Lia Thomas is a transgender woman who has, in one year, become the star athlete of the women’s swim team at The University of Pennsylvania. When she competed on the men’s team, she was seeded no. 462 in the NCAA. Now, she’s seeded No. 1 and expected to beat Olympic gold medalist Katy Ledecky, widely considered one of the greatest female swimmers of all time, later this month at the NCAA championship.
Thomas won’t stop there. She recently told Sports Illustrated that she has her sights set on the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
What does the rise of Lia Thomas mean for the future of women’s sports? Suzy Weiss reports from the Harvard pool, where Lia Thomas recently smashed Ivy League records.
Air raid sirens have been ringing out over the capital of Ukraine for the past week. Russian troops have laid siege to Kharkiv, the second biggest city in the country, and the city of Kherson in the south has already fallen. More than a half of a million Ukranians have fled their homes, with little more than a suitcase or two. Hundreds have been confirmed dead, and surely that number is just the beginning.
Why did Putin invade Ukraine at this moment? What is his endgame—and what is the West’s? Does this war augur the beginning of a new era? Perhaps even a new Cold War?
Today, Niall Ferguson, Walter Russell Mead and Francis Fukuyama discuss whether or not America is up to the task of truly, as Biden said at the State of the Union address, defending freedom from tyranny.
Zoe Strimpel on the collapse of Western authority, self and geopolitical understanding— and the predictably catastrophic results of our politics of retrenchment, appeasement and pacifism.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is one of those pioneering American leaders whose story is for the history books. Born in the segregated south in the 1950s, Rice couldn’t step foot in certain movie theaters and restaurants when she was a little girl. By the time she stepped foot in the White House as a National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, she was one of the most powerful people in the world—and the highest ranking black woman in the history of the United States.
On today’s episode, a conversation with Secretary Rice, who now serves at the Director of Stanford's Hoover Institution, about the most pressing issues facing the country: the future of the GOP, the continued popularity of Donald Trump, the state of our democracy, the culture wars on race and identity politics, immigration, the rise of China, possible war in Russia … and much more.
Right now, the Winter Olympics are underway in Beijing. But for the Chinese Communist Party, the 2022 Games are an opportunity not simply for athleticism, but for authoritarianism.
Athletes at the Games are subject not just to official Olympics rules, but also the heavy hand of the CCP. They are being spied on—and they have been warned, including by Nancy Pelosi, not to criticize the injustices China is committing in plain sight.
Why is America participating in an Olympics in a country committing genocide? What does it say about our relationship with China? And will historians remember these games in the way we remember the 1936 Berlin Olympics?
Josh Rogin is a foreign policy columnist for The Washington Post, the author of “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century,” and a favorite Honestly guest. Today he breaks down what you aren’t seeing when you tune into this year’s Olympics.
Eric Scmidt has been a pioneer at every chapter of the tech revolution… from the very beginnings of the internet to helming Google for more than a decade. Now, he’s focused on the next iteration of our digital world: artificial intelligence. His most recent book, written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocker, is called “The Age of AI: And our Human Future.” It investigates how AI is transforming the very foundations of what it means to be human.
Today, our quick question to Google’s former CEO is this: how long do we have until the robots take over?
Ever since the end of World War II, America has been the dominant world superpower. We have been ready to use that power to defend our national interest. Or to defend a certain set of values. Or both.
But there has always been a tension in this country between isolationism and interventionism. Between those among us who think we should maintain an active role in world affairs—and those who want to pull back and focus on our myriad problems here at home.
That long standing debate is being reignited right now on the Russian-Ukrainian border.
So for today, a debate between Bret Stephens and Matt Taibbi on American Power. When should we use our might? And has recent history proven that we do more harm than good?
The Covid vaccines are medical miracles. During the pandemic they have been literal life-savers; I’ll never forget the relief I felt after getting that first shot.
Despite the conspiracy theories in some corners of the web or on Fox News, there is simply zero evidence that they are killing people; that they are harming people in large numbers; or that this is all some malicious plot by Big Pharma. There is overwhelming proof that these vaccines prevent serious illness.
Like all medical interventions, though, vaccines can have side effects. And in the case of mRNA vaccines—those from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna—there is a small but real risk for young people, especially young males. The need for an evidence-based discussion about the wisdom of requiring boosters is urgent.
But that’s easier said than done.
Over the course of this pandemic, the public has been told that pronouncements from federal health officials represent “the science.” Distinguished medical experts, including some from our nation’s most elite institutions, who have questioned official Covid recommendations and policies—on everything from lockdowns to masking to vaccine mandates—have often been demonized and sometimes silenced.
And so healthy debate about scientifically complicated and morally complex subjects has been shut down, both by censors and by self-censorship.
David Zweig has been one of those rare journalists who, from the start, has challenged the accepted narrative on Covid. He has published a stream of investigations for New York Magazine, the Atlantic, and Wired—from questioning the wisdom of closing schools, to hospitalizationmetrics, to maskingchildren—that initially were maligned or ignored, only to be accepted by legacy media and acknowledged by health officials months later.
Today, he reads an article he wrote for Common Sense that tackles the knotty subject of boosters and myocarditis.
It’s hard to think of an institution in American life that’s more broken than higher education. As universities have abandoned core liberal principles like free speech, bending to students’ demands for censorship, perhaps the most striking feature of all has been the cowardice and silence of tenured professors.
None of this has stopped her from speaking her mind.
Today, why Amy Chua remains an optimist in the face of unprecedented political tribalism; how her students continue to inspire her even as she’s lost faith in Yale; and why she did, indeed, threaten to burn her daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t practice her piano perfectly.
As a boy growing up in Turkey, Abdullah Antepli thought hating Jews was normal. He read Mein Kampf before he was 15. His parents gave him a children's version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He burned Israeli flags.
Today, he is an imam, a professor at Duke University, and, as he puts it, a recovering antisemite. Imam Adbullah has been fearless about blowing the whistle about rising antisemitism in the Muslim community. In the wake of the recent hostage-taking at the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, he tweeted: “Houston, we have a problem!” He wrote, “we need to honestly discuss the increasing anti-semitism within various Muslim communities.”
Today, on Holocaust Remembrace Day, a conversation with a man who has paid a heavy personal price for working to eradicate Jew-hate and to promote peace between Muslims and Jews. Learn more about Imam Abdullah’s work here.
