The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality was persistently skewed.
Today, Favreau is changing the media from the inside. He’s a co-host on Pod Save America, and co-founder of Crooked Media, both of which have seen tremendous growth in 2017.
In this conversation, we look back on 2017, talk through the first year of the Trump White House (“a day-to-day shitshow”); the Democrats he’s watching for 2020; the mechanics of building a podcast empire; Favreau’s concern about the left (“we need to take the time to persuade other people of what we believe”); and the rot in the Republican Party.
To Favreau, the right-wing media is “the real center of gravity in that party; it’s not the Republicans in Congress, it’s not even really Donald Trump, although I guess you could say that he is, in some ways, a creation of that media machine.”
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What Happened by Hillary Clinton
The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton
All the Truth is Out by Matt Bai
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The Matt Yglesias Show
Race, policing, and the universal yearning for safety
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Black Republicans, Donald Trump, and America's "George Floyd moment"
Andrew Yang on UBI, coronavirus, and his next job in politics
Why the hell did America invade Iraq?
How to decarbonize America — and create 25 million jobs
Isabel Wilkerson wants to change how we understand race in America
What it would take to end child poverty in America
Hannah Gadsby on comedy, free speech, and living with autism
What would Keynes do?
A devastating indictment of the Republican Party
How inequality and white identity politics feed each other
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Dadding out with Mike Birbiglia
A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering
The crisis in the news
Bryan Stevenson on how America can heal
What a post-Trump Republican Party might look like
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