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This episode features a clip from the podcast The War On Cars where guest, prominent sex columnist Dan Savage, talks about how terrible cars are, and how livable streets activists can win people over to our side. It was a fun interview, and while I’ve always enjoyed his media appearances, prior to this interview I never knew he was a kindred spirit with regard to this topic!

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This episode features a bulletin from Sveriges Radio’s daily English language news podcast about how shop workers in Sweden’s trade union think Christmas music poses a health and safety risk. MY APOLOGIES if this episode is triggering for any listeners.

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This episode features a clip from a terrific interview with Yuval Noah Harari on by Sean Illing on his Vox podcast The Grey Area. After Ezra Klein went to the NYT Vox slowly auditioned other people to fill the gap, renaming The Ezra Klein Show first to The Conversation with different hosts, of which Sean was by far and away the best, and they eventually gave him the feed and renamed it The Grey Area. I just never unsubscribed. Ezra is awesome, but I like the NYT incarnation of his show less than the old version, and I think The Grey Area is usually more interesting than EKS these days.

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An extended series of clips stitched together from a recent episode of Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast where Sam talks to subject matter expert Timothy Snyder about Russia’s war on Ukraine and he systematically knocks down bad take after bad take from the "do your own research" wing of the Twitterverse.

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This episode features a clip from Coleman Hughes’ podcast Conversations with Coleman where music critic and historian Ted Gioia talks about where musical innovation comes from and the pattern of things from the fringe becoming mainstream.

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This episode features a clip from Channel 4 News’ report on the truck bombing of Russia’s bridge connecting illegally annexed Crimea in Ukraine to the Russian mainland. The latest in a long series of colossal embarrassments for Putin.

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This episode features a clip from The Michael Shermer Show where Michael talks to British satirist and commentator Andrew Doyle about the adoption by progressives of trans activist’s world-view, and how folly and unprogressive he predicts history will judge that to be. Call me a “TERF”, but I tend to agree, and I hope saying so doesn’t mean I lose a bunch of friends. Also, I’m personally more concerned with the elimination of sex-separated spaces for women and girls, as well as social contagion among teenage girls leading to irreversible medical interventions for them, than I am about gay boys, but ya know, yeah them too.

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This episode features a clip from HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher where Bill predicts how the traditionally unifying event of an alien invasion would go down in present-day America.

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This episode features a clip from Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast where he explains why Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. His description here mirrors much of my own take and was a big part of why I felt so compelled to escape from post-Trump America.

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This episode features a clip from a recent Al Franken Podcast wherein he interviews journalist and Russia expert Julia Ioffe who explains why negotiating with Putin about Ukraine is ill-advised.

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This episode features a clip of Coleman Hughes from his podcast Conversations with Coleman where in his discussion with Jonathan Haidt he discusses the pros and cons of the social fragmentation allowed by the internet. Seems like most people I know focus only on the benefits or the downsides, but to me it seems worth observing both.

This episode features a clip from The Local’s Sweden In Focus podcast where they interviewed Carlos Velasco from Honduras about what led him to a life in Sweden. The thing I’ve been most surprised by living in Sweden is how few of my fellow ex-pats came here not for work or love, but for the same kinds of reasons I did: that by the numbers it’s among the best places in the world you can live. Carlos knows what’s up!

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This episode features a clip from The Ezra Klein Show where Ezra is setting up the context for his interview with legal expert Dahlia Lithwick about just how extremist and anti-democratic the SCOTUS is at the moment. As well as a clip from NYT’s The Daily where Sabrina Tavernise interviews abortion-rights lawyer Nancy Stearns about whether or not her stronger, pre-Roe legal case could have changed the course of history for women’s rights.

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This episode features a montage of clips assembled to sound like one thought by Ezra Klein from a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show where he talks about "The End of 'The Everything Bubble'" with Financial Times journalist Rana Foroohar. She was fine, but I thought the questions Ezra asked throughout the course of the interview told the story better than she did.

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This episode features a clip of Todd Barry talking about a visit to Sweden and apartment hunting in NYC. The clip is old, but I saw him perform here recently and as one of very few Americans in the room I think I was probably the only one to thoroughly understand the nuances of every joke.

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This episode features a clip from The Kids in the Hall Brain Candy, in anticipation of the new TKITH series on Amazon Prime! Also a funny sketch from The Harris Alterman about the debut of a truly free speech social media platform.

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This episode features a clip from The David Pakman Show where he talks about the moral panics around book censorship on the right. Wait, are they for or against book bans? It can be hard to keep track.

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This episode features a clip from The Ezra Klein Show where Ezra talks to the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko about how the west views Ukraine, how Ukraine views the west, and how Russia views them both. It was a great hour-long conversation. My two-minute clip is heavily edited, so go listen to the whole thing!

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This episode features a clip from Dan Olson’s epic 2+ hour rant/takedown of the grifts known as crypto and NFTs and all their associated cruft, Line Goes Up. I have friends who’ve earned literally hundreds of thousands of dollars leveraging the NFT shell game to great effect. But they did so with no delusions of grandeur, just wanting to take part in the early stages of an obvious MLM scheme. So I guess good on them for getting in early and milking the cash cow. But I still find the whole thing distasteful. Ha.

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This episode features a clip from HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher where he laments the American trend of things entirely changing but keeping their old name, regardless of how little it still applies.

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This episode features clips from Wes Anderson’s best film The Grand Budapest Hotel related to Boy with Apple. And also from the HBO series Silicon Valley.

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This episode features a clip from The New York Times’ podcast The Daily, where Sabrina Tavernise translates the message Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave to Russian citizens on the eve of Putin’s invasion to try to inform them of what what was actually going on since they really only have access to state propaganda. There’s also a clip from The David Pakman Show where he addresses the alt-left and contrasts their wrongness with the spot-on record of the Biden Administration.

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This episode features a promo for Jon Ronson’s new podcast miniseries, Things Fell Apart, from BBC. He investigates the surprising origins of different elements of today's culture wars featuring interviews with many people who, however pivotal, you've probably never heard of, and who rarely give interviews. It's topics like anti-abortion activism among evangelicals, publicly shaming people for things they said online, different waves of feminism and contemporary trans activists, racism, anti-racism, teaching sex ed, and on and on. A common theme among many of the episodes is activists becoming, in a sense, victims of their own success. It's terrifically well done and strikes a nearly impossible to achieve note of nuanced even-handedness. I think everyone who was featured in the show would say they got a perfectly fair hearing and that listeners will feel similarly about how their views are represented, regardless of which side of any given issue they are on. It's just fantastic.