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
July 10, 2025 • 32 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 • 29 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 • 29 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.
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 breaking news to fascinating exploratio...
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June 19, 2025 • 31 mins
A few years ago, Olga Khazan, author of Me, But Better, set out to change her personality, which even she found unpleasant. After consulting with experts on personality plasticity and then setting a deadline, Khazan put herself through an intense experiment intended to make herself more likeable, to herself and others.
Khazan tested and scored herself on a range of key personality traits at the beginning and end of the experiment...
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June 13, 2025 • 20 mins
In this bonus episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with staff writer Tom Nichols about how all the pieces fit together: the military parade, the president’s speech at Fort Bragg, and the dispatching of Marines to the protests in Los Angeles.
It’s not just that President Trump wants to acclimate Americans to the sight of tanks in the streets. It’s not just that Trump is signaling to governors that he will use the forces at his dispos...
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June 12, 2025 • 36 mins
Explaining how Musk tanked his reputation has many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture’s historical relationship with “genius,” and how it tends to go wrong.
In this episode, we talk with Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, about what Musk has in...
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June 5, 2025 • 29 mins
In April, 250 former Israeli intelligence officers signed their names to an open letter of protest asking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to proceed with his plans to escalate the war on Gaza.
One of them was Tamir Pardo, head of Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA, from 2011 to 2016. Pardo, with his decades of experience fighting terrorism, explains his perspective on how the war unfolded and what Netanyahu’s real motiv...
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May 29, 2025 • 30 mins
The Atlantic’s Jocelyn Frank reports on the detailed system that may be unintentionally leading pilots to avoid the mental-health care that they need, and increasing risks to passenger safety.
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 breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribe...
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May 22, 2025 • 26 mins
We talk with Eric Garcia, author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation and a political reporter at the Independent, about the myths spreading about autism under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yes, there’s the one about how vaccines cause autism, which the scientific community has rejected. But there’s also a more fundamental one that Kennedy references often: Is there, as he repeats, an “autism epidemic”? An...
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May 15, 2025 • 25 mins
Lavender carpets. Golden swords. Arabian horses. President Trump arrived in the Gulf to a royal welcome. Both sides seem delighted about what they’re getting out of one another. So what are they getting? And what will it mean for the future of the Middle East?
We talk to Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, about this new era of chumminess between the American president and the Gulf leaders....
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May 8, 2025 • 32 mins
Recently, Donald Trump mused that “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?” We talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans’ relationship with choice.
Elenor Mak, founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. And Martha Gimbel, executive director of th...
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May 1, 2025 • 36 mins
In the past few years, Donald Trump has changed his mind about cryptocurrency. He’s gone from believing it was “based on thin air” to wanting the U.S. to become the “crypto capital of the world.” Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey breaks down how the president’s reversal of opinion about this notoriously volatile industry could destabilize the U.S. financial system—and lead to a crypto-induced economic crisis.
Get more from your f...
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April 28, 2025 • 40 mins
Why would President Donald Trump invite The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump has attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to meet with him in the Oval Office? We talk with Goldberg about what Trump told him about Signalgate. We also talk with Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer about the lessons Trump learned from his time in the political wilderness, and how he is applying them in his second te...
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April 24, 2025 • 30 mins
For a while, it seemed as if DOGE Elon and Tesla Elon could exist in the same space-time continuum. One of them carried out Donald Trump’s ruthless cost-cutting mission while the other pitched cars that appealed most to people who were highly likely to oppose that mission, or even rage against it.
Then this week came Tesla’s first quarterly earnings report since Elon Musk started his work with DOGE, which showed that the company’s ...
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April 17, 2025 • 34 mins
Sarah McBride made models of the White House when she was 6. Her childhood dream, as a Delawarean, was to meet Joe Biden.
Then last November, one of her ambitions came true when was elected to the House of Representatives. She became the first openly trans member of Congress, a historic achievement that also happened to coincide with a rise in anti-trans sentiment and the election of Donald Trump.
We talk with McBride about how s...
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April 10, 2025 • 23 mins
The stock market has been tanking since President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs a week ago. Then Wednesday mid-afternoon—after Trump reversed course on global tariffs—the market experienced one of its biggest single-day jumps ever. So … what exactly happened? And if the U.S. economy continues to be this unpredictable, what does that mean for the future?
Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’...
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April 3, 2025 • 33 mins
If the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric against universities sound vaguely familiar, that may be because they’ve already happened elsewhere. Over the years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has dismantled his country’s higher-education system; cracked down on diversity, dissent, and critical thinking; and cast academic institutions as dangerous.
So what does that mean for the future of higher ed in America?
Further ...
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March 27, 2025 • 23 mins
The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Shane Harris published more details from a Signal chat between President Donald Trump’s top advisers that included sensitive details about a military strike in Yemen. In screenshots published by The Atlantic, the defense secretary messaged information about strike targets and times of attack. Top Trump officials have denied both to reporters and in congressional hea...
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March 24, 2025 • 28 mins
The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, received a connection request on Signal from a “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Two days later, he was added to a group text with top administration officials created for the purpose of coordinating high-level national-security conversations about the Houthis in Yemen. (Read his story here.)
We talk with Goldberg and Shane Ha...
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March 20, 2025 • 34 mins
It’s been five years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But there may be another potential pandemic on the horizon: bird flu. Against the backdrop of growing anti-vaccination sentiment, exhaustion from COVID, and a new administration, The Atlantic’s Katie Wu explains that the U.S. is perhaps less prepared to deal with a widespread outbreak than it was when COVID hit—and bird flu, if it spreads to humans, could be worse.
...
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