The government shutdown enters its second week with no negotiations underway, as President Trump threatens permanent layoffs. The impact of the shutdown is spreading to the skies, where staffing shortages have forced some air traffic control towers to close and ground flights across the country. And former FBI Director James Comey appears in court to face felony charges, a case driven by pressure from President Trump.
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Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Kelsey Snell, Russell Lewis, Krishnadev Calamur, Mohamad ElBardicy and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas
We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
Over the past week, ICE and border patrol agents have clashed with Chicago residents, and federal guard troops arriving in the city might inflame tensions further.
Julie Bosman, Chicago bureau chief for The Times, and Mattathias Schwartz describe the situation on the ground and explain how the city fits into a broader political fight.
Guest:
Julie Bosman, the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times.
Mattathias Schwartz, who has reported on the tension between President Trump and the courts.
The Trump White House suggests not issuing backpay to furloughed workers after the government shutdown ends. Attorney General Pam Bondi goes on the attack during a hearing about Justice Department policies. And the Supreme Court appears skeptical of a Colorado law banning conversion therapy.
There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this.
The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immigration agents in the streets. They picked one over health care. And the issue here is very real. Huge health insurance subsidies passed under President Joe Biden are set to expire at the end of this year, threatening to make health care premiums skyrocket and kick millions off their insurance.
Neera Tanden was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act and has worked in Democratic policymaking for decades. She is the president of the Center for American Progress and was a director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council. I asked her on the show to lay out the policy stakes of the shutdown and what a deal might look like.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, 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.
In the midst of the Great Depression, the City of St. Louis wanted to create a monument to the city’s role in the westward expansion of the United States and general waterfront improvement.
It took thirty years, but they eventually created their monument with the assistance of the Federal Government. When it was completed, it was a structure like no other on Earth.
It was a 660-foot-tall freestanding stainless steel arch. It required innovations not just in design and architecture, but in materials, construction, and even elevators.
Learn more about the Gateway Arch, how and why it was built, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. This week:
The Daily Mail says that over half of the UK population live in households that get more in benefits than they pay in tax - is it true?
Do some billionaires earn more in a night than the population of Bournemouth earns in a year? New Green leader Zack Polanski seems to think so - we scrutinise the figures.
Are older generations getting smarter?
Have 77% of Gen-Z brought a parent along to a job interview? Really?
If you’ve seen a number you think we should take a look at, email the team: moreorless@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Tim Harford
Reporter: Lizzy McNeill
Producer: Nathan Gower
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele
Sound mix: Duncan Hannant
Editor: Richard Vadon
Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone. Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) considers major contemporary authors who disavow identity even as their works and public personas respond in varied ways to the imperatives of being “Indian.” Chapters examine Bharati Mukherjee’s rejection of “ethnic” Americanness; Chetan Bhagat’s “bad English”; Amit Chaudhuri’s autofictional literary project; and Jhumpa Lahiri’s decision to write in Italian, interspersed with meditations on the iconicity of the theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Edward Said. Through an innovative method of accented reading and sharing stories and syllabi from her teaching, Srinivasan relates the burdens of representation faced by ethnic and postcolonial writers to the institutional and disciplinary pressures that affect the scholars who study their works. Engaging and self-reflexive, Overdetermined offers new insight into the dynamics that shape contemporary Indian English literature, the politics of identity in literary studies, and the complexities of teaching minoritized literatures in the West.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is assistant professor of English at Rice University. Her books include the essays What is We? (2025) and the coedited Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), and her public writing has appeared in numerous venues.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.
The new Supreme Court term started on Monday, and the justices have a lot on their plates. They’ll be deciding a host of big issues in the coming months – including if Trump can fire board members of the Federal Reserve and whether his tariff policy is overstepping presidential authority. But first, on Tuesday, the court heard arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case focused on whether conversion talk-therapy for minors is protected by the First Amendment. So, for more on this Supreme Court term and what we can expect, we spoke to Kate Shaw, co-host of Crooked Media’s Strict Scrutiny and a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
