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We’ve talked a lot on the program about the Trump administration’s wars on science and education and why they’re doing as part of a larger far-right attack on the achievements of modernity. This month, the president announced that a change to federal immunization guidance for infants to reduce the number of recommended shots. He cited no actual evidence, just his ludicrous belief that doctors were pumping infants with a liter of vaccine liquids. I wish I was joking. In addition to the harms to public health and science that Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Junio
American democracy has been widely seen as embattled for the last 10 years or so, but the factions seeking to undermine or replace it have been active for many decades. We’ve covered the political groups who have been at work in this regard here on Theory of Change, but it’s also the case that many business leaders have become increasingly radicalized to view democracy as a threat to business — even though the social democratic nations of Europe have combined vigorous capitalism with strong democracy for decades without either one destroying the other. Corporate interests have always sought in
As November draws nearer, Democrats’ electoral prospects are looking very similar to how they were in 2018 before the party swept to victory in many congressional and statewide seats. 2028 is much further away, of course, but there is a very real possibility that Democrats could gain trifecta control of the presidency, Senate, and House. If the recent past is any indicator though, in just two years’ time, voters will swing wildly in the opposite direction, handing control back to Republicans. American voters (and elsewhere) are clearly very dissatisfied with what political parties are offering
The life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein were so complex that 5 years after his death, there is much about him that remains yet unknown. The system of sexual violence and exploitation that he devised is as infamous as it is uncovered. The financial structures he set up for himself were so complex that it takes hours to list them all, and his political and business connections were so vast and mysterious that to describe them in detail makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist. But knowing and sharing the Epstein details is important because the late billionaire was part of a larger class of bus
Ben Goldberger is a psychotherapist and breathworker serving Chicaog and the surrounding suburbs since 2010. He supports people of all ages and backgrounds in healing and transforming the roots of depression, anxiety and other major life challenges. He specializes in trauma recovery, relationship repair, child development, addictions, journey integration, and spiritual development. He believes in the innate human capacity to heal. Full Circle Breathwork is an intensive body-centered process...
Opposition to vaccines in the United States and around the world was a fringe view for a very long time, but it’s not anymore now, thanks to people like Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. While this type of thinking has proliferated in the age of social media, in fact, being anti-vax is as old as the vaccines themselves. It’s a history worth exploring and knowing about, not just so that you can have better arguments for why vaccines work, but also so that you can understand that the arguments against inoculations are basically unchanged since the early
“We live in the worst timeline” is a phrase you often hear people say in left-leaning social spaces. It’s usually a joke, but I think it’s more than that. The truth is that, while Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, democracy in this country has been at risk many times throughout its lifetime, and also that it really couldn’t be said to have fully existed until the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. The moment we’re living in is complicated. On the one hand, it is true that the United States has never had more social progress than right now. But it’s als
Donald Trump is in serious political trouble. His approval ratings are even lower than they were after the Capitol Putsch, as independent voters have turned against him. He’s even began losing support from fellow Republicans as well, which is a new thing in his political career. It’s easy to see why: tariffs have increased inflation, his war on Iran has been a disaster, gas prices are up significantly, and people are upset about his desecration of American landmarks like the White House and the Kennedy Center. If you had paid attention during his first term, you’d have seen that Trump has want
Reactionary Catholics are a small minority of core Republican voters, but in many ways they set the party’s agenda because they’re so well organized and have a much stronger intellectual tradition than the Evangelicals who dominate the Republican voting base. But this trend exists internationally as well, and Opus Dei, a lay-member organization founded in Spain, has become a political powerhouse in a number of different countries. Aside from the ridiculous caricatures of the group painted by Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code novels, there has not been much detailed reporting on Opus Dei’s activit
Thirty years ago, John Horgan had a dream—or rather a nightmare. Here and there, scientists were saying that all the major problems of the universe had essentially been solved, and that the work of the future was just going to be filling in the details of what we already knew. But those voices were largely drowned out in the generation of scientists who came of age promoting radical new ideas that they claimed would push their disciplines far beyond what was then-currently known. Despite their creators’ claims, however, ideas like string theory, quantum consciousness, and chaos theory, were un
As artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Claude are becoming more integrated into many people’s lives, it’s perfectly natural to wonder why and how these things work and what possible implications they have for philosophy. The current AI systems are not conscious, but unfortunately, a lot of people are becoming enamored with the idea that they might be, including Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, who actually wrote an entire book, which he seems to have forgotten about called The God Delusion, which argued that minds aren’t necessary to produce pe
One of the biggest myths in politics today is that Donald Trump’s supporters are just a gigantic monolith, a group of people who will say whatever he says and believe whatever he tells them to believe. While there are many Americans who will change their opinions to suit Trump’s, it’s also true many people support Trump for their own reasons and reasons, which may not be compatible with his form of governance and the agenda that he has been imposing since he became president for the second time. It is certainly the case that a lot of Trump voters are super fans of his and really do view him as
Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, large language model artificial intelligence systems have become the most rapidly adopted technology in human history. Last March, ChatGPT’s website had 5.7 billion visits, while its competitors Claude and Gemini combined for another 3 billion. Despite how much people are using these services, however, AI still has many critics who argue that they are nothing more than simplistic pattern matchers that are vastly overhyped. While the critics are underestimating what you can do with these systems, they do indeed have a point. LLMs excel at many a
Ben Saltzman is an associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2017. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in English and Director of the Program in Medieval Studies. He also co-edits one of the longest-running literary studies journals in the country, Modern Philology. Previously, he was a Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor at Caltech from 2014–2017 after earning his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2014.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community “Our real opponent is not the Democrats,” Donald Trump told his Twitter followers in 2019. “Our primary opponent is the fake news media.” You couldn’t ask for a more perfect distillation of how Republican campaigning works. The idea that the mainstream media and society as a whole are biased against right-wing viewpoints permeates every corner of American politics, even within the Democratic party and within mainstream media outlets. Within today’s Republican party, fighting against “liberal media bias” was the b
If you’re like most people who pay attention to the news, you’ve probably felt it. We are living in a transitional moment, a time of great uncertainty as old realities are giving way to new ones. Right now, the future looks fuzzy and it’s hard to deny that humanity’s collective vision of the future is in a crisis of its own. Everywhere you look in film, television, novels, and social media, the future that everyone’s talking about is a dark one. Dystopia is the default. That’s a big problem because the future hasn’t happened yet, which means that if we want a better one, we have to start think
George E. Newman is a psychologist and cognitive scientist who studies creativity, identity, and the construction of meaning. He is an Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at the Yale School of Management, where also held affiliated appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He has published more than 60 articles in leadin...
For decades, people have been telling Democrats that they need to do better in small cities and rural parts of America. And yet, while there are some uniquely successful candidates here and there, there’s no doubt that the party just keeps doing worse in these areas. The Democratic consultant class keeps trying its familiar strategy of being Republican-lite in these right-leaning parts of the country, but it just isn’t working. That’s the subject of a recent episode, but for today, we’re going to be talking about a different path, one that’s being boosted by James Talarico, the Democrat runnin
Eddie Dalton’s raspy and melodious voice carries through the air, telling tales of a lifetime spent in the school of hard knocks, as the blues band backing him weaves soul into every rubato-inflected syncopation and chord progression. “We’re just passing through time, like the wind through the pines, just small little pieces in a bigger design,” he croons in his hit, “Another Day Old,” sounding like a reincarnated Muddy Waters. The fans are impressed: “This song is part of my testimony,” the top-rated YouTube comment on the video reads. “This song has touched the depth of my soul,” reads anoth
Space aliens are one of the most common tropes of science fiction, and with good reason. We live in an immense universe and there seem to be a massive number of planets out there. Surely, at least a few are inhabited, right? Most Americans in opinion polls seem to believe this. A poll from November 2025 found that 56 percent of adults surveyed said they thought aliens exist. Former president Barack Obama appears to be one of them based on a recent interview he did with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen. But whether aliens exist or not is only one of so many interesting questions the scenario present
Episode Summary When the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade in 2022, some people thought of it as the anti-abortion movement having reached the finish line in its endeavors. But in reality, the Dobbs v. Jackson case was only just the beginning. In the years since, not only has abortion been banned and severely restricted across more than a dozen states, many women have died from being denied hospital care by fearful doctors, even when they weren’t seeking an abortion. In the years since, not only has abortion been banned and severely restricted across more than a dozen states, many women
Episode Summary Everyone by now has seen countless stories about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing software development, causing headaches for educators, and threatening jobs in industries from law to accounting. But there’s another business being changed very dramatically by AI that doesn’t get nearly so much coverage — and that’s the adult media industry. Some creators are using AI to generate content or impersonate themselves in fan messages. There’s a dark side as well: Some people are using image generators to fabricate fake performers or steal the identities of real ones. An
Episode Summary The United States military is conducting bombing operations against Iran without a Congressional Declaration of War, consistently stated objectives or even terms on whether this is a war or not. Everything is in chaos: Some of it is due to incompetence within the Trump administration, of course. According to CNN and other news outlets, just days before President Donald Trump decided to follow Israel’s lead and bomb Iran, his FBI laid off an entire team of analysts who were experts in tracking Iranians online—all because they’d also been involved previously with investigating Tr
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.community Donald Trump was swept into office by an elaborate series of lies about his radical policies, but more than a year into his second term, the less-engaged independent voters who powered his victory have turned firmly against the president. But as low as Trump’s approval ratings have fallen, the Democratic Party’s favorability among Americans is even lower. How is this possible and what does it mean? Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a very different answer. Usually, however, the criticism boils down to: Democra
Episode Summary When we hear the term “conspiracy theorist,” most people probably imagine someone who looks a bit like Alex Jones, a middle-aged white guy who’s slightly overweight and loves to scream. And to be sure, there are a lot of people out there like that—supporting Donald Trump as fanatically as possible. But the reality of American right-wing extremism includes many people who look completely different. Noelle Cook, my guest on today’s episode discovered that firsthand in her research on women who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, which began, fatefully enough, when she coinciden
