The drive to religious freedom in America was carried out overwhelmingly in the state legislatures—and the federal First Amendment had almost nothing to do with it.
Trump has been president for 11 months, and during that time, former President Joe Biden has basically left the public eye. Yet as Trump's own presidency has deflated like an old soufflé, he's gotten very focused on making sure we all know that Biden is still the problem. For more on Trump's increasing fixation on Joe Biden, as well as his horrifying comments on the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, we spoke to Shawn McCreesh. Shawn is the White House correspondent for The New York Times, covering the Trump administration.
And in headlines,President Trump declares fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, the House Oversight Committee alleges Washington, D.C.'s police chief pressured subordinates to manipulate crime data, and from the people who said "what if the military, but… space?" comes the sequel no one asked for: The U.S. Tech Force.
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the right-wing commentator Candace Owens didn’t simply blame liberals. Her antisemetic conspiracy theories have become so toxic that Kirk’s widow has called for a private summit this week.
Guest: Will Sommer, senior reporter for The Bulwark.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
While Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is popular in academic economics and finance, it fails to properly explain profits, mistakenly confusing entrepreneurial profit seeking with risk management.
For more than 40 years, the Farmland Protection Policy Act has socialized US farmlands and transferred wealth to politically-connected people. What it hasn’t done is protect farmland.
President Donald Trump loves tariffs. But according to a new analysis from Politico, more than half of US imports right now are not subjected to them. To find out why, we spoke to Paroma Soni. She's a data and graphics reporter at Politico, where she covers trade, immigration, agriculture and politics.And later in the show, two mass shootings occurred over the weekend — one in Sydney, Australia and another at Brown University in Rhode Island. We talk to Talib Reddick, president of Brown University's Undergraduate Council of Students.
Are “boot camp” clinics that treat kids and teenagers with chronic pain symptoms helping or inflicting more damage on patients who have trouble advocating for themselves?
Guest: Isobel Whitcomb, science journalist based in Portland, Oregon.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
Cities like Austin and Atlanta used to top lists of places people moved to looking for relatively affordable places to live. Until, one day, they weren’t that affordable. On today’s show, how a low cost of living is threatened by growth, and how one sunbelt city in Alabama is planning ahead.
Whole Foods based its brand on a certain standard of quality—but there are some things that shoppers nevertheless want. Amazon believes it has found a way to keep the shelves looking like Whole Foods, while getting you the Tide PODS and Cheez-Its you deeply desire.
Guest: Peyton Bigora, staff reporter for Grocery Dive
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
Whether we like it or not, global warming is happening. The global temperature has already gone up, and it’s going to go up more, because the atmosphere is already full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and we’re continuing to add to that stock. Quite how much it will increase by is a very important question for all of us.
Until relatively recently, during much of the 2010s and into the 2020s, many scientists claimed that if we kept on going down the path we were on, if we just kept on with business as usual, then by the end of the century global temperatures would increase by almost five degrees centigrade.
This projection was based on something called RCP 8.5, a statistical scenario used by scientists to model the future of the climate.
You can still find scientific papers published in 2025 that make the same claim. However, there’s a good case that RCP 8.5 should never have been used as the business-as-usual scenario. And in hindsight it doesn’t look like an accurate vision of the future at all.
So what’s going on?
Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at Stripe, explains the argument.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Series producer: Tom Colls
Sound mix: Donald MacDonald
Editor: Richard Vadon