OA1177 - We are excited to welcome former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin for the first half of this unique two-part interview! Chesa is a very notable representative of the “progressive prosecutor” movement. His time as SF DA shows both the promise of this movement, and the limitations. But before we dig into all that, we begin with Chesa’s unique background as the child of incarcerated parents and how this experience inspired him to dedicate his life to bringing a new approach to the criminal legal system.
A.M. Edition for July 29. At least sixteen children under five have died of hunger-related causes since mid-July, according to the UN-supported group the IPC. WSJ correspondent Margherita Stancati says it’s the most dire assessment of conditions in Gaza since the war began. Plus, in Midtown New York a lone gunman has killed four people including a police officer and a Blackstone executive. And, we look at how the Trump administration is looking to borrow 1 trillion dollars with a deluge of new government debt. Azhar Sukri hosts.
In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey set out from England to sail around the world. Partway through the voyage, a whale knocked a hole in their boat, leaving the couple stranded at sea. A Marriage at Sea, a new book by Sophie Elmhirst, chronicles how the Baileys struggled to survive for months as they awaited rescue. In today's episode, the author speaks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about the Baileys' story.
To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday
By almost all accounts, the historic trade deal that was reached between the United States and the 27 nations of the European Union is far better for the United States than it is for Europe.
Jeanna Smialek, the Brussels bureau chief for The Times, explains why the European Union gave in to President Trump and the blowback that’s causing.
Guest: Jeanna Smialek, the Brussels bureau chief for The New York Times.
The framework agreement is not likely to do much for economic growth on either side. But it avoids new fissures on other foreign policy issues, particularly the war in Ukraine.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Photo: Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
“It’s so insidious, people don’t realize it,” Barbara Kingsolver told me, describing the prejudice against “country people.” Kingsolver is one of those “country people,” as well as a literary legend in her own time, who set out to write the “great Appalachian novel.” And I think she did.
“Demon Copperhead” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and we taped this conversation later that year. And I wanted to re-air it because the divide between rural and urban America remains just as strong today, and as relevant to our politics. And Kingsolver might be the country’s sharpest and most poignant observer of it.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, with Aman Sahota.
Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Here’s one fun question to ask at a dinner party: What is your favorite conspiracy theory?
There’s the idea that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy. The moon landing was fake, and 9/11 was an inside job. Covid was designed by the Gates Foundation to control the world—and the Covid vaccine had a microchip. There’s the deep state. Chemtrails. QAnon. The Illuminati. Reptilian overlords. Pizzagate—which says that high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizzeria.
That one, Pizzagate, is rivaled only by the idea that there is a group of Satan-worshipping globalists and Hollywood celebrities who traffic children in order to harvest adrenochrome, a chemical which, in this scenario, is extracted from their blood. Why? It’s obvious: They inject it in order to stay young.
It’s easy to joke about these theories. It’s much harder to reckon with the fact that many Americans believe them sincerely—and their justification is grounded in the fact that some conspiracy theories turn out to not be theories, but fact.
The government was poisoning alcohol during Prohibition. The FBI was illegally spying on civil-rights activists like MLK. The U.S. government did let some few hundred black men with syphilis go untreated to study the effects. And Covid likely came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The question is how to tolerate and even encourage healthy speculation and investigation? How do we allow for skepticism of received wisdom, which may actually be wrong, without it leading to reptilian Jewish overlords?
In the past few weeks, the speculation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death is a perfect example of this conundrum. It’s a story filled with smoke and unanswered questions: How did Epstein get so rich in the first place? Was his wealth connected to his crimes? Was he acting alone? Was there a client list—and if so, who was on it? Why did he get such a sweetheart deal? And on and on.
And then things get more far-fetched: Was Epstein’s suicide faked? Who could have killed him? Was he connected to foreign intelligence? And my favorite: Was he running a Jewish cabal?
To help us understand why conspiracy theories are so compelling—and how we might better engage with those who believe them—is Ross Douthat.
Ross Douthat is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and host of theInteresting Times podcast. He has been covering conspiratorial thinking—how to understand it, and what to do about it—for years.
In 2020, he wrote: “It’s a mistake to believe most conspiracy theories, but it’s also a mistake to assume that they bear no relation to reality. Some are just insane emanations or deliberate misinformation. But others exaggerate and misread important trends rather than denying them, or offer implausible explanations for mysteries that nonetheless linger unexplained.” Which we thought perfectly encapsulated the conundrum of handling conspiracy theories today.
So today on Honestly, Bari asks Ross: What is the state of conspiracy theories in America? How do we dispel conspiracy theories that are clearly false—without relying on establishment sources the public no longer trusts? And what are the consequences when these theories go unchecked?
Go to groundnews.com/Honestly to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage plan and unlock world-wide perspectives on today’s biggest news stories.
Captain James Cook was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy whose three major voyages of exploration between 1768 and 1779 greatly expanded European knowledge of the Pacific region.
His detailed maps, scientific observations, and interactions with indigenous peoples left a profound impact on geography, ethnography, and natural history.
He left an indelible mark on the region, and in the end, it also killed him.
Learn more about Captain Cook, his voyages, and how his impact can still be felt today on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?
That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.
