and Peoples by William McNeil We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3X6WMNF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vox takes culture seriously. Our coverage of movies, TV, books, and music delves deep into what our cultural touchstones reveal about who we are and what we care about — and how what we consume influences our world in turn.That's why I'm so excited to introduce you to Switched on Pop. It's a podcast that digs into both the musical theory and the cultural context of pop music, and it's now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. As a big fan of the show, I wanted to introduce you to the hosts, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. In this bonus episode you'll hear some of their favorite interviews, as they pull back the curtain on how pop hits work their magic. Subscribe to Switched on Pop wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices