The latest release of files related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein left key questions unanswered about his rise to power and his connections to the president.
David Enrich, an investigations editor at The New York Times, explains how he worked with a team of reporters to fill in those mysteries and reveal the truth about Mr. Epstein’s origins.
Guest: David Enrich, a deputy investigations editor for The New York Times.
Background reading:
The release of the Epstein files revealed new photos, but many files were withheld.
This is the strangest economy I’ve seen in my lifetime. If you just looked at the macro data — the jobs numbers, G.D.P., the stock market — things look pretty normal. But they clearly aren’t normal. The Trump administration spent the year upending the global trade system while tech companies spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I., a technology that could potentially displace many of our jobs. And people don’t feel normal, either. Survey data shows that the vibecession rages on.
Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal are the co-hosts of the excellent economics podcast “Odd Lots” and have closely followed all the chaos this year. So I wanted to have them on the show to explain what the hell is going on.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. 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. And special thanks to Kimberly Clausing, Natasha Sarin and Kyla Scanlon.
As the first year of Trump 2.0 limps to a close, it's time to celebrate 2025’s worst takes and funniest moments with The Pundies, Pod Save America's annual awards show! Jon, Lovett, Dan, and Tommy, joined by producer Elijah Cone, debate which political beef of 2024 was the most entertaining, which Trump administration official should be anointed "The Worst," whether this year's Democratic victories were enough to wash away all the pain, and lots more.
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.
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Quico Toro joins to discuss Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses, distinguishing the "parasitic" nature of the charlatan from the hit-and-run tactics of the scammer. He traces the lineage of the grift from the official alchemists of 16th-century Venice to the upsell tactics of Trump University, arguing that loneliness and the internet have created a "target-rich environment" for swindlers. Then, a pivot to the environment: Mike and Quico debate whether the "green halo" around solar and wind constitutes its own form of elite misinformation, and why the villainization of nuclear energy—and the partisanship of climate policy—has stalled real progress.
Now, Vice President JD Vance is the first executive branch leader in more than a century with a furry face.
And others are following suit. From the Senate to the campaign trail, more and more men in politics are letting their facial hair grow free. But what does that tell us about masculinity, power, and how we see each other?
Why did our politicians remain bare faced for so long? And what does the reemergence of whiskers in the White House represent?
Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.
On the Epstein matter, the current DOJ is not just putting its thumb on the scale for Trump. It's his defense team. Make no mistake: The top two officials at the Justice Department are executing Trump's wishes to cover-up the victims' statements and the details about Epstein's 2008 sweetheart deal. It's the president's cover-up, and the mainstream media needs to call it for what it is. And over at CBS's "60 Minutes," Bari Weiss wants Trump to know she's on the administration's side as well. Meanwhile, Vance made clear at AmericaFest that he's cool with literal Nazis in the MAGA coalition as he readies for his 2028 run. Plus, Kushner and Witkoff are still doing Putin's bidding, the governor of Louisiana is adding the (pretend) invasion of Greenland to his portfolio, and Tim reads from the Monday Mailbag.
E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist, successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. She joined 'The Source' to discuss her memoir, Not My Type: One Woman Against a President.
Author and journalist Vijay Prashad returns to Bad Faith initially to discuss Venezuela but gets sidetracked by Briahna's frustration with several media happenings from last week: the Compact article "The Lost Generation" arguing that white millennial men have faced discrimination as a consequence of DEI, and Vivek Ramaswamy's New York Times op/ed that attempts to pull the GOP back from its descent into open racism, which often manifests in the use of anti-Indian slurs against Ramaswamy and Second Lady Usha Vance. The two do get to Venezuela eventually, but life is about the journey.
The construction of a giant factory complex in Arizona was supposed to embody the Trump administration’s ability to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
But undertaking big projects is not as simple as it seems. Peter S. Goodman, who writes about the intersection of economics and geopolitics for The New York Times, explains why.
Guest: Peter S. Goodman, who covers the global economy for The New York Times.
Background reading:
Read about the 18,000 or so reasons that make it so hard to build a chip factory in the United States.
Photo: Loren Elliott for The New York Times
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
How much can we truly know about the inner lives of others? Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Miles Leeson and Karen Leeder to reflect on the challenge of interpreting the minds and motivations of poets, both past and present.
Editor Miles Leeson presents Poems from an Attic, a newly published collection of Iris Murdoch’s previously unseen poetry. Found in a box long after her death, these intimate verses offer fresh insight into the desires of a writer better known for her novels and philosophy.
Professor Karen Leeder has spent much of her career studying the poetry of East Germany. Her recent translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 won this year's Griffin Poetry Prize 2025. Grünbein has written about the wartime bombing of his birth city Dresden and as a translator of classical authors, including Aeschylus and Seneca, his work features reflections on the relevance of the past and of antiquity in the present.
Nick Makoha's latest volume of poetry The New Carthaginians draws on an eclectic range of artistic, historic and cultural sources from the politics of 1970s Uganda to the myth of Icarus and the exploded collages of the neo-expressionist art movement. He writes employing symbols and traditions in startling ways to transform what we might think we know into something completely new.
