The Gray Area with Sean Illing

The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.

https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast

Eine durchschnittliche Folge dieses Podcasts dauert 1h6m. Bisher sind 657 Folge(n) erschienen. Dieser Podcast erscheint alle 4 Tage.

Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 32 days 2 hours 54 minutes

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Introducing: The Impact, with the curious case of the $629 Band-Aid


This is a bonus episode that I'm really excited about. It's Vox's new show, The Impact, hosted by Sarah Kliff.  So often in Washington, the story stops when Congress passes a law. Reporters move on to the next legislative or political battle. But on The Impact, that is where the stories begin. The Impact looks at what happens when laws and policies wind their way out into the real world where all of us live...


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 October 19, 2017  26m
 
 

episode 96: What happens when human beings take control of their own evolution?


Over the past decade, scientists have developed what was once just the subject of dystopian fiction: gene editing technology. It's known as CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, was a key member of the research group that developed the technology. She's also the co-author of the recent book A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution...


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 October 16, 2017  1h7m
 
 

episode 95: Ta-Nehisi Coates is not here to comfort you


“It’s important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power. Coates’s view of his career flows from his view of human events: contingent, unguided, and devoid of higher morality or cosmic justice. He is not here to comfort you. He is not here to comfort himself...


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 October 9, 2017  1h13m
 
 

episode 94: How the Republican Party created Donald Trump


Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have studied American politics for more than three decades. They are the town’s go-to experts on the workings of Congress...


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 October 2, 2017  1h51m
 
 

episode 93: Reihan Salam wants to remake the Republican Party -- again


In 2008, Reihan Salam co-wrote Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream with his frequent collaborator Ross Douthat.  After nearly eight years of President Bush, Salam wanted to remake the Republican Party to appeal to the working-class voters it needed...


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 September 25, 2017  1h21m
 
 

episode 92: David Remnick on journalism in the Trump era and why he hires obsessives


For the past 19 years, David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker, perhaps the greatest magazine in the English language. Under his leadership, the New Yorker has received 149 nominations for National Magazine Awards and won 37. It’s also, perhaps more impressively, been consistently profitable in an era where many august journalism organizations have seen their business models collapse. And Remnick keeps writing...


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 September 19, 2017  1h28m
 
 

episode 91: What Hillary Clinton really thinks


On page 239 of What Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals that she almost ran a very different campaign in 2016. Before announcing for president, she read Peter Barnes’s book With Liberty and Dividends for All, and became fascinated by the idea of using revenue from shared natural resources, like fossil fuel extraction and public airwaves, alongside revenue from taxing public harms, like carbon emissions and risky financial practices, to give every American “a modest basic income...


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 September 12, 2017  1h0m
 
 

episode 90: Dan Rather thought he'd seen it all. But then came President Trump.


Dan Rather has covered the most momentous events of the modern era. He was in Dallas, Texas, during President Kennedy's assassination. He was in Vietnam, embedded with US troops, in 1965 and 1966. He reported on Watergate, stood at the Berlin Wall as it fell, and interviewed young Chinese dissidents as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. Rather has seen it all...


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 September 5, 2017  1h11m
 
 

episode 89: From 4Chan to Charlottesville: where the alt-right came from, and where it's going


Angela Nagle spent the better part of the past decade in the darkest corners of the internet, learning how online subcultures emerge and thrive on forums like 4chan and Tumblr. The result is her fantastic new book, Kill All the Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, a comprehensive exploration of the origins of our current political moment...


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 August 29, 2017  1h29m
 
 

episode 88: Why prosecutors, not cops, are the keys to criminal justice reform


Angela J. Davis is the former director of the DC public defender service, a professor of law at American University, and editor of a remarkable new book titled Policing the Black Man, which pulls together deeply researched essays on virtually every aspect of how black men and black boys interact with the criminal justice system. It is a revelatory, comprehensive tour of the subject that’s often in the news but rarely treated in a thorough way...


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 August 22, 2017  1h19m