This month will see thousands of people take to streets around the world to test their feats of endurance. It’s marathon season. And this week, we’re looking at the science behind what keeps you running.
We’ll learn about the psychological preparation that goes into undertaking mammoth challenges, like marathons and expeditions, and meet a scientist from the UK Space Agency who’s endured the Antarctic winter, and is now training to be an astronaut.
We’ll find out just how genetic our ability to cope with endurance exercise is. How air pollution could be affecting your running times. And find out how evolution has gifted our animal friends with some unique ways of getting ahead.
As well as all that, there’s the science of what makes something ugly. And an exciting innovation that could see us using cow dung to fuel our cars.
All that and more in this week’s Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Alex Lathbridge, Chhavi Sachdev and Candice Bailey
Producers: Robbie Wojciechowski with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, Imaan Moin, and Minnie Harrop
The Supreme Court finally begins oral arguments on nationwide injunctions.
Walmart announces price hikes as President Trump concludes a whirlwind Middle Eastern tour.
Former FBI Director James Comey makes a post about “86ing" the president.
Special thanks to Virginia Allen, Bradley Devlin, Tim Kennedy, and John Popp for their excellent work keeping the show running while I was away this week.
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Is Donald Trump eroding American democracy and consolidating power for himself? Or is he trying to do that and failing? Is this what sliding toward authoritarianism looks like? Or is this what a functioning democracy looks like? And how can you tell the difference?
Two articles came out recently that offer very different perspectives on these questions. In Vox, Zack Beauchamp wrote a piece called “Trump Is Losing,” which argues that Trump’s efforts to cow his enemies and consolidate power are not organized or strategic enough to make a serious dent in our democratic system. In The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz published a piece that he reported in Hungary, about how life in a modern authoritarian regime doesn’t look and feel like you might expect: “You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if — still go on feeling as if — the big one is not yet here,” he writes.
So I invited both Beauchamp and Marantz on the show to debate these big questions: What timeline are we on? What signs are they looking at? If we’ve crossed the line into authoritarianism, how would we know? Is Trump losing? Or is it possible he’s already won?
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
If you were to ask most people what year they associate with the American Revolution, it would be 1776. That was the year that the Continental Congress declared Independence.
However, 1776 wasn’t the start of the revolution, nor was it the end of the revolution. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the Declaration of Independence, it would have gone down as a pretty horrible year for the revolution.
For my money, the most interesting year of the revolution was actually the first year, 1775.
Learn more about 1775 and the start of the American Revolution on the 1775th episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
OA1158 - We start off with some patron questions about what to do when ICE comes to your neighborhood, the one thing that the world’s most annoying white libertarians got right, and how to best exercise the very few rights US citizens have coming back into the country. Then in our main story: This week the Supreme Court heard arguments over birthright citizenship--or did it? Matt explains how they might do something even worse than expected while still striking down Trump’s attempt to end the Constitutional right to citizenship for everyone born on US soil by executive order.
Finally, we polish off today’s episode with a meaty footnote about the lies and tyranny of a very different kind of would-be monarch.
On today’s episode, we’re tracking Trump’s trip to the Middle East and his push for price controls. Plus, covid data tracker Kelley Krohnert, start-stop engines, and girls trip side chats. Tune in!
What has gone wrong with the left—and what leftists must do if they want to change politics, ethics, and minds. Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.”
In Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left ( MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Criticisms of Western wrongdoing are certainly important, yet Heinze explains that leftists have rarely engaged in the kinds of open and public self-scrutiny that they demand from others. Citing examples as different as the Ukraine war, LGBTQ+ people in Cuba, the concept of “hatred,” and the problem of leftwing antisemitism, Heinze explains why and how the left must change its memory politics if it is to claim any ethical high ground.
Eric Heinze is Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London.
We’re talking about a military buildup on the U.S./Mexico border, and another air traffic control outage - this time out West.
Also, we’ll tell you about a major step forward in personalized medicine that could one day be used to treat millions of people.
Plus, the biggest retailer yet to raise prices because of tariffs, a historic discovery made at Harvard Law School, and the WNBA is back and bigger than ever as the NBA gets closer to the finals.
Those stories and even more news to know in about 10 minutes!
Join us every Mon-Fri for more daily news roundups!
On his tour of the Middle East, Trump lavishes praise on dictators—as they deposit bribes in his pocket. Republicans, in between defending Trump's jet grift, finalize more details of their "big beautiful bill," which, in addition to gutting Medicaid, now aims to cut food assistance, funding for Planned Parenthood, and Biden's clean energy tax credits. The Supreme Court hears arguments on two important, intertwined questions: whether Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship is constitutional (it's not), and whether federal judges below the Supreme Court can issue nationwide injunctions. Jon and Dan react to the Solicitor General's clueless argument before the justices and new polling on Trump's "inoculation" against corruption attacks, and offer Democrats some advice on how to talk about the GOP's tax cuts. Then Jon sits down with long-time friend of the pod Beto O'Rourke to talk about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Beto's future in the Lone Star State.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
