The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Krista Tippett is the host of the award-winning radio show and podcast On Being. In 2014, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. For good reason. She's created, over decades, something rare in American life: spaces where people of different faiths, disciplines, and ideologies discuss divisive questions without becoming more divided, without losing sight of each other's humanity...

Oftentimes it’s easy for me to describe these conversations. This one is on Trump and Russia. That one is on health care. But not this time. I want you to listen to this conversation, because Jaron Lanier is brilliant and his mind is unusual and spending some time within it is a privilege. But I don’t know how to describe it to you. It begins with the story of Lanier tripsitting Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, when he was dying from cancer and decided to try LSD, and it goes from there...

What really happened between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? The investigation into that question has rocked American politics. The FBI director was fired over it. The attorney general might get fired over it. The president’s former campaign manager and his original national security adviser were charged with crimes as part of it. The president himself might ultimately be charged with obstruction of justice for his response to it...

Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality was persistently skewed. Today, Favreau is changing the media from the inside. He’s a co-host on Pod Save America, and co-founder of Crooked Media, both of which have seen tremendous growth in 2017...

“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by two points. We ended up winning by 1.8.” This, Trippi says, was the reality of the Alabama Senate election. It was a dead heat when it started. It was a dead heat on the day it ended. And a lot of what the media thinks they know about it is wrong...

The most important story in the world right now is how real the chance of war with North Korea is — and how cataclysmic such a war would be. Part of the reason the risk of war is so real is that our understanding of North Korea is so sparse. "The Hermit Kingdom" is a world unto itself; a land of deprivation, of lunacy, of tyranny, of delusion. We have no diplomatic relations, no trade, no cross-cultural exchanges...

On October 24, 2016, in the final days of the presidential election, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, tweeted, "When this election is finally over, I'm planning to celebrate with an orgy of...serious policy discussion.”  Then, of course, Donald Trump won the election, and serious policy discussion took a backseat to alternative facts, at least for awhile. But now it’s time! In this podcast, Krugman and I cover a lot of ground...

I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal or if the president falls into a coma...

I wanted to take a post-Thanksgiving break from politics and current events this week to talk to Robert Wright. He's written some of the best books on religion and evolutionary psychology, including Non-Zero and The Evolution of God. His latest book is Why Buddhism is True, and it’s fantastic. I’m interested in mindfulness, and so have read a lot of books on the subject. This isn’t like those. It’s a not a how-to guide, or an argument for meditation’s health benefits...

We’re living through an upheaval. The #MeToo moment has engulfed some of the most powerful men in politics, entertainment, and media. It has also forced a national reckoning with the reality of America’s sexual and workplace cultures — how often they permitted harassment and assault to flourish, how routinely they protected perpetrators and blamed victims...