The Ezra Klein Show

What is America doing in Venezuela?

On Jan. 3, the Trump administration launched an operation that ended with the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, who is now in New York City on narcoterrorism and weapons charges. “We’re going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place,” Trump said.

Mr. Trump’s policy here is strange for a number of reasons: The U.S. is suffering from a fentanyl crisis, but Vene...

I like to start the year with a few episodes on things I’m personally working on. Not resolutions, exactly. More like intentions. Or, even better, practices.

One of those practices, strange as it sounds, is repeatedly asking the question: “What is this?” It’s a question I got from a book of the same name, by Stephen and Martine Batchelor. In that book, they are describing an approach to Buddhist meditation built on the cultivation o...

This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — things look pretty normal. But they clearly aren’t normal. The Trump administration spent the year upending the global trade system while tech companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I., a technology that could potentially displace many of our jobs. And people don’t feel normal, ei...

What will America’s story be after President Trump? My colleague David Leonhardt did a great series on that question this year, talking to a number of leading politicians. I thought two of those episodes, with Senator Bernie Sanders and with Senator Ruben Gallego, would be of particular interest to you.

And they’re great to listen to as a pair. Sanders and Gallego have strong views about where the Democratic Party went wrong and how...

“This lightbulb went off that almost no one was asking these questions.”

In 2006, Elie Hassenfeld and a few of his friends pooled some money they wanted to donate to charity. And they wanted to find charities where their money would go the farthest in improving lives. That information, it turned out, was incredibly hard to find.

That was the seed of GiveWell. For almost a decade, GiveWell has dedicated itself to rigorously researchin...

This is one of my favorite conversations in recent memory — with the writer Zadie Smith. 

Smith is the author of novels, including “White Teeth,” “On Beauty” and “NW,” as well as many essays and short stories. Her ability to give language to the kinds of quiet battles that live inside of ourselves is part of why she’s been one of my favorite writers for years.

“We absolutely need to gather in our identity groups sometimes for our fre...

Gavin Newsom is the 2028 Democratic front-runner. That’s what many of the polls and the Polymarket betting odds say.

It’s been widely believed that Newsom wants to run for president someday. But belief that he could be a front-runner was less common. A liberal white guy from a state that much of the country considers badly governed just didn’t seem like the profile the Democratic Party was looking for.

But as a Californian who has wa...

I answer your questions on the year’s political lessons, the struggles of young men and handling heat on the show.

The end-of-year Ask Me Anything episode has become a tradition on the show. So as 2025 comes to a close, I’m joined by Claire Gordon, the show’s executive producer, to answer your questions about an eventful year — how my thinking on the Trump administration has evolved, how well the Democratic Party has played its chip...

My colleague Ross Douthat talks to the journalist who exposed Jeffrey Epstein. 

This episode of “Interesting Times,” with the Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, came out back in July. But since Epstein has very much stayed in the news, I wanted to share it now. The conversation is such a fascinating and helpful explainer of the whole case, and the questions that remain unanswered — with the woman whose reporting l...

The holidays are an unusually social time, filled with parties and family get-togethers. But for most of the year, we feel isolated and unsatisfied with our social lives. Our society isn’t structured to support connection year-round. So it’s an apt time to re-air this episode — a conversation with the writer Sheila Liming about rediscovering the lost art of hanging out.

Liming is an associate professor of professional writing at Cha...

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 ...