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At the center of the country’s debates over artificial intelligence is a simple but hard question: What kind of technology is this?Is A.I. a kind of “alien mind”? Are we unleashing a new species on the planet, one that will transform human society so completely that historical analogies to past technologies simply don’t hold? Or is A.I. more normal than that?Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. And he’s an author, alongside his colleague Sayash Kapoor, of the extremely influentia...

Last week, David Robinson resigned from OpenAI. He’d been in charge of writing the safety reports for new models and came to believe that OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence industry lack the safety culture necessary to protect the world from what they’re building.Robinson has an unusual background for an A.I. frontier lab staffer. He’s a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate, he founded a civil rights nonprofit and he advised the Biden White House. He did not come up in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. And when he joined OpenAI in 2023, he says, he saw A...

President Trump and the modern right have a theory of beauty. You see it in Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch and his executive order requiring classical and traditional styles for certain federal buildings. This isn’t my theory of beauty, but it is a theory. And it’s a response, in part, to something that a lot of people have been feeling, and not just on the right: that the modern world is ugly, or getting uglier. I’ve seen at least a dozen articles or videos over the last few years asking, “Is the world getting uglier?” The...

Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss  unless the government acts, because he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we are building, and how emphatic he was that so many of the people in positions of authority are in complete denial about what he thinks is about to happen.Gates is...

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, has been one of the most argued-over candidates this election cycle. If he wins, he’d be the first-ever Muslim senator, and he’s faced a torrent of attacks about his faith. The race has also become a proving ground for a lot of questions about the Democratic Party and its future: What should U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians be? Is the future of health care reform Medicare for all? Can a left-wing populist win in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump?There’s been so much...

Jensen Huang might just be the single most influential person in artificial intelligence today.Huang is the chief executive of Nvidia, the company that designs nearly all the chips and infrastructure that the rest of the industry relies on. This has made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world and has made Huang incredibly influential in the Trump administration.And unlike many of the leaders of the frontier labs, Huang doesn’t think A.I. could wipe out humanity. He thinks that the doomers are just scaring people, and that the industry doesn’t need new regulation at all. I wa...

Fears of out-of-control A.I. have reached a boil over the last few weeks, and several industry executives have called for a coordinated slowdown of A.I. development. But if our goal is to control A.I. — and that should be our goal — slowing down isn’t enough. We need to stop the labs from doing something they’re already on the cusp of doing: recursive self-improvement, or handing over the training of A.I. models to A.I.Mentioned:“We’re Not Losing Control of A.I. We’re Giving It Away.” by Ezra KleinYou can find the transcript and more episode...

America is waking up to the critical risks posed by artificial intelligence. But every conversation about possible regulation tends to hit the same wall: “Well, what about China?”Chinese A.I. models are just slightly behind American ones. If America slows down its A.I. development to make our models safer, the fear is that China will simply race ahead of us and own this critical technology of the future — with A.I. models that are less safe than our own. So how should the United States respond to this prisoner’s dilemma? And is it possible that the two countries...

Francis Fukuyama's “The End of History and the Last Man” is one of the most insightful books for understanding the strangeness and instability of this political moment.Fukuyama wrote his landmark book more than 30 years ago, and it’s typically remembered as a triumphalist argument, heralding the permanent victory of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War. But that’s not quite right. Fukuyama also talked about the serious weaknesses he saw in liberal democracy — how it may not fully satisfy the human soul — and his warnings feel very prescient now. So I wanted to have Fukuyama on the show to t...

Behind the intense political movements of the last decade, from Trumpism to wokeness and back again, there’s a strange and erratic rhythm. Movements saturate the culture seemingly overnight, only to evaporate or spark backlash just as rapidly. We’re extremely politically engaged, yet we’ve rarely felt so powerless to create lasting policy change.I haven’t seen many very successful attempts to explain what is driving this volatility. But one concept that has taken off recently, and captures what so many of us are feeling, is “hyperpolitics.”The idea comes from Anton Jäger, a historian and contributing writer to New...

Whatever type of music you love, Rick Rubin has probably left his mark on it. Rubin, a founder of Def Jam Recordings and a former co-chairman of Columbia Records, might be the most influential music producer alive. A very partial roll call of the artists he’s worked with: Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, Run-DMC, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Slayer, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kanye West, Neil Diamond, Brandi Carlile and Adele. We recorded this in 2023, after Rubin released a fascinating, unusual book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.” I’d expected stories of late-night sessions with famous musicians, but instead it read...

A lot of things are on track to get more expensive.  The U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock of the global economy. When yields on those Treasuries go up, mortgages, car loans and credit cards get more expensive, and it can hit the stock market, too. And yields have been going up – to levels we haven’t seen consistently since before the Great Recession – inspiring some erratic and futile efforts from the Trump administration to push them back down.  So why are yields creeping higher? What is the administration trying to do about it? And if this continues, what’s in store...

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year. It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hass...

Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0. The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end manufacturing in the 2000s, filling American shelves with cheap clothes, toys and electronics, while devastating American factory towns. This new China Shock could be even more destabilizing. China now dominates advanced manufacturing: electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels. It’s outcompeting nearly all high-end manufacturing around the world, and other countries are just starting to feel the pain. And China isn’t slowing down. It’s m...

We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to a test. A.I. companies don’t want their technology to lie, cheat or steal. So why is this happening? Why are the creators of these models apparently unable to control their creations? If A.I. development isn’t on a safe path — and it doesn’t seem to be — what do we do about it? Toner has been thinking about A.I...

We’re in a really strange moment in the foreign policy politics of the Democratic Party. People are looking for an alternative vision — an approach to American power in the world that would feel more moral and just, after the failures of President Biden, and the wrecking ball President Trump has taken to international rules and norms. The answer many on the left are coming to is powerfully simple: international law. America could just start following the rules that we helped write. Is that possible? Is that enough? What would that even look like? To talk through these questions, I invi...

My colleague Ross Douthat is leaving The Times after 17 years to become a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” Before he goes, I’m asking him a few questions. Douthat has had a unique vantage point on the news media and politics over the last few decades. He’s typically held the role of explaining the right to more liberal audiences, starting as an undergrad, when he was a conservative columnist for The Harvard Crimson. Douthat has also lived through the seismic changes in the media from the both the inside and the outside: He’s made his career at legacy media institutions, but I firs...

The show’s executive producer, Claire Gordon, joins me in the studio to ask me your questions. Topics include: whether my views on “woke” issues have changed; the feedback we got on our episode with Chris Rufo; the D.S.A. insurgency; my first singing lesson; and the story that I’m in a “secret society” with Peter Thiel. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions; we read them all and wish we’d been able to get to more of them! Mentioned: “What Has Chris Rufo Wrought?” The Ezra Klein Show “White threat in a browning America” by Ezra Klein Why We’re P...

What’s big and ugly and has united Republicans and Democrats? A.I. data centers. An overwhelming majority of Americans say they’d oppose a data center being built near where they live. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul just imposed a one-year moratorium on data center construction, and there are over 100 other local or statewide moratorium proposals across the country. A.I.’s explosive momentum over the last few years seems to have finally run into a force that could slow it down: the messy politics of getting things done in the real world. So, is that a good thing...

'The Odyssey' is the political movie of the decade. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This column read was produced by Marie Cascione, Claire Gordon and Emma Kehlbeck. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick and Rollin Hu. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. Cinematography by Kyle Kelley. Video edit...

The first year of President Trump’s second term was a whirlwind of action: on immigration, on trade, on political retribution. But things seem to me to be slowing down quite a bit. Trump is incredibly unpopular, and he’s now bogged down in a war with Iran that he doesn’t seem capable of ending. He often appears more concerned with his many White House renovations than with whether the Republican Party can hold the House and the Senate in November. So what’s going on in this administration? Where is this all going? It’s hard to think of a journ...

President Trump is very unpopular right now. But polls show the Democratic Party is just as unpopular – if not more so. So what can the party do about it?  But to answer that question, you first have to understand what the Democratic Party is. That is, mechanically, what is it? What powers does it have? When you call the Democratic Party, who picks up the phone? And how can that party, the official party, be reinvented for this era? Ben Wikler has a unique perspective on this question. He transformed the Democratic Party of Wisconsin into a fund-raising, door-knocking powerhouse whe...

Morris Katz helped orchestrate Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory and Graham Platner’s ultimately disastrous run for Senate. It’s quite a résumé  for a political consultant who is still in his 20s. Platner’s implosion could prove particularly costly for Democrats. It may mean the difference between winning and losing a Senate majority. But before the rape accusation that ended his campaign, Platner had come out of nowhere to beat Janet Mills, the sitting governor of Maine, who was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate. The lessons to take from that campaign remain angrily contested.  Katz, a senior adviser to Platner, ha...

How Brian Eno expanded the possibilities of what music and sound can be. Eno is a trailblazing musician and producer who’s worked on seminal records by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and Coldplay, among others. But Eno isn’t just a great collaborator with other artists; he’s also a great collaborator with machines. Long before we started worrying about A.I. replacing human creativity, Eno was tinkering with generative systems to pioneer ambient music – a genre that has deeply influenced how we listen to music today. We recorded this conversation in 2025, and it’s one of my favorite r...

You can’t understand China today without understanding its president, Xi Jinping. Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has doubled down on communist ideology and significantly consolidated his own power while transforming China into an industrial juggernaut unrivaled in the world. And Xi’s ambitions for China go far beyond that. So what does Xi want for China in the coming years? And how should the United States respond? Kevin Rudd has a unique perspective on these questions. He first met Xi in the 1980s, when Rudd was a China analyst in Australia’s foreign service and Xi was a local...

Already this summer, there have been huge wildfires in the Southwest and Great Plains and an extraordinary heat wave in Europe, as the world stares down the barrel of a powerful El Niño. Climate change is accelerating, and yet climate politics right now is in disarray. But something else is happening, too. Advances in clean energy technology mean it is now possible to build a world of energy abundance that was the stuff of dreams just a few years ago. That means a new kind of climate politics is possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disas...

The old solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don’t seem to fit the present reality. A two-state solution feels increasingly impossible, given the scale of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian determination for a right of return. And a one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians would live as equal citizens in a single state, is hard to imagine, given how strongly both peoples seek political self-determination. But what if those aren’t the only options? A Land for All is an Israeli-Palestinian initiative that is proposing a confederation model: two sovereign states, structured to allow freedom of m...

What does it mean to celebrate America on its 250th anniversary? The Trump administration’s festivities — from the U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn to the Great American State Fair — have centered American glory and greatness. What has been missing are the Americans who fought to move America closer to its promises. They had to love a country — or at least believe in a country — that often failed them. How did they do it? Beneath that is a deep question for anyone who loves a country, or even loves another person: How do you love something in its wholen...

Christopher Rufo is arguably the most successful activist of the MAGA era. He rose to prominence fighting D.E.I. initiatives and critical race theory. In President Trump’s second term, he’s had a huge influence on policy, from Trump’s executive orders against D.E.I. and the attacks on the Department of Education to the ICE and C.B.P. deployments to Minneapolis. Rufo, helpfully, calls his shots. He has published a guide, “The New Right Activism: A Manifesto for the Counterrevolution,” in which he argued for the value of “agitprop” and counseled that “political life moves on narrative, em...

A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed, postliterate society where we’re constantly staring at screens and evaluating one another based on metrics, as the country around us feels like it’s falling apart: That sounds like the world we live in. It’s also the world Gary Shteyngart created in his 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.” I’ve been thinking about the book a lot recently, especially with the rise of the “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular and the longevity guru Bryan Johnson, and this feeling that people are upset and agitated but grabbing at the wrong things to fix it. It feels uncannily like t...

Attention is working in really unusual ways this election cycle. Graham Platner, a political unknown a year ago, ended up dominating his Senate primary against Maine’s sitting governor – even as his campaign was rocked by a series of scandals. James Talarico also seemed to come out of nowhere to become the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. Jon Ossoff has ginned up a ton of excitement as a potential 2028 presidential contender, in part because of his viral videos. Meanwhile, the former reality TV personality Spencer Pratt became a political star on X during his bid to become mayor of Los...

The Democratic Party is in the middle of a rupture over foreign policy – with Israel and Palestine at the center. In recent weeks, the Democratic senators Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen both called for a break with the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel. Schatz said the next administration needs “a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers,” while Van Hollen went further, accusing Biden’s senior decision makers of “complicity.” And Gaza has become a central issue splitting Democrats in primaries around the country. It’s become such a profound fault line, it reminds me of how the Iraq war remade...

A new masculinist movement has gone mainstream on the right. The prominent voices in this movement yearn for an earlier time, when men were men and women were women. Sometimes that time seems to be the 1950s, like when Tucker Carlson extols a world where men go to work and women stay at home. But sometimes it goes way farther back. The pastor Doug Wilson advocates household voting, in which men vote for their wives. And Costin Vlad Alamariu, better known as Bronze Age Pervert, harks back to the Bronze Age — specifically the ancient Hittite and Mitanni Empires. Helen Lewis wr...

Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China. And I think if you look closely at both of these stories, you see that our foreign policy has entered into a period of absolute incoherence. I’m not even sure what the status of the Iran war is at this point. What is Trump trying to achieve? What is he willing to accept? Taking a more hawkish approach to China has been a co...

President Trump doesn’t seem to care that much about winning the midterms. He’s more unpopular at this point in his second term than basically any of his modern predecessors. Democrats seem poised to retake the House and have a real chance of retaking the Senate. You might expect a president in that position to pivot to the center, to focus on voters’ top concerns and try to boost the strongest Republicans in key races. Trump isn’t doing any of that. Instead, he announced a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay out “victims of lawfare,” he threatened to re-escalate the Iran war...

What are the conditions that enable a country to become great — or great again? The Trump administration — and other right-wing movements in other countries — offers a vision of greatness based on power and domination abroad, and a mix of shared national and religious stories at home. And that vision is clearly appealing to a lot of people. Liberals in the U.S. and elsewhere have been struggling to tell a story that can compete. What story would Yuval Noah Harari tell? One of the through lines of Harari’s best-selling books — “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus,” “Nexus” — is the huge role that stories play in shaping...

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for whatever party is in power. An...

What do you do when you feel anxious or insecure? Many of us try to push the feeling away, or we ruminate on it, or try to solve it, or avoid the thought altogether. But what would happen if we did the exact opposite? The Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön is the author of many beloved books, including “When Things Fall Apart,” “Welcoming the Unwelcome” and — my personal favorite — “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” And she has a way of inviting people to befriend the parts of life that typically induce dread — from uncertainty and suffering to loss and discomfort. And she...

On Friday, I moderated a forum with the top Democratic candidates for California governor, focusing on the state’s housing crisis. California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office in 2019 promising to build millions of homes. And in the years since, dozens of pro-housing laws have passed, designed to cut red tape and spur more construction. And yet the number of homes being built in California is basically the same as when he took office, and the state’s housing crisis remains, arguably, the worst in the country. So I wanted to know what the next governor would do about...

Here’s a shocking number: One out of eight American adults is taking a GLP-1, like Ozempic or Zepbound, according to a KFF poll. GLP-1s are the biggest pharmaceutical story since antidepressants. But there’s still so much we don’t know. “We’re only at the beginning of what’s been called this Ozempic era,” the journalist Julia Belluz told me. “I think we’re really just at the beginning of discovering the benefits and the harms of these drugs.” These discoveries begin in the research but are also expanding into how we think about our punishing beauty standards and the bl...