The Gray Area with Sean Illing

You have to forgive people who wrong you…right? The world is filled with injustice and wrongdoing, and to live in the world — to not be consumed by anger — forgiveness is necessary. At least that’s what we’re told over...

Sean’s guest today is Daniel Kolitz, author of a remarkable Harper’s story on “gooning.” They talk about this emerging subculture and how it reflects back on the larger world, from the economics of attention to the rise...

We’ve never had more wealth, more data, or more ways to be entertained. So why doesn’t it feel like progress? Sean’s guest today is Brad DeLong, an economic historian at UC Berkeley and author of Slouching Towards...

We all know what awkwardness feels like. It's that jolt of discomfort when the social script breaks down, and no one knows what to do next. But what if awkwardness isn’t a flaw to fix but a window into how we live...

We use “Orwellian” to describe everything from campus dust-ups to authoritarian crackdowns. But what did George Orwell actually stand for, what did he get wrong, and what can we learn from him about our age of...

We all think of ourselves as authors of our lives. The difference between our happy ending and someone else’s tragic one are the choices we each make. But what if none of that’s true? Sean’s guest today is Robert...

The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling faster than anyone predicted...

Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads. Services that used...

Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about how democracies unravel...

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true or not — are what...

This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and what happens when...

Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect. That’s because, for the...

Free speech is often treated as a timeless and sacred right. But what if it’s more myth than reality? This week, Sean is joined by historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? They trace the history of free...

How much money is too much? In today’s episode, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns tells Sean that we need to cap the amount of wealth a person can accumulate. They talk about how extreme inequality affects democracy...

America has a hard time building stuff. Roads. Trains. Bridges. Housing. Everything takes seemingly forever. Meanwhile, China seems to have no trouble at all: high-speed rails, solar panels, electric cars, bridges...

A loose movement of radical intellectuals is driving American politics. They’re called the “New Right,” and they share a basic hostility to American liberal democracy, a real desire to fundamentally overhaul it, and...

Almost every tech platform is designed to grab and hold your attention, to keep you clicking, scrolling, and buying for as long as possible. Sports gambling has become one of the clearest examples of this. The industry...

The internet was supposed to set us free. But somewhere along the way, it became a tool for surveillance, extraction, and control. What happened? And is there still time to reclaim the weird, untapped potential of the...

What comes after the human? We’re living through multiple crises — ecological, technological, political. But beneath all of that is something even deeper: a crisis of the self. Who are we, really? How did we come to see...

American higher education is under attack. Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down...

We live in a culture obsessed with hope. We are trained to believe that being hopeful is the key to success. Stay positive. The sun will come out tomorrow. Keep the faith. But maintaining that kind of blind hope is...

What’s the point of college if no one’s actually doing the work? It’s not a rhetorical question. In the age of AI, it's incredibly easy for students to offload their assignments. AI tools can write essays, make study...

We’re nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, and a lot of us are still trying to figure out what that actually means. Not just politically. But culturally. What kind of country are we living in?...

For decades, the American right has stayed on brand: the economy. Low taxes. Free markets. Deregulation. Those have been the buzzwords for more than half a century. But that doctrine is now being challenged by other...

Sebastian Junger came as close as you possibly can to dying. While his doctors struggled to revive him, the veteran reporter and avowed rationalist experienced things that shocked and shook him, leaving him with...