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bySlate Podcasts
CommentaryNewsPolitics
After the Trump administration launched a massive Immigrations and Customs Enforcement operation in Minnesota, protesters gathered to defend immigrant neighbors. Renee Nicole Good, a mother of a six year old, showed up with her wife and dog to film altercations between officers and community members. What happened next changed everything. Guest: Jon Collins, senior reporter on the Minnesota Public Radio News race, class and communities team. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at th...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Political Gabfest - Purposely Negative
This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and guest host Juliette Kayyem discuss what we learn from Trump's escalating battle with the press and its track record in the courts, the likely outcomes of this week's Trump-Xi summit with former New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief and host of Face-Off: the US vs. China, Jane Perlez, and the role of voter trust as the midterm elections approach.Here are this week’s chatters: Emily: Kohelet Rabbah 7:1, The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022John: History Channel: Grant; John Anderson for The Wall Street Jo...
Published: Sep 24, 2026Duration: 1h 0m 22s
What Next - Off the Record: Draining the Press Pool
Donald Trump announced that he was banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW at kind of a weird time—it’s not like he thought they were doing a great job last year or in his first term or...ever. But with the announcement of something called “Trump TV,” suddenly it all makes sense: it could just be a First Amendment-violating exercise in branding. Guest: Oliver Darcy, founder and lead author of Status News.This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusiv...
Published: Sep 24, 2026Duration: 7m 22s
What Next - Is a Tejano Star's Next Stop Congress?
Donald Trump’s in-roads with Latino voters was one of the surprises of his 2024 victory, carrying places like southern Texas’s 15th district by 18 points. But singer-turned-congressional candidate Bobby Pulido thinks those gains are temporary, and that Democrats have a chance, with sensible policies, to take the district and Congress.Guest: Bobby Pulido, congressional candidate for Texas’s 15th district, Tejano singer-songwriter. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicki...
Published: Sep 24, 2026Duration: 37m 12s
What Next - The Fascist Threat Brewing in…Kansas?
Trans rights have become something that’s argued about in the abstract—are Democrats too far out on a limb defending them? Did they cost the Democrats 2024? Should they be more moderate in 2026? But the real-world effects of changing laws are anything but abstract, affecting the basics of public life like your ID and whether you can use the bathroom.Guest: M Gessen, opinion columnist for the New York Times.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slat...
Published: Sep 23, 2026Duration: 29m 30s
What Next - The Data Center Will Not Hold
Donald Trump owes his political career to saying what no other politician would. But now that he’s standing alone in full-throated support of data centers and artificial intelligence, he looks less like a populist, and more like a liability for Republicans trying to win elections.Guests: Jim Newell, Slate senior politics writer and author of The Surge.Patrick Reis, Slate politics editor.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe tod...
Published: Sep 22, 2026Duration: 31m 56s
What Next - Why is Everyone Fighting Over... Macklemore?
What it means that Macklemore decided he’d rather keep speaking out for Palestine than continue opening for Ed Sheeran.Guest: Soraya Nadia McDonald, cultural critic and writer. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme and Patrick...
Published: Sep 21, 2026Duration: 30m 15s
Slate Money - Avoiding the A.I. Apocalypse
This week: Everyone is talking about A.I. safety as OpenAI shares more alarming security breaches. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck examine the complicated reality of trying to slow down the A.I. frontier. Then, the hosts discuss Fed chair Kevin Warsh’s unexpected vote to raise rates—in defiance of Donald Trump. And finally, with the SEC opening the door to tokenized equities, they explain what it means for stocks to be traded like crypto—and why AMC is beefing with Robinhood over it. In the Slate Plus episode: Toilets, Toilets EverywhereM...
Published: Sep 19, 2026Duration: 52m 2s
Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads | The Tax Nobody Talks About: Your Time
David Plotz talks with journalist Annie Lowrey about her new book The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It, an investigation into the hours Americans lose to broken bureaucracy, from 12-hour tax filings to multiyear waits for housing vouchers and building permits. Lowrey traces the waste to what she calls the “ordeal mechanism,” the deliberate friction built into some programs to weed out the “undeserving,” alongside outdated technology like the COBOL code still running state unemployment systems. She and Plotz discuss why the burden falls hardest on poor people and immigrants, why Social Security r...
Published: Sep 19, 2026Duration: 33m 50s
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - One Ballot After Another
You’ve seen the headlines about the lists, the claims, the THREE times this same executive order about voting by mail has gone to the Supreme Court. But is Trump’s interference with mail-in voting settled—at least with respect to the midterms? Our go-to election law expert, Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law, joins Dahlia to unpack what just happened and how this postal chaos alters voters’ sense of election security. We’re calling this discussion “information” and not “catastrophizing.” Hasen has this advice for listeners: get out there and vote in-person. Next, Sam Sankar of the enviro...
Published: Sep 19, 2026Duration: 1h 6m 24s
What Next - Off-the-Record: Weddings by Kremlev
Don Trump Jr.’s wedding had everything: a private island, fireworks, a Funfetti cake airlifted in from Florida—everything but the groom’s dad. But that’s the advantage of being rich, you can pay for the wedding of your drea—oh wait, one of Putin’s buddies was footing the bill. Ah well, nevertheless…This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive episodes of What Next —you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe direc...
Published: Sep 18, 2026Duration: 3m 47s
What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - But HOW Might A.I. Kill Us All?
Why did the “Hugging Face Incident” scare A.I. researchers so much? And if they are so confident artificial intelligence needs to be slowed down, why aren’t they slowing it down?Guest: Nate Soares, President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, co-author of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slat...
Published: Sep 18, 2026Duration: 30m 4s
Political Gabfest - Kremlin Wedding Present
This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss whether this week's Supreme Court intervention rejecting Trump's mail-in ballot restrictions will prevent midterm chaos, explore the fast-evolving dynamics of public and political anxieties about AI, and dissect remarkable new reporting from ProPublica exposing the Putin-adjacent Russian oligarch who paid for much of Donald Trump Jr.'s private island wedding.Here are this week’s chatters: Emily: New podcast Examined: The Backfire Effect, by Josie Duffy Rice; Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People by Nikolas Bowie and Dap...
Published: Sep 17, 2026Duration: 1h 3m 57s
What Next - Who's Interfering in the Election Now
Those concerned that the Trump administration will interfere with the upcoming midterm elections can breathe a little easier this week, as the Supreme Court threw out their plan to have the Post Office muck up mail-in voting. But are we out of the woods yet?Guest: Ari Berman, Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show...
Published: Sep 17, 2026Duration: 36m 19s
What Next - JD Vance Enters the Mommy Wars
Childcare is expensive and who wouldn’t want to spend more time with their kids? Giving parents money to stay home, on its face, would seem to make sense. But a proposal from the Trump administration isn’t enough to help most stay-at-home parents—and it comes with some glaring downsides.Guests:Dr. Jessica Calarco, Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of four books including Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.Lauren Brody, founder of The Fifth Trimester movement, advocate with Chamber of Mothers...
Published: Sep 16, 2026Duration: 26m 7s
Slate Money - Money Talks: The Zero-sum Mistake
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Published: Sep 15, 2026Duration: 33m 49s
What Next - Is Trump Losing His Touch?
The GOP just held a midterm convention that was centered around the one thing their base seems to really like: Donald Trump. The only problem is that pretty much everyone outside the GOP is blaming Trump for rising inflation, a foreign war, and a stagnating economy—and, oh yeah, Trump won’t be on the ballot. Guest: Greg Sargent, host of “The Daily Blast” podcast and a staff writer at The New Republic. Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and...
Published: Sep 15, 2026Duration: 30m 2s
What Next - How Ivanka Trump Sparked a Revolution in Albania
There are thousands of people protesting the Trump family every day—but they aren’t Americans, and they aren’t protesting Donald.Guest: Imogen West-Knights, Slate contributing writer based in London.Want more What Next? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Madeline T...
Published: Sep 14, 2026Duration: 33m 48s
Slate Money - The Private Equity Confidence Game
This week: The new book Money to Burn goes deep on private-equity behemoth Apollo Global Management and its billionaire cofounder and former CEO, Leon Black. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers, and Emily Peck are joined by author William D. Cohan to talk about his reporting on Black’s investment empire and what it means for Wall Street to be dominated by private equity. They also get into Black’s tragic origin story, messy personal scandals, and strange friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.In the Slate Plus episode: Your $5K Check’s in the MailWant to hea...
Published: Sep 12, 2026Duration: 50m 1s
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Capitulation Nation
Capitulation under Trump 2.0 has been devastating to the rule of law. To review a couple of lowlights: One of the nation’s leading lawyers, Brad Karp, cut a deal with Donald Trump in the first days of the bully-in-chief’s second administration that turned out to constitute five flabby bullet points on an unsigned piece of paper. Chief Justice John Roberts is pretending the president is a generic Republican. Dahlia Lithwick talks to Jacob Weisberg about his new book, Profiles in Cowardice, which examines the flawed individuals leading institutions that were meant to hold the line in Trump...
Published: Sep 12, 2026Duration: 54m 58s
What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - A.I-pocalypse Now?
After OpenAI agents hacked a rival company this summer, the word from Silicon Valley was “That’s it! They’re almost ready to kill us all!” But…are they? Really?Guest: Paul Ford, co-founder of the AI start-up Aboard, technology writer. Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you lis...
Published: Sep 11, 2026Duration: 27m 41s