The U.S. and Iran begin high-stakes talks in Oman today over Tehran’s nuclear program, If they can't reach a deal, President Trump could launch a military strike from the large military force assembled in the Middle East. Lawmakers now have just one week to fund the Department of Homeland Security, as Democrats release a detailed list of demands to overhaul how immigration enforcement officers operate. And the FBI confirms a ransom letter in the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show co-host Savannah Guthrie, as investigators search for answers and her family pleads for proof she is alive.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Andrew Sussman, Jason Breslow, James Doubek, Mohamad ElBardicy, and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Nia Dumas.
Our Director is Milton Guevara.
We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis. Our technical director is Stacey Abbott.
Our Executive Producer is Jay Shaylor.
(0:00) Introduction (02:12) US-Iran Talks Begin (05:36) Dem List of DHS Demands (09:24) Search For Nancy Guthrie Continues
Women’s pain is too often dismissed in medicine. An alarming number of women report feeling major surgery and dealing with doctors and nurses who make light of their complaints.
Susan Burton, reporter and host of the podcast “The Retrievals,” shares stories from just a few of the many cases of women who felt significant pain during their C-sections.
Guest: Susan Burton, the host, writer and reporter of “The Retrievals,” a podcast series by Serial Productions.
The family of Nancy Guthrie have begun publicly pleading with would-be kidnappers to clarify any demands. The release of Jeffrey Epstein emails upend public life in the United Kingdom, with pressure building on Prime Minister Keir Starmer. And the Olympic opening ceremonies are about to get underway in Italy.
Ragebait, sponcon, A.I. slop — the internet of 2026 makes a lot of us nostalgic for the internet of 10 or 15 years ago.
What exactly went wrong here? How did the early promise of the internet get so twisted? And what exactly is wrong here? What kinds of policies could actually make our digital lives meaningfully better?
Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu have two different theories of the case, which I thought would be interesting to put in conversation together. Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.” Wu is a law professor who worked on technology policy in the Biden White House; his latest book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”
In this conversation, we discuss their different frameworks, and how they connect to all kinds of issues that plague the modern internet: the feeling that we’re being manipulated; the deranging of our politics; the squeezing of small businesses and creators; the deluge of spam and fraud; the constant surveillance and privacy risks; the quiet rise of algorithmic pricing; and the dehumanization of work. And they lay out the policies that they think would go furthest in making all these different aspects of our digital lives better.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Michelle Harris, 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 Natasha Scott.
The Winter Olympics has the Unexpected Elements team looking into some of the incredible science behind the sports. First up, the tale of India’s lone luge pilot: how did using old train tracks as sled runners give him a competitive edge? Then, we look at the physics behind a cheating scandal that has rocked the ski jumping world. Scientific studies tell us exactly how much difference changing a single stitch in a costume can make.
Did you know there are different types of ice? Professor Christoph Salzmann has discovered three of them, and tells us what makes them unique. Plus dinosaurs, disease, and whether we laugh with an accent. All on this week’s Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Chhavi Sachdev and Tristan Ahtone
Producers: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, with Lucy Davies, Imy Harper and Tim Dodd
We're just one week into February, and a lot has happened already — from the fallout over the Department of Justice's Epstein file dump, to President Trump's claims the U.S. should "nationalize" elections, to the decision to pull 700 federal immigration agents out of Minnesota on Wednesday. It's been a lot to follow — so we spoke to Tim Miller. He's writer-at-large at The Bulwark and host of The Bulwark Podcast.
OA1233 - We are not conspiracy theorist type people. But... yeah man I don't know. But also, so much more in these files to talk about. If you know anything about the federal government’s 2007 plea deal with Jeffrey Epstein you know that it was bad. But newly-released documents from the Epstein files show that it was actually much worse than that! Thanks to a newly-released legal memo, a draft indictment, and internal emails between prosecutors we now have a much better understanding of the disagreements within US Attorney for the District of Southern Florida Alex Acosta’s office as they finalized the terms of a much-too-friendly agreement between the US government and a billionaire pedophile which a federal appeals court would later call “a national disgrace.” Matt has the receipts for this special emergency episode.
From time to time, the American people need to be reminded who is the boss. The boss is the US government. The citizenry are the serfs, the servants, the subordinates.
