The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol: This Is Not Democratic Government

ICE and Border Patrol are kidnapping people in the suburbs near New Orleans based on racial profiling—it’s like the South of 70 years ago. Mini Greg Bovino cares far more about his video team capturing him menacing and harassing people going about their lives than he does about due process and the Fourth Amendment. But despite her own pinup-style social media spreads, Trump may be readying to dump Kristi Noem from DHS. Meanwhile, the administration keeps creating new excuses for why it killed the two shipwrecked men near Venezuela, while also withholding key information. Plus, Trump is handing out more welfare checks to farmers, MTG says MAGA is not America First, the Dems get another shot this week on the affordability issue, Colin Allred may have been unwisely pushed out of the Texas Senate race, and Tim and Bill share a rare ‘you gotta hand it to Ted Cruz’ moment.

Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.

show notes

1A - ‘If You Can Keep It’: Trump And Matters Of Military Law

As of Thursday, the Pentagon says it’s attacked 23 boats and killed at least 87 people as part of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking in the Caribbean.

In the months since the first strike on Sept. 2, one question has emerged that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cannot seem to shake: Are these boat strikes legal?

The White House says yes. But several members of Congress, legal experts, and former defense and intelligence officials have their doubts. Questions also remain about whether it’s legal for President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard in cities across the country.

In this installment of our weekly politics series, “If You Can Keep It,” we convene a panel of experts on military law to help us find answers.

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The Commentary Magazine Podcast - A Bridge Colby Too Far?

A full house today takes up Pete Hegseth's speech on American defense and the national security strategy document released by the administration—Good? Bad? Ugly? And how about that New York Times story revealing the way the Biden administration self-destructed on immigration? Plus, I recommend (with the provisos that it's very very very long and very very very violent) Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair—a merger of his two Kill Bill films from 20 years ago. Give a listen.

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Bad Faith - Episode 533 Promo – Chickens Come Home to Roost (w/ Seth Harp)

Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock this episode and our entire premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast

Investigative reporter and NYT bestselling author of The Fort Bragg Cartel Seth Harp joins Bad Faith to discuss the Thanksgiving DC shooting of two members of the National Guard by a CIA-trained Afghan national. The event provides an opportunity to unpack the fallout from Biden's 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, revisit the U.S. military's opium war, and assess Trump's attempts to use drugs as a pretext for a new war with Venezuela.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Start the Week - Histories, emotions and identity

Three prize-winning authors in today's discussion programme hosted by Tom Sutcliffe:

The German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. Tens of thousands of peasants rose up to demand a new, more egalitarian order—only to be crushed in a brutal counterattack that left up to 100,000 dead. The historian Lyndal Roper argues that this rebellion was far from chaotic: it was a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical ideals of the Protestant Reformation. Her book Summer of Fire and Blood is the winner of the 2025 Cundill History Prize.

The neurologist Masud Husain explores the human mind through the stories of seven patients. In asking what it is that makes us who we are, he explores how our identity can shift when we lose just a single cognitive ability. He examines the stories a man who ran out of words, a woman who stopped caring what others thought, and another who, losing her memory, believed she was having an affair with her own husband. His account of the science of identity, Our Brains, Our Selves, won the Royal Society's 2025 Trivedi Science Book Prize.

The historian Hannah Durkin explores the stories of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last ship of the Atlantic slave trade. Based on her original research she uses first hand accounts to tell the stories of the enslaved in their own words. Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade is the winner of the 2025 Wolfson History Prize.

Producer: Ruth Watts

The Daily - Trump Sent Them to a Notorious Prison. Torture Followed.

Warning: This episode mentions suicide.

In March, the U.S. government sent more than 200 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Over four months, the men said they endured physical, mental and sexual abuse.

Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief at The New York Times, interviewed 40 of these prisoners. She explains what she found out about this part of President Trump’s program of mass deportation.

Guest: Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.

Background reading: 

Photo: Adriana Loureiro Fernandez 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. 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova - Deep Cover Presents: Snowball [ft. Maria Konnikova]

We’re sharing a preview of another podcast, Deep Cover Presents: Snowball, that Maria participated in. Snowball follows journalist Ollie Wards as he unravels the wild story of how his family lost everything after their brush with a charming Californian con woman. He embarks on a question to find out how she did it, why she did it, and where she is now. Here’s a preview of Snowball. If you can’t wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of Deep Cover Presents: Snowball early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Find Pushkin+ on the Deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Source - Should America be a force for good in the world?

It’s frequently been noted that the United States is the lone superpower in the world. But in the age of Trump and 'America First,' what does it mean for the U.S. to exit the world stage as a force for democracy, human rights and economic globalism? This creates a vacuum for China to fill but also increases suffering in many parts of the world. The Case for American Power, defends the necessity of U.S. global leadership.array(3) { [0]=> string(20) "https://www.tpr.org/" [1]=> string(0) "" [2]=> string(1) "0" }

The Daily - Sunday Special: ’Tis the Season for Cookies

The first week of December at The New York Times is known as “Cookie Week.” Every day, for seven days, our cooking team highlights a new holiday cookie recipe. This year’s batch features flavors that aren’t necessarily traditional holiday ones — or even, for that matter, flavors. Instead, they draw inspiration from family night at the movies, drinks like Vietnamese Coffee, and perhaps most surprisingly, an Italian deli meat.

In this edition of the Sunday Special, Gilbert Cruz talks with Melissa Clark and Vaughn Vreeland from New York Times Cooking about this year’s cookies, and they answer questions from readers about how to navigate cooking and baking during the holidays.

Background Reading:

These 7 Cookies Will Be the Life of Every Party

Melissa Clark is a food reporter and columnist for The Times.

Vaughn Vreeland is a supervising video producer for NYT Cooking and writes the “Bake Time” newsletter.

Audio produced by Tina Antolini and Alex Barron with Kate LoPresti. Edited by Wendy Dorr. Engineered by Rowan Niemisto. Original music by Daniel Powell and Diane Wong. 

Photo credit: Rachel Vanni for The New York Times. 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.