Category: 3-SometimeCommentary

In it escalating campaign against Venezuela, the Trump administration has gone from shooting drug boats to trying to seize oil tankers in the Caribbean.

Anatoly Kurmanaev, a foreign correspondent for The New York Times who has spent years covering Venezuela, explains why President Trump is shifting his strategy, and what that might tell us about his true endgame.

Guest: Anatoly Kurmanaev, a reporter for The New York Times covering Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine.

Background reading: Venezuela’s oil exports have plummeted after the United States took action against three tankers carrying crude.

Photo: Satellite image ©2025 Vantor, via Associated Press

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It's Christmas Eve. A holiday celebrated by 2.4 billion people around the world, which centers on a 2,000-year-old story about a Jewish man born in Bethlehem who became a rabbi, who the Romans would later execute in Jerusalem. 

But what most people don’t know is that the first people who believed in Jesus did not think they were starting a new religion. They were a small group of Jews who thought of themselves as history's last generation, with Jesus as their Messiah.

Of course, as we all know now, they were not history’s last generation. Instead, they became history's first Christians. How did that happen? When did Christ's followers begin to see themselves as distinct and separate from Judaism? Why did some Jews refuse to accept Christ as the Messiah? And how was that refusal, and the anti-Judaism of the early Christians, directly connected to the antisemitism burning across the globe today?

These first few centuries are essential for understanding not just Christianity and Judaism, but the way ideas spread, and why many of the ideas of this period—good ones, and also some very bad ones—still persist in our world today.

My guest today, Paula Fredriksen, has spent her career studying this period of history. She is one of the world’s leading scholars of early Christianity and the author of many books including: When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, and Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. 

Paula was born in Rhode Island and now lives in Jerusalem, just 20 minutes from Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified.  

This conversation is a Christmas special you won’t want to miss.

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book links in this article.

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Mary Katharine Ham and special guest-host Kelly Maher discuss the surprising amount of political news being made in the right-of-center coalition during the week of Christmas. It's like a Friday-night news dump for the whole year! We are on Widow Defense and Commendation for Erika Kirk for running AmFest, we get into Ben Shapiro's speech, Tucker Carlson's reaction, Megyn Kelly's anger at Shapiro and behind-the-scenes work for the Erika-Candace summit, and of course, the Candace Owens of it all. Also, the Heritage Foundation continues its come-apart.

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Paris Marx is joined by Jathan Sadowski and Brian Merchant to reflect on the year in tech, discuss the worst people in Silicon Valley, and share what they’ll be keeping an eye on in 2026.

Jathan Sadowski is the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite, co-host of This Machine Kills, and a Senior Lecturer at Monash University. Brian Merchant is the author of Blood in the Machine and writes a newsletter of the same name.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Visit Francesca Bria’s useful Authoritarian Stack

• Trump signs an executive order to keep states from implementing their own AI legislation

• The Trump administration is gutting the Department of Education, climate science programs, and public health

• Disney and OpenAI have reached a billion dollar deal

• Bernie Sanders calls for a moratorium on AI data centre construction

Thomas Chatterton Williams joins to discuss his new book, The Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. He argues that the racial reckoning of 2020 was not an inevitable tide of history but a perfect storm of pandemic isolation, polarizing politics, and institutional failure. TCW dissects how mainstream institutions—from the New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer—abandoned objectivity for "moral clarity," and how misinformation about cases like Jacob Blake fueled a cycle of violence in Kenosha. Mike and Thomas debate whether the Left's introspection is necessary to defeat the "worse" impulses of the MAGA Right, or if it just alienates the base.

Produced by Corey Wara

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