Is starting a family becoming impossible?
Why does it feel so hard to start a family today? How much of that is truly a personal choice? In this episode of The Gray Area, guest host...
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The Ezra Klein Show
Ezra Klein gives you a chance to get inside the heads of the newsmakers and power players in politics and media. These are extended conversations with policymakers, writers, technologists, a...
Episodes
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The millennial midlife crisis
Is "adulthood" a moving target? For millennials, hitting the milestones of the past — homeownership, secure careers, and financial independe...
How to be less neurotic
If you could change anything about your personality, anything at all, what would it be? And why would you want to change it? Writer Olga Kha...
Your body wasn’t built for a desk
We’ve all heard that "sitting is the new smoking," but the research behind that phrase goes much deeper. How bad is sitting for you really?...
Why we want to believe in aliens
Are we truly alone in the universe? Despite the lack of hard evidence, belief in aliens and UFOs, officially known as Unidentified Anomalous...
Straight dating isn’t broken
Have you noticed the bad vibes around dating lately? Whether you’re swiping on apps or scrolling through social media, it’s easy to feel lik...
Kidneys for sale
Is it ever okay to put a price on a kidney? Why is it illegal to sell an organ, but perfectly legal to sell blood plasma? This episode explo...
How memory changes you
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....
Freud was right about one thing
Sigmund Freud is probably the most famous psychoanalyst. Yet many of his theories have been critiqued or discredited. So is there anything w...
Why straight dating feels bleak
The internet is rife with chatter about “heteropessimism,” the feeling that gender relations are broken and heterosexual relationships are d...
We’re postliterate
What happens when we read less? What does that do to our ability to understand complex ideas, or even think for ourselves?In today’s episode...
What does a parent owe their child?
The Gray Area is taking a short break this week — but we’ve got something special for you. We’re dropping an episode from one of our favorit...
The vanishing pleasures of daily life
Sean talks with writer and philosopher Ian Bogost about his new book The Small Stuff. They discuss what modern life has lost in its pursuit...
How Google broke the internet
The internet is changing. For years our primary gateway to the internet has been search engines: we ask a question, a list of websites pops...
The illusion of the ‘self’
Sean Illing talks with neuroscientist Gregory Berns, author of The Self Delusion. Berns claims that the idea of a unified, persistent self i...
How MAGA is turning on itself
For years, right-wing influencers and politicians have pushed the conservative movement to have more controversial, anti-establishment views...
The global baby bust
Birth rates are dropping and global population growth is slowing. Why? We’re heard all the different speculation: It’s the economy. It’s hou...
Why public opinion turned on AI
AI was supposed to make our lives better. Instead, it’s made many of us scared and angry. Communities are protesting data centers across the...
A skeptic considers the case for God
Sean talks with writer Liz Bruenig about faith, doubt, and the experience of believing in God in a modern, skeptical age. They discuss relig...
The “Godzilla El Niño” is coming
Sean talks with journalist David Wallace-Wells about a looming climate event that could make 2027 one of the hottest years ever recorded. Th...