The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Episodes
Elizabeth Kolbert: We have locked in centuries of climate change
10 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Elizabeth Kolbert covers climate change for the New Yorker. She's the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. And she recently wrote a ...
Sarah Kliff and Ezra Interview Obama About Obamacare
06 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Two weeks before he leaves office, President Obama sits down for a lengthy conversation about the lessons of the Affordable Care Act and the law's unc...
You Ask, Ezra Answers
03 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
At long last, here’s the Ask Ezra Anything episode. You sent in great questions, and I answered as many as I could. To keep me honest — and to mak...
Evelyn Farkas explains the crisis in Syria and the threat of Russia
27 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
From 2012 to 2015, Evelyn Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, where she was responsible for polic...
Tim Wu's interesting, unusual, fascinating life
20 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Columbia law professor Tim Wu makes me feel boring and underaccomplished. He’s been a Supreme Court clerk, a Silicon Valley startup employee, a best...
Ta-Nehisi Coates: "There’s not gonna be a happy ending to this story"
14 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author at the Atlantic. His book, Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award, and was spoofed on SNL. He's writing t...
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on management, rationalism, and the enlightenment
06 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Patrick Collison is the 28-year-old CEO of Stripe, the online payments company that was just valued at $9 billion.Haven't heard of Stripe? You've prob...
Award-winning chef José Andrés on cooking, creativity, and learning from the best
29 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
José Andrés isn't just a chef. He's a force. All that talk of how DC is now a hot dining scene? Andrés deserves more than a bit of the credit. He's...
Heather McGhee returns to talk Trump, race, and empathy
22 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There are few episodes of this show that people loved as much as my conversation with Heather McGhee, president of the think tank Demos. Our first dis...
Ron Brownstein: Clinton didn’t lose because of the white working class
15 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Why did Donald Trump win it? And why was the polling so completely wrong?No one digs deeper into the demogr...
David Frum on the 2016 election, and the long decline of the GOP
06 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
We’re bringing the Ezra Klein Show to you a little early this week because, well, there's an election coming in a few days. And we wanted to talk ab...
Deborah Tannen on gendered speech, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and you
01 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
To understand the 2012 election, you had to ask a political scientist. To understand the 2016 election, you need to call a linguist.At least, I did. D...
Joseph Stiglitz on broken markets, bad trade deals, and basic incomes
25 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This week’s guest is a Nobel Prize winner. We like to sprinkle those in every so often. Joseph Stiglitz revolutionized how economists understood ma...
Let's talk about Hillary Clinton's policy ideas, with Jonathan Cohn
18 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The overwhelming focus of this election has been Donald Trump — the things he does, says, tweets. But the next president is likely to be Hillary Cli...
Francis Fukuyama on whether America's democracy is decaying
11 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, a public intellectual, and progenitor of the famed "End of History" thesis. But his recent work is his most...
Tyler Cowen interviews Ezra Klein about politics, media, and more
06 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A number of you have asked that we turn the tables and have someone interview me for the show. So when Tyler Cowen — economist at George Mason Unive...
The best conversation I’ve had about the election, with Molly Ball
04 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This election season has left pretty much everything I thought I knew about politics in doubt. Both parties nominated unpopular candidates, even when ...
HHS Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on running Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid
27 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This week, I've turned over the mic to The Weeds' Sarah Kliff. She went to Capitol Hill to interview HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell about all things hea...
Dr. Leana Wen on why the opposite of poverty is health
20 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There are a couple of ideas that drive how I see policy and politics. One of them is that most of what drives health outcomes has nothing to do with w...
Arlie Hochschild on how America feels to Trump supporters
13 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
I’ve been reading sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s writing for about a decade now. Her immersive projects have revolutionized how we understand labo...
Stewart Butterfield on creating Slack, learning from games, and finding your online identity
06 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
W. Kamau Bell on the lessons of parenthood, Twitter, and fame
30 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 Perio...
Malcolm Gladwell on the danger of joining consensus opinions
23 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Malcolm Gladwell needs no introduction (though if you didn't know the famed author has launched a podcast, you should — it's called Revisionist Hist...
Grant Gordon on studying the world's worst conflicts
16 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Grant Gordon is a political scientist and policymaker who specializes in humanitarian intervention. He’s a fellow at the Stanford Center on Internat...
Melissa Bell on starting Vox, managing media, and connecting newsrooms
09 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Atul Gawande on surgery, writing, Obamacare, and indie music
02 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show
26 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 u...
Conservative intellectual Yuval Levin on how the Republican Party lost its way
19 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Yuval Levin has been called "the most influential conservative intellectual of the Obama era," and the moniker fits. As editor of National Affairs —...
Hillary Clinton. Yes, that Hillary Clinton.
12 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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 abou...
Patrick Brown on plant-meat that bleeds and the science of flavor
05 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
Heather McGhee on what Democrats get wrong about racism
28 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Heather McGhee is the president of the think tank Demos, and one of the most interesting thinkers today on the intersection of racism and economic ine...
Jesse Eisenberg on Jewish humor, writing lessons, and interrogating strangers
21 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
My guest on this episode is Jesse Eisenberg — who you may know as Lex Luthor in Batman V. Superman, Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, or Daniel...
Jessica Valenti on honesty, internet trolls, and modern feminism
14 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jessica Valenti is the founder of Feministing, a columnist at the Guardian, and the author of the new book "Sex Object." She's also a friend from the ...
Moby on how cheap rent leads to great art
07 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Moby's new memoir, Porcelain, is a great read for policy wonks. Really.It's less a history of music than a history of New York in the 80s and 90s, an...
Secretary of Labor (and maybe VP?) Tom Perez
31 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Perez is President Obama's Secretary of Labor. He is also, according to the New York Times, on Hillary Clinton's shortlist for the vice presidency...
Andrew Sullivan on quitting blogging, fearing political correctness, and Donald Trump
24 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, Andrew Sullivan quit blogging — the medium he had done so much to create. And you know what? He was pretty damn happy about it. He was ta...
Alice Rivlin, queen of Washington's budget wonks
17 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There is no budget wonk in Washington with a resume as thick as Alice Rivlin's. She was the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office. She ...
Arianna Huffington on sleep, death, and social media
10 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Arianna Huffington is, of course, the editor and namesake of the Huffington Post, one of the true juggernauts of the new media world. But her path to ...
Robert Reich on supporting Bernie Sanders, dating Hillary Clinton, and fighting inequality
03 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
You could fill a podcast just reciting Robert Reich's biography. Rhodes Scholar. Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork. Director of policy p...
Bruce Friedrich on how technology will reduce animal suffering
26 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When I first met Bruce Friedrich, he was running PETA's awareness campaigns. Yeah, those campaigns — the ones where naked people stuffed themselves ...
Ben Thompson on how to make it in media in 2016
19 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Note: If you saw this twice, this is a reissue of a previous episode, with corrected audio.Since starting his site Stratechery in 2013, Ben Thompson h...
Ben Thompson on how the media business is changing
19 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Note: There was a technical issue with the first upload of this show, please re-download if you got to it early.Since starting his site Stratechery in...
Grover Norquist explains what it takes to change American politics
12 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This is an interview you all have been asking for since day one. Grover Norquist is the head of Americans for Tax Reform, the creator of the no-new-t...
Neera Tanden on what it's like to work for Hillary Clinton
05 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Neera Tanden is CEO of the Center for American Progress — perhaps the most influential left-leaning think tank in Washington. Before that, though, s...
David Chang, head of the Momofuku empire
29 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
David Chang has driven many of the most important food trends of the last decade. His Momofuku empire has put pork belly on your plate, ramen on your ...
Cory Booker on the spiritual dimension of politics
22 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Cory Booker is a United States senator from New Jersey, the only vegan in Congress, and the author of the new book "United: Thoughts on Finding Common...
Michael Needham on the Republican Party's crack-up
15 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Want to understand what's happened to the Republican Party? Then listen to this discussion.Michael Needham is the CEO of Heritage Action for America, ...
Jim Yong Kim on revolutionizing how we treat the world's poor
08 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
This was an amazing interview.Jim Yong Kim is the president of the World Bank — the massive, multilateral institution dedicated to eradicating pover...
Theda Skocpol on how political scientists think differently about politics
01 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Political science is a misunderstood discipline. It's often laughed off by people who think it's ridiculous that something as human and contingent and...
Bill Gates on stopping climate change, building robots, and the best books he's read
23 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Bill Gates is one of those people for whom "needs no introduction" is actually true. The polymathic Microsoft founder now leads the world's largest an...
How lobbying works, with super-lobbyist Tony Podesta
16 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When the New York Times profiled Tony Podesta, the headline was simply: "Tony Podesta, superlobbyist." Podesta is head of the Podesta group, and consi...
Rachel Maddow on skinhead rallies, AIDS activism, and why she doesn't read op-eds
09 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Maddow is, of course, the host of MSNBC's top-rated, Emmy-award winning primetime news show and the bestselling author of "Drift: The Unmooring...