Is it bad to want to be rich?
Is wanting to be rich selfish? Does making money require exploiting other people? Or can the pursuit of wealth actually benefit society? In...
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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
20 of 803 episodes
Why does killing a bug feel wrong?
The Gray Area is taking a break today — but we’ve got something special for you. We’re dropping an episode from one of our favorite podcasts...
How trauma became a status symbol
We were told that airing our personal trauma in public would set us free. Instead, we got “the trauma script,” celebrity branding, and perfo...
Inside the world of cash advance apps
In today's episode, Vox senior reporter and producer Miles Bryan talks with writer Daniel Kolitz about his piece for The Baffler, "Paid Phon...
This is how you rule the world
What should a college teach? How to think? How to find a career? How to be a good citizen? What about how to acquire money, influence, and p...
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...
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...