Radio Atlantic
The 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.
Episodes
October 23, 2025 • 34 mins
In Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, the clock is ticking. The film’s fictional president of the United States has less than 20 minutes and very little information to decide whether or not to retaliate against a nuclear missile, launched at the United States, from an unknown source. As with Bigelow’s other war movies, the story is disturbingly plausible. During the Cold War, the likely scenario was a war with the So...
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October 16, 2025 • 35 mins
This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights law designed to ensure that states could not get in the way of nonwhite citizens voting.
We talk to Stacey Abrams, voting rights activist and former candidate for Georgia governor, and Atlantic staff writer Vann Newkirk about the case and a world without the Voting Rights Act.
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October 9, 2025 • 28 mins
The Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia concludes this week, but the outrage (from comedians who didn’t go) and self-justification (from comedians who did) continues. The festival is one small piece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s grand vision to remake the kingdom for the 21st century and simultaneously draw global attention away from human-rights violations like the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In this epi...
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October 2, 2025 • 40 mins
President Donald Trump is using the Department of Justice to try to punish his political enemies. How much can the president bend the DOJ, an institution built on norms and ethics, to his will before it breaks? In this episode, we talk to the Atlantic staff writer Quinta Jurecic, who covers legal issues, and Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare, about who the Trump administration might target next, what legal strategies migh...
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September 25, 2025 • 41 mins
Hanna Rosin sits down with Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters to ask him about a purity test for teachers and a nearly scandalous incident that happened days before the interview. And two Oklahoma high-school teachers take very different paths.
This is the second episode of a two-part series from Radio Atlantic. (This episode has been updated from a previously published version to include additional news.)
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September 21, 2025 • 41 mins
A live conversation about authoritarian forces in America with Anne Applebaum, an Atlantic staff writer, and Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and a lifelong democracy activist.
Speaking about the upcoming midterms, Kasparov says: “If Democrats do not retake the House, 2028 will be a formality.”
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September 18, 2025 • 21 mins
Yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended indefinitely. It’s a shocking moment for free speech, given the order in which events unfolded. Earlier that day, FCC Chair Brendan Carr had suggested on a conservative podcast that ABC and its affiliates consider taking steps against Kimmel, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
As it so happened, the late-night legend David Letterman was scheduled to speak ...
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September 18, 2025 • 44 mins
American public education is changing. And, in many ways, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters is at the center of it, trying to push for Bibles in schools, new curriculum standards that include dozens of references to Christianity, and an ideology test for teachers coming from “places like California and New York.”
One Oklahoma teacher finds herself at direct odds with Walters and the Department of Education. And a pair of ...
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September 11, 2025 • 32 mins
He was, after all, the eldest boy. The family drama that inspired HBO’s Succession ended this week with a settlement that ensures Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media conglomerate will pass to his oldest and most conservative son, Lachlan.
The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins wrote about the Murdoch succession saga for The Atlantic’s April cover story, “Growing Up Murdoch.” He joins Radio Atlantic to share insights from his mont...
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September 4, 2025 • 29 mins
As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. works to dismantle the national vaccine infrastructure, states have started going their own way. Governors in California, Washington State, and Oregon said they intend to coordinate on vaccine policies. Florida’s surgeon general went in the opposite direction, announcing a plan to end all state vaccine mandates, which he compared to “slavery.” We talk to the Atlantic scie...
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August 28, 2025 • 35 mins
President Donald Trump recently deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and has talked about federalizing the Guard in other cities across the country. In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk to Atlantic staff writers Quinta Jurecic and Nick Miroff about which legal barriers might hinder Trump from using the military this way, how he might try to push past the courts, and what role immigration enforcement is playing in t...
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August 21, 2025 • 33 mins
There was so much symbolism in President Donald Trump’s two most recent international summits—in Alaska last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then at the White House this week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In this episode, we talk with Anne Applebaum, who has been studying Ukraine and Russia for decades and understands their leaders’ underlying motivations. And we speak with politics and national-secur...
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August 14, 2025 • 38 mins
In July, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for an expansion of involuntary commitment—forcing people into treatment facilities—in response to the homelessness crisis. San Francisco has been attempting such an expansion for the past 19 months. What can the rest of the country learn from California?
This is the final episode in a three-part series from Radio Atlantic, No Easy Fix, about homelessness and add...
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August 7, 2025 • 35 mins
At the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, U.S. cities began trying new ways to stop the spread of infection among drug users. Ideas that were first seen as radical, such as needle exchanges, quickly caught on—because they worked. San Francisco is one of the first places where such programs took root. Now it’s one of the places questioning whether they should still exist.
This is the second episode of a new three-part min...
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July 31, 2025 • 33 mins
For the past five years, American cities have tried—and often failed—to meaningfully address worsening homelessness and addiction.
In San Francisco, a city that has become emblematic of these crises, a new mayor has pledged to prioritize the problem. And one man, living on the street and struggling with addiction, is ready to make a change.
This is the first episode of a new three-part miniseries from Radio Atlantic, No Easy Fix...
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July 24, 2025 • 27 mins
The Trump administration is again going after undocumented minors—but their approach is different than it was during his first presidency.
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Read more from Nick Miroff.
Read Stephanie McCrummen’s story: The Message Is ‘We Can Take Your Children’
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Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breakin...
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July 17, 2025 • 28 mins
Donald Trump and his Department of Justice kicked the conspiracy-theory beehive last week when they rescinded previous promises to make public the government’s secret files on Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire financier and convicted sex offender charged with the sex trafficking of minors. The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, speaks with the journalist who broke the Epstein story in 2018. Julie K. Brown is an investig...
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July 10, 2025 • 31 mins
In the United States and many other Western countries, the decision to have children or not is sometimes framed as a political affiliation: You’re either in league with conservative pronatalists, or you’re making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint. But the declining global birth rate is a fact that defies politics. Dean Spears, a co-author of the new book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the C...
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July 3, 2025 • 28 mins
The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg talks to Ken Casey, frontman for the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, about the time he called out a fan in the audience who was wearing a MAGA shirt. The band has been around for three decades and has its working-class roots in Quincy, Massachusetts. At concerts, the band often dedicates its song “First Class Loser” to Donald Trump, and it sells T-shirts that say “Fighting Nazis si...
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June 26, 2025 • 28 mins
We talk with the writer Arash Azizi about what kinds of seismic changes could be coming for his home country of Iran, and whether he thinks they could make things better—or much worse.
Read more from Azizi at The Atlantic here.
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