Radio Atlantic
242 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 1.7K ratingsThe Atlantic has long been known as an ideas-driven magazine. Now we’re bringing that same ethos to audio. Like the magazine, the show will “road test” the big ideas that both drive the news and shape our culture. Through conversations—and sometimes sharp debates—with the most insightful thinkers and writers on topics of the day, Radio Atlantic will complicate overly simplistic views. It will cut through the noise with clarifying, personal narratives. It will, hopefully, help listeners make up their own mind about certain ideas.
The national conversation right now can be chaotic, reckless, and stuck. Radio Atlantic aims to bring some order to our thinking—and encourage listeners to be purposeful about how they unstick their mind.
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Episodes
News Update: Who Could Tame Facebook?
April 13, 2018 00:00 - 44 minutesAs Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer recently wrote, Facebook “is currently embroiled in the worst crisis of trust in its 14-year history.” This week, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Congress for the first time. It’s not clear whether Congress will seek to exert more regulatory control over the company, even after revelations that as many as 87 million people unwittingly had their Facebook data given to the political firm Cambridge Analytica, which may have used...
Trumpocracy
April 06, 2018 04:00 - 50 minutes“Trump gambled that Americans resent each other’s differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far that gamble has paid off,” writes David Frum in his new book Trumpocracy. Along with The Atlantic's Global Editor Kathy Gilsinan, David joins to explain how President Trump has undermined our most important institutions. What does democracy around the world look like when the leader of the free world is less interested in it himself? Links - Trumpocracy (David Frum, 2018) - “S...
King Remembered
March 30, 2018 04:00 - 56 minutesIn his last speech, known to history as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Martin Luther King Jr. began by remarking on the introduction he’d been given by his friend, Ralph Abernathy. “As I listened to ... his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself,” King said modestly, “I wondered who he was talking about.” The facsimile of King that America would fashion after his assassination—saintly pacifist, stranger to controversy, beloved by all—might have provoked something we...
The Family Unit in a Divided Era
March 23, 2018 04:00 - 47 minutesThe family is where the forces that are driving Americans farther apart—political polarization, generational divides, class stratification, Facebook fights—literally hit home. Economic, ideological, and technological shifts pose uncertain consequences for what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the basic social unit of American life.” And not even a burgeoning industry of experts can tell parents what to do. “Parents are now more anxious than ever about their children,” writes Paula Fass in The ...
Does America Have a Monopoly Problem?
March 16, 2018 04:00 - 47 minutes“Politicians from both parties publicly worship the solemn dignity of entrepreneurship and small businesses. But by the numbers, America has become the land of the big and the home of the consolidated,” writes The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their institutions, the nation seems to now look to corporations for positive action. Can big business be a force for good or only a force for profit? Does their very size pose a threat? If corporations can be pe...
If We Could Learn From History
March 09, 2018 05:00 - 49 minutesDiscarding the limits on a leader's time in office is a classic autocrat's move. So when Xi Jinping began to clear a path for an indefinite term as China's president, he dimmed many once-bright hopes that he would speed the nation's path toward a new era of openness and reform. For James Fallows,The Atlantic's national correspondent, it was a sad vindication of a warning he issued two years ago in the magazine, of “China’s Great Leap Backward.” As the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of ...
Goodbye Black History Month, Hello Black Future
March 02, 2018 05:00 - 52 minutesMoviegoers across America are filling theaters to see, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes it, “a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.” Wakanda, the setting of Marvel’s blockbuster film Black Panther, is suddenly everywhere, which means people the world over are seeing something that’s never had this widespread an audience: Afrofuturism. “Blockbusters rarely challenge consensus, and Disney blockbusters even less so,” ...
How Innocence Becomes Irrelevant (No Way Out, Part III)
February 23, 2018 05:00 - 57 minutesAfter Rick Magnis, a Texas judge, reviewed the evidence in Benjamine Spencer’s case, he recommended a new trial for Spencer “on the grounds of actual innocence.” But Texas’s highest criminal court took the rare step of rejecting the judge’s ruling. Why? Because Spencer did not meet the state’s “Herculean” standard of unassailable proof, such as DNA, that would remove all doubts of his innocence. According to the judge who wrote the opinion denying Spencer a new trial, this standard has kept i...
Who Killed Jeffrey Young? (No Way Out, Part II)
February 20, 2018 05:00 - 25 minutesIn part one of our three-part series "No Way Out," Barbara Bradley Hagerty told the story of how Benjamine Spencer was convicted for the murder of Jeffrey Young, and how much of the evidence that led to that conviction has fallen apart under scrutiny. But if Spencer did not kill him, who else could have? And if the evidence does point to another assailant, is that enough to free Spencer? In this episode, part two of three, Barbara explores an alternate theory of the crime. She talks with two ...
No Way Out, Part I
February 16, 2018 05:00 - 55 minutesIn 1987, Jeffrey Young was robbed and killed, and his body was left on a street in the poor neighborhood of West Dallas. Benjamine Spencer was tried and convicted for the attack. Spencer was black, 22 years old, and recently married. Young was 33 and white, and his father was a senior executive for Ross Perot, one of the most prominent businessmen in Dallas. No physical evidence connected Spencer to the murder. Instead, he was convicted based on the testimony of three eyewitnesses and a jailh...
From 'I, Tonya' to 'Cat Person,' Is 'Based On a True Story' Better?
February 09, 2018 05:00 - 51 minutesConor Friedersdorf recently argued in The Atlantic that in this moment, when the truth is bitterly contested, fiction presents us an opportunity. It allows us to step into another person’s perspective and talk about gray areas without the problems of detailing an actual person’s private moments. But does blurring the lines between truth and fiction undermine the messy complexities of the real world? David Sims and Megan Garber join to discuss the spate of recent pop culture that aims to recas...
Paul Manafort and How the Swamp Was Made
February 02, 2018 05:00 - 54 minutes“Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there," Franklin Foer writes in his cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic. "But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?” Before Paul Manafort led the campaign to position Donald Trump as the ultimate Washington outsider, Manafort had built a career on being th...
Who Gets to be American?
January 26, 2018 05:00 - 47 minutesOnce again, immigration is at the top of America's legislative agenda, as it has been, seemingly every generation, for much of the nation's history. But while many recent discussions of immigration have focused on unauthorized immigrants, some of the most contentious aspects of the current debate concern legal immigration: Who should the U.S. allow to be an American? Priscilla Alvarez, an editor on The Atlantic's politics and policy team, joins hosts Matt and Alex to discuss the debate within...
Bricks, Clicks, and the Future of Shopping
January 19, 2018 05:00 - 41 minutesThe 'retail apocalypse' is upon us, they say. In the United States, 2017 saw emptied malls, shuttered department stores, and once-iconic brands falling into bankruptcy. Yet retail spending continues to grow, in strange new directions that could have significant effects. What will shopping look like in the future? How will these changes reverberate throughout the country? Atlantic editor Gillian White joins our hosts to discuss. If you listen to Radio Atlantic, we value your feedback. Please h...
The Presidential Fitness Challenge
January 12, 2018 05:00 - 48 minutesAs the anniversary of his inauguration nears, a new book filled with salacious claims about the Trump administration has become a bestseller. Faced with renewed questions about his mental and temperamental fitness for the office, President Trump has pushed back, declaring himself a “very stable genius” and attacking his critics. But no new claims or revelations, James Fallows wrote recently for The Atlantic, have been more telling than Trump's public behavior. If the stories presented in a b...
How Has America Changed Since 1968?
January 05, 2018 05:00 - 40 minutesAs 2018 begins, tensions and tumult in America are high. But before the end of 1968, Conor Friedersdorf reminded us in The Atlantic, "Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated; U.S. troops would suffer their deadliest year yet in Vietnam—and massacre scores of civilians at My Lai; Richard Nixon would be elected president; the Khmer Rouge would form in Cambodia; humans would orbit the moon; Olympic medal winners in Mexico City would raise their fists in a black power s...
Ideas of the Year, 2017 Edition
December 22, 2017 05:00 - 50 minutesEvery year is impossible to synthesize. Yet 2017 was not just another year. To help us wrangle the chaotic, extraordinary events of the last 12 months into some sort of shape, we posed a question to journalists from across The Atlantic's staff, and to our listeners: What were the ideas of 2017? In this episode, Jeff and Matt discuss the many different responses to that question we collected, and share their own ideas of the year. Share yours: 202-266-7600. And here's to the year ahead. If you...
Putin, Russia, and the End of History
December 15, 2017 05:00 - 53 minutesVladimir Putin just announced, to the surprise of no one, that he will run for reelection as President of Russia. In her January/February 2018 Atlantic cover story, Julia Ioffe writes that Americans misunderstand the man ruling the former Soviet empire: he’s not a master tactician playing three-dimensional chess, he’s a gambler who won big. "Over the past year, Russian hackers have become the stuff of legend in the United States," Julia writes. "But most Russians don’t recognize the Russia p...
The Manifest Destiny of Mike Pence
December 08, 2017 05:00 - 54 minutesThat Pence is the vice president of the United States is "a loaves-and-fishes miracle," writes McKay Coppins in the latest issue of The Atlantic. It's remarkable enough that "an embattled small-state governor with underwater approval ratings, dismal reelection prospects, and a national reputation in tatters" would be chosen as a presidential running mate at all. But unlikelier still is the fact that Pence, known for his devotion to Christ, would become the most prominent character witness for...
The Great Recession, One Decade Later
December 01, 2017 03:00 - 46 minutesIn December 2007, the U.S. marked the beginning of its longest recession since World War II. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency born in the ashes of the nation's economic downturn, is under new leadership that promises big changes. Meanwhile, a tax plan speeding through Congress could have far-reaching effects on the economy, well beyond taxes. On paper, the U.S. economy looks robust. But for whom, and for how long? This week, Annie Lowrey and Alana Semuels join our hosts...
John Wayne, Donald Trump, and the American Man
November 24, 2017 03:00 - 50 minutesFor generations, Hollywood has defined what masculinity means in the U.S., with iconic screen figures such as John Wayne. But Wayne's stoic, taciturn image was the product of a complicated relationship with the director John Ford, one that offers different lessons about masculinity and its constraints. As scandals about men and their behavior fill the news, we discuss the legacy of John Wayne and other male screen icons. Our cohosts are joined by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber and Stephen...
How an American Neo-Nazi Was Made
November 17, 2017 05:00 - 33 minutesAndrew Anglin spent his formative years flirting with hippie progressivism, then tried his hand at becoming a tribal hunter-gatherer. But he only achieved notoriety after he founded the Daily Stormer, the world's biggest website for neo-Nazis. Anglin and his mob of followers have terrorized people around the world, and their influence has been cited by the perpetrators of fatal violence. What lessons should be learned from Anglin's radicalization? And what is society's best response to his i...
The Press and the Election of 2016: One Year Later
November 10, 2017 05:15 - 38 minutesIt’s a year after Donald Trump's upset election victory. Before and after the 2016 election, President Trump referred to journalists as enemies to himself and to the American people. But his victory wasn’t just a success in vilifying the media, it was a success in manipulating it. Trump was a media figure, skilled at drawing attention. And news organizations were unused to being so squarely part of the story. What lessons have journalists taken from the 2016 campaign and President Trump’s ele...
Khizr Khan on What Patriotism Requires
November 03, 2017 04:11 - 58 minutesSince the 2016 election heightened America's deep political divides, the mantle of patriotism has become fodder for a bitter tug-of-war. Is it patriotic to leak a presidential secret? To voice dissent during a national rite? Should a general running the White House be deferred to or defied? In this episode, Atlantic journalists Krishnadev Calamur and Sigal Samuel talk with Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father whose stirring speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention touched off a famous f...
Reporting on Open Secrets, with Jodi Kantor and Katie Benner
October 27, 2017 02:11 - 48 minutesAllegations of sexual harassment (and more) by powerful men in numerous industries have been leading news reports across America. On-the-record accounts of disturbing behavior are proliferating. Several leaders of prominent companies have been forced out of their positions. Does this represent a lasting shift in attitudes toward scandalous conduct, or will the public's interest in these matters subside? Is this a tipping point, in other words, or a flash point? The journalism of Jodi Kantor, ...
Why Do Happy People Cheat?
October 20, 2017 01:33 - 50 minutes"Infidelity," Esther Perel writes in the October issue of The Atlantic, "happens in bad marriages and in good marriages. It happens even in open relationships where extramarital sex is carefully negotiated beforehand. The freedom to leave or divorce has not made cheating obsolete." Adultery is as ancient as marriage, and as contemporary relationships have evolved, Perel writes, the causes and consequences of infidelity have much to teach us about the nature of commitment. In this conversatio...
Derek Thompson and the Moonshot Factory
October 12, 2017 23:41 - 50 minutesFew journalists have gotten a peek inside X, the secretive lab run by Google's parent company Alphabet. Its scientists are researching cold fusion, hover boards, and stratosphere-surfing balloons. Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, spent several days with the staff of X. In this episode, he tells Matt and Alex all about what he found, and what it suggests about the future of technological invention. Have thoughts or questions? Leave us a message! (202) 266-7600. Don't forget to lea...
The Miseducation of Ta-Nehisi Coates
October 06, 2017 03:38 - 1 hourIn his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Atlantic's national correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the past eight years of his career—his pursuit of an understanding of America, and his route to becoming a celebrated author. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, our cohosts Matt, Jeff, and Alex each conduct an interview with Ta-Nehisi about what he's found. This is a longer episode than our usual, so if you'd like to skip around, here are the three segments, for easy fast-forward...
Russia! Live with Julia Ioffe and Eliot A. Cohen
September 29, 2017 00:05 - 53 minutesAccording to the U.S. intelligence community, this much is settled fact: Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. But beyond that basic consensus, much remains unknown, the subject of multiple investigations by FBI director Robert Mueller and Congressional intelligence committees. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, recorded before a live audience at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue, Atlantic staff writer Julia Ioffe and contributing editor Eliot Cohen j...
What Are Public Schools For?
September 22, 2017 03:42 - 57 minutesThe idea that public schools are failing is one of the most commonly heard complaints in American society. But what are they failing to do? Surveys of American parents—and the history of the nation's public education system—tell a more complicated story. In this episode, The Atlantic's education editor Alia Wong joins Jeff, Matt, and Alex for a conversation about how we define and measure success in public education. We’d like to hear your stories about education: public, private, school-of-h...
Will America's Institutions Survive President Trump?
September 15, 2017 01:51 - 58 minutesEight months into the Trump administration, we're taking stock: What is shaping up to be President Trump's effect on America’s institutions? Will subsequent presidents preserve or disregard the norms he's tossed aside? What are his political allies and opponents learning from his actions? Jack Goldsmith, author of The Atlantic's October cover story, explores these and many other questions with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Golberg. Then, Matt Thompson and Alex Wagner discuss Trump's impact on the G...
A Memo to the Huddled Masses
September 08, 2017 09:39 - 41 minutesImmigrants flock to the U.S. in pursuit of the American Dream. But does the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program mean a wake-up call for millions of undocumented Americans? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, reporter Jeremy Raff and editor Priscilla Alvarez join Jeffrey Goldberg and Matt Thompson to discuss what the suspension of DACA means for those directly affected ... and what it means for America as a whole. For links and show notes, go here. Learn more about your a...
News Update: The Questions After Harvey
September 02, 2017 16:00 - 17 minutesIf history is any guide, the biggest problems for residents of the Houston area will come into focus only after the nation's attention has already turned elsewhere. In this Radio Atlantic extra, Matt Thompson talks with Atlantic staff writer David Graham about the questions we should be asking now, while Harvey remains in the headlines. As the recovery gets under way, what should we be watching? Plus, a Houston-area resident talks about what she's seen over the last week that she wants to hol...
What Game of Thrones Has Taught Us About Politics
September 01, 2017 04:00 - 45 minutes"Winter is coming," they warned us, and the seventh season of Game of Thrones might have proved them right. But no one mentioned that winter in Westeros would coincide with so many troubling events in real-world politics. In this episode, Megan Garber, staff writer for The Atlantic, joins Radio Atlantic cohosts Alex Wagner and Matt Thompson for a conversation about lessons from the show, and other recent pop culture. - If you're not a Game of Thrones fan, or don't want to be spoiled, worry no...
Are Smartphones Harming Our Kids?
August 25, 2017 04:00 - 47 minutesIt's been ten years since the iPhone came out, and now the first generation to grow up with smartphones is coming of age. Jean Twenge, a psychologist who has studied generational behaviors, has found troubling signals that these devices seem to be taking a visible toll on the mental health of post-Millennials. In the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic, Twenge shares her findings in a story adapted from her new book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More...
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yoni Appelbaum on Charlottesville's Aftermath
August 17, 2017 23:12 - 59 minutesAfter white supremacists and neo-Nazis rallied in Virginia, resulting in the deaths of three Americans, President Trump's equivocating responses shocked Republicans and Democrats alike. Did this represent a major breakpoint in American politics? Why have Confederate symbols and ideas suddenly returned to the public sphere, not to mention HBO? And how should Americans comprehend the relationship between these extremist currents and the Trump administration? Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yoni Appelbaum ...
Kurt Andersen on How America Lost Its Mind
August 11, 2017 04:00 - 50 minutesWhen did the reality-based community start losing to reality show celebrity? Why are "alternative facts" and fake news suddenly ubiquitous features of the landscape? The spread of American magical thinking isn't, in fact, sudden, argues Kurt Andersen in the September 2017 Atlantic. It was rooted in the very origins of the nation, and started to blossom in the '60s. Andersen explores how these forces made their way to the White House in conversation with our Radio Atlantic cohosts, Jeffrey Gol...
News Update: Mark Bowden on North Korea
August 09, 2017 20:22 - 23 minutesGiven new revelations about North Korea's nuclear capabilities—and newly harsh rhetoric from President Trump—Jeffrey Goldberg and Matt Thompson talk with Mark Bowden, author of The Atlantic's July/August cover story on how to deal with North Korea. In that story, Bowden laid out the four options a U.S. administration has for handling North Korea's nuclear ambitions—trying to prevent its progress, turning the screws on the country's leadership, decapitating its leaders, and accepting that a nu...
Ask Not What Your Robots Can Do For You
August 04, 2017 04:00 - 54 minutesOur increasingly smart machines aren’t just changing the workforce, they’re changing us. Already, algorithms are directing human activity in all sorts of ways, from choosing what news people see to highlighting new gigs for workers in the gig economy. What will human life look like as machine learning overtakes more aspects of our society? Alexis Madrigal, who covers technology for The Atlantic, shares what he’s learned from his reporting on the past, present, and future of automation with ou...
One Nation Under God?
July 28, 2017 07:11 - 45 minutesAmerica prides itself on pluralism and tolerance, but how far does that tolerance extend when it comes to religious expression? Could faith in general be on the decline? Radio Atlantic cohosts Jeffrey Goldberg (editor-in-chief), Alex Wagner (contributing editor and CBS anchor), and Matt Thompson (executive editor) explore those questions with Emma Green, who covers religion and politics for The Atlantic. For links and other show notes, visit this page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visi...
'Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory'
July 21, 2017 04:25 - 1 hourThe Atlantic was founded on the eve of the Civil War to advance the American idea. But as we approach the magazine's 160th anniversary, has that idea taken an unprecedented turn? In this inaugural episode, our cohosts — Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief; Alex Wagner, contributing editor and CBS anchor; and Matt Thompson, executive editor — explore that question with Atlantic writers David Frum, and Molly Ball. And we present the world premiere of Jon Batiste's Battle Hymn of the Republic, re...
Trailer
July 11, 2017 21:42 - 2 minutesComing July 21: A weekly conversation about what's happening in our world, how things got the way they are, and where they're heading next. Don't miss this sneak preview, for a taste of what's to come, including a teaser of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, recorded for The Atlantic by legendary jazz musician Jon Batiste. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices