What Next | Daily News and Analysis
The problem with the news right now? It’s everywhere. And each day, it can feel like we’re all just mindlessly scrolling. It’s why we created What Next. This short daily show is here to help you make sense of things. When the news feels overwhelming, we’re here to help you answer: What next? Look for new episodes every weekday morning. Get more of What Next with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of What Next and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the What Next show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.com/whatnextplus for access wherever you listen.
Episodes
October 30, 2025 • 32 mins
Why SNAP benefits potentially won’t be replenished Nov. 1, and what happens to the people who depend on them to eat.
Guest: Dr. Lindsay Allen, health economist and policy researcher at Northwestern University.
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October 29, 2025 • 28 mins
Having successfully gotten their photo ops, the National Guard receded from the streets of Los Angeles, but an aggressive border patrol, with an eye on raising arrest numbers, has taken their place. In the South Bay, an activist group has formed to monitor where raids are happening, who’s conducting them, and try to help residents keep themselves safe.
Guest: Alexander Sammon, politics writer for Slate.
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October 28, 2025 • 29 mins
Last week, the FBI indicted more than 30 people in a series of NBA gambling scandals. The sports leagues are promising drastic action – but with everyone from the states to the owners getting rich off legal sports gambling, is the game rigged?
Guest: Jay Willis, editor-in-chief of Balls and Strikes.
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October 27, 2025 • 28 mins
Isn’t a government shutdown supposed to be a crisis? The Republicans, in control of the White House, Congress and Supreme Court haven’t taken steps to end it on their own, and the ship may have already sailed on the only real ask from the Democrats. So what now?
Guest: Jonathan V. Last, editor at The Bulwark.
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October 26, 2025 • 32 mins
For years, conservatives claimed that the Biden administration was pressuring tech companies to censor conservative speech with no solid evidence.
In Trump 2.0, the administration is explicitly bragging about doing the very same thing they accused democrats of. What gives?
Guest: Renée DiResta, Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who T...
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October 24, 2025 • 6 mins
The streets are full of ghouls, masked horrors, and terrifying make-up—also it will be Halloween soon.
Guest: Luke Winkie, Slate staff writer.
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October 24, 2025 • 31 mins
This week’s AWS outage illustrates just how fragile and vulnerable our interconnected world really is—and how far we’ve fallen from the vision of a decentralized internet.
Guest: Samanth Subramanian, author of “The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables That Connect Our World.”
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October 23, 2025 • 25 mins
Thousands of children may be avoiding peanut allergies thanks to research indicating that early exposure to—rather than avoidance of—the legume is key. Now there’s reason to believe this is true for tons of allergens – and that the great “pandemic” of kid food allergies never needed to happen.
Guest: Dr. David Hill, attending physician with the Division of Allergy and Immunology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and The Hil...
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October 22, 2025 • 27 mins
Right after JD Vance was done dismissing concerns about racism in a group chat of GOP staffers and Young Republicans, POLITICO released messages from Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia that were so explicitly racist it may cost him the support of what has been an extremely compliant congressional GOP. And lest any vice presidents tell you otherwise, racism is as evident in policy proposals as it is in the chats.
Guest: David A. Graham,...
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October 21, 2025 • 32 mins
The whole spectrum of Trump’s foreign policy is on display when it comes to South America: The US Navy is gathering off the coast of Venezuela, while the Treasury Department prepares to send tens of billions of dollars to Argentina.
Guest: Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly.
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October 20, 2025 • 32 mins
Off-cycle elections generally favor the party that isn’t in the White House. And with a large voting bloc of federal employees, Virginia Democrats were feeling good about the upcoming elections for governor and attorney general. Then texts from their AG candidate hit the news.
Guest: Eva McKend, correspondent covering national politics for CNN.
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October 19, 2025 • 21 mins
Paying a fraction of a penny per stream and diminishing the value of music were bad enough for Xiu Xiu, but when Spotify owner Daniel Ek announced an investment in a German defense contractor, they decided it was time to take the music back.
Guest: Jamie Stewart, musician in the band Xiu Xiu.
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October 17, 2025 • 27 mins
As Trump throws out journalists and outlets that report anything negative about him, he’s limiting access to a group of right-wing influencers who work to further his agenda.
Guest: Makena Kelly, tech and politics writer for WIRED.
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October 16, 2025 • 35 mins
In an executive order, Donald Trump declared “Antifa” a terrorist organization. As it isn’t an organization, there aren’t leaders to target, so zealous conservatives took aim at Mark Bray, a Rutgers professor who wrote a book about fighting fascism eight years ago. The clumsy attempts to get him fired didn’t bother him—but the doxxing and death threats were enough to convince him he needed to leave America.
Guest: Mark Bray, assis...
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October 15, 2025 • 26 mins
The government shutdown isn’t hitting everywhere equally—infrastructure projects that rely on federal funding have been halted exclusively in states that voted for Kamala Harris. Do blue states have any recourse against a federal government that only functions to punish them?
Guest: David Faris, associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a La...
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October 14, 2025 • 28 mins
Bari Weiss has had a successful media career by any metric, save perhaps for broad appeal. But as she takes over as the head of CBS News, the “mass” part of mass media doesn’t matter as much, and the new order of the day—pleasing a few angry old billionaires—is absolutely her sweet spot.
Guest: David Klion, columnist for The Nation and contributing editor to Jewish Currents; author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism.
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October 13, 2025 • 48 mins
While the What Next team celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day, please enjoy this episode from our colleagues at Amicus, Slate’s legal podcast. Mary will be back with a new episode of What Next tomorrow.
In this week’s episode of Amicus, we delve into the recent Supreme Court shadow docket order in Noem v. Vasquez-Perdomo, which in essence legalized racial profiling by roving ICE patrols, and in practice may have ushered in America’s...
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October 12, 2025 • 27 mins
At this very moment, police departments can gather more data than they have time to actually go through — audio and video from crime scenes, cell phone and search data, vast digital dragnets. This is where artificial intelligence comes in…as well as the civil rights questions.
Guest: Gerrit De Vynck, tech reporter for the Washington Post.
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October 10, 2025 • 6 mins
As troops continue to roll in, unwelcome, to American cities, you can be forgiven for calling the national picture “pretty bleak.” But even now, the news will occasionally let you get off a chuckle or guffaw, even if it isn’t always from your better nature. It’s SchadenFriday; go ahead and indulge.
Guest: Alex Sammon, Slate feature writer.
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October 10, 2025 • 25 mins
Though ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services denied their Freedom of Information Act requests, these journalists aren’t giving up without a fight—not until they get their hands on a document that outlines how much information Medicaid is sharing with ICE.
Guest: Joseph Cox, cofounder of 404 Media.
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