The Gray Area with Sean Illing

If you came by the Vox office, you would find it oddly quiet. That's not because we don't like each other, or because we're not social, or because we don't have anything to say. It's because almost all our communication happens silently, digitally, in Slack.Slack is Stewart Butterfield's creation, and it's the fastest-growing piece on enterprise software in history. But here's the kicker: he didn't mean to create it, just like he didn't mean to create Flickr before it...

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian and a writer. But you probably know him from one of his podcasts(Denzel Washington Is The Greatest Actor Of All Time Period and Politically Re-Active) or his CNN show The United Shades of America.In this conversation, Bell and I go wide...

Malcolm Gladwell needs no introduction (though if you didn't know the famed author has launched a podcast, you should — it's called Revisionist History, and it's great.).Gladwell's work has become so iconic, so known, that it's become easy to take it for granted...

Grant Gordon is a political scientist and policymaker who specializes in humanitarian intervention. He’s a fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, and has worked on humanitarian and development policy for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the UN Office of Humanitarian Coordination, the UN Refugee Agency, as well as the Rwandan Government, Open Society Justice Initiative and other organizations...

I first started working with Melissa Bell at the Washington Post. I was trying to launch a new product — Wonkblog — and I needed some design work done. Melissa wasn't a designer. She wasn't a coder. She didn't manage designers or coders. She was, rather, a blogger, like me. But somehow, no one would meet with me to talk Wonkblog unless Melissa was also in the room.It was my first exposure to Melissa's unusual talent for finding and connecting the different parts of a modern newsroom...

I've wanted to do this interview for a long, long time.Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He's a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He's a New Yorker writer...

This is a serious conversation with a very funny man.Trevor Noah is the host of Comedy Central's the Daily Show. He's also a stand-up comic who grew up in apartheid South Africa, the son of a black mother and a white father. That was illegal in apartheid-era South Africa, so Noah grew up hiding his real parentage, only seeing his father in carefully controlled circumstances. Somehow, he managed to turn this into a very funny, very incisive stand-up act...

Yuval Levin has been called "the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era," and the moniker fits. As editor of National Affairs — in my opinion, the best policy journal going on the right — he's been at the head of the "reformicon" movement, and his work has had a heavy influence on top Republicans like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio...

My interview this week is with Hillary Clinton. You may have heard of her.I won't bore you with Clinton's bio. Instead, I want to say a few words about what this interview is, as it's a bit different than the EK Show's normal fare (though I do ask her for book recommendations!).I got about 40 minutes with Hillary Clinton...

Not long ago, I had the chance to eat a burger from a company called Impossible Foods. The burger was delicious. It was juicy, savory, and bloody. Oh, and it was made from plants.Yes, they've created a veggie burger that bleeds. Patrick Brown is the CEO and Founder of Impossible Foods. His company is the Tesla of plant-based meat: they are trying to create a burger that carnivores will prefer to the thing cut from the side of the cow...