The Ezra Klein Show

On Monday night, in front of a live audience, I talked to Fareed Zakaria about the different political age he believes we’ve entered. 

Zakaria is the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and the author of the 2024 book “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” To mark the release of the book in paperback, Zakaria invited me to have this conversation at Symphony Space in New York City. We discuss the “revol...

Patti Smith, “the Godmother of Punk,” has lived a wild life and accumulated so much wisdom in the process. In the 1960s and ’70s, Smith was a fixture of the New York City creative scene — hanging out with the likes of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. Merging her own poetry with an ace backing band, she became a global rock star. Then she gave it up, moved to Michigan, raised a family, and remade hers...

Is this the future of MAGA?

Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused a firestorm on the right. Carlson and Fuentes’s friendly chat about American Jews — whether they fit into this country or were loyal to Israel above all — was the kind of conversation that for decades would have been unimaginable among mainstream figures in politics. And by crossing that line, Carlson was making a sta...

Democrats’ case for the government shutdown was just starting to break through to voters. Why fold now?

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html 

This column read was produced by Kristin ...

Democrats won big on Tuesday. It looks like the MAGA coalition has started to crack.

Ezra is joined by his column editor, Aaron Retica, to discuss the big lessons for Democrats as they eye the midterms next year, and whether an anti-MAGA playbook is coming into focus.

This episode contains strong language.

NOTE: We're recording an "Ask Me Anything" episode soon. You can send your question to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with the subject ...

Democrats don’t just need to win more people; they also need to win more places. And that requires a different kind of thinking.

Mentioned:

"How Liberalism Wins" by Ezra Klein

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ez...

Israeli forces still occupy half of Gaza. In the cease-fire deal, Israel agreed to fully withdraw its presence there once Hamas fully demilitarized. But Amit Segal thinks that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Instead, he believes Gaza will end up divided. So what does that really mean? What are the implications?

Segal is the chief political analyst for Channel 12 News in Israel and is known to be quite close to the Netanyahu gover...

The “Democratic penalty” should scare the hell out of Democrats.

The Democratic Party brand has become toxic in certain parts of the country, especially with working- class voters. The Center for Working-Class Politics has actually measured this so-called “Democratic penalty,” and found it’s in the double digits in some Rust Belt states.

So what should Democrats do about it?

One theory says that Democrats were once economic populists ...

President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won rural areas by 40 percentage points. And you could see what’s been happening in Washington, D.C., and Chicago as a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. The rural-urban divide in America has become so big it’s dangerous — for our ...

Every Israeli-Palestinian peace deal has failed. Could Trump’s be any different?

On Oct. 10, the Israeli cabinet approved a cease-fire deal brokered by the Trump administration, Turkey and Qatar. Since then, the living Israeli hostages have come home. Nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel have been freed. Israeli forces have partially withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, and they’re allowing in more desperately needed aid. This is ...

Eliezer Yudkowsky is as afraid as you could possibly be. He makes his case.

Yudkowsky is a pioneer of A.I. safety research, who started warning about the existential risks of the technology decades ago, – influencing a lot of leading figures in the field. But over the last couple of years, talk of an A.I. apocalypse has become a little passé. Many of the people Yudkowsky influenced have gone on to work for A.I. companies, and those ...

The government shutdown is the Democrats’ first big strategic bet of Trump’s term.

Not everyone in the party agreed that shutting down the government was the right move or that health care was the right message. So why did they ultimately pick this fight? What are the risks? And what could Democrats learn here that might help shape their strategy for the midterms and beyond?

Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and a current co-h...

There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this.

The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immigration agents in the streets. They picked one over health care. And the issue here is very real. Huge health insurance subsidies passed under President Joe Biden are set to expire at the end of this year, threatening to make health care premiums skyrocket and kick millions off their insur...

Brian Eno’s music opens up worlds I love to step into during trying times. And this conversation with Eno did the same thing.

Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. He’s been experimenting with music technology for decades. Lon...

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, comparing it to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

So I wanted to have Coates on the show to talk out our disagreement, as well as some deeper questions that I think exist underneath it about the work of politics.

What should the left do ...

This is McCarthyism 2.0. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has been speed-running an attack on the “radical left.” And the tactics it has been using are darkly reminiscent of the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s. So what can that period teach us about the current moment and what the Trump administration might do next? How far could this go? 

Corey Robin is a political theorist at Brooklyn College. He’s an e...

The Utah governor is trying to model a different kind of leadership in a very dangerous political moment.

The Trump administration seems intent on using the assassination of Charlie Kirk to crack down on what it calls “the radical left.” But Spencer Cox doesn’t believe that suppression will make Americans safer.

For years now, Cox has been thinking seriously about our toxic political culture and what the path out of it could be. So I...

This is an episode in two parts. First, my thoughts on Charlie Kirk’s murder, now that I’ve had a few days to process it, and to see the unfolding reactions and responses on both sides. Then a conversation with Ben Shapiro — one that was recorded shortly before Kirk’s assassination, but that has a different significance after it.

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way” by ...

In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover. What should they do?

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-kle...