A.M. Edition for Oct. 14. Beijing is eager to save an upcoming Trump-Xi summit, while Washington wants to stem losses in the stock market. And so WSJ editor Peter Landers explains that President Trump is taking a carrot and stick approach to trade tensions. Plus, we explore what a slew of results from America’s biggest banks say about the U.S. economy. And, WSJ’s Ken Thomas takes a look at which federal agencies are being hit the hardest by shutdown layoffs. Caitlin McCabe hosts.
After the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, President Trump took a victory lap to Jerusalem before going on to a peace summit in Egypt. David E. Sanger, who is covering Mr. Trump’s trip, discusses some takeaways.
We also hear from the Times reporter Christopher Flavelle about how the U.S. government shutdown has given the Trump administration an extraordinary amount of power over dozens of agencies.
Guests:
David E. Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times, reporting on President Trump and his administration.
Christopher Flavelle, a reporter for The New York Times, covering how President Trump is transforming the federal government.
Background reading:
President Trump told the Israeli Parliament, “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” But he has avoided questions about what comes next.
The remaining Israeli hostages are reunited with their families as many questions remain about what comes next in Gaza. New tariffs on lumber and wood product imports are set to take effect, potentially raising housing costs. And a New Orleans family finds an ancient Roman grave marker in their backyard.
Wells Fargo is one of the most popular retail banks in the United States, and its gigantic customer base uses it for everything from savings accounts to loans and more. However, a few years bank the bank came under fire for perpetuating a conspiracy all its own -- more and more customers found they had multiple accounts and lines of credit opened without their consent, and further investigation found that was just the beginning of the problem. Tune in to learn more about this real-life banking conspiracy, how it was discovered and the consequences (or lack thereof).
When Adam McKay decided to make a movie based on The Big Short, he was mainly known for his comedies. But he managed to get a bevy of star actors — among them Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Steve Carell and Margot Robbie — to sign on and bring the intensity and arcane financial jargon of Wall Street to life. Michael Lewis sits down with McKay a decade after he made the Oscar-winning movie version of The Big Short to learn about the challenges of getting the film made — and why he’s still making movies about societal collapse.
Contemporary women are primal-screaming and hitting rage rooms, but are these really the solutions to our personal and political anger? On this episode of How To!, Courtney Martin talks with Soraya Chemaly, journalist and author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, about her own recent upsurge of anger. Soraya explains how to identify, understand, and harness what’s bottled up inside you—and use it for change.
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The show is produced by Rosemary Belson, with Sophie Summergrad. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob and our supervising producer is Joel Meyer.
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The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (U Minnesota Press, 2025) delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. It follows the social lives of projects throughout their production cycles, from planning and editing to screening, broadcasting, and after-images. Across its narrative sweep, this ethnography engages the film career of Kukatja elder Mark Moora to demonstrate the impact of filmmaking on how Aboriginal futures are collectively imagined and called forth.
William Lempert highlights a series of awakenings through which Moora ultimately came to view cinema as a process for catalyzing his family’s return to their home country of Mangkayi. This biographical media journey paints an intimate portrait of the inspiring possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states. Lempert traces how Moora’s life and films convey a multiplicity of Aboriginal experiences across time and space, from colonial contact to contemporary life in communities like Balgo, including the continued governmental attempts to undermine them.
Amid ongoing negotiations to establish the first treaties between Indigenous nations and Australian states, Dreaming Down the Track illustrates what is at stake in how Aboriginal–State relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Lempert stays true to Moora’s insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.
William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. His writing has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Reighan Gillamis Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
