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Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is still ongoing. So far, more than 5,000 Palestinians are reported dead and many more injured. There’s no one way to cover this that reconciles all that is happening and all that needs to be felt.

My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.

Ackerman is an award-winning columnist for The Nation and the author of “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump” and the newsletter Forever Wars. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And they’ve each taken up angles I think are particularly important right now: the way that Sept. 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Together we discuss the goals behind Hamas’s initial attack on Israeli Jewish civilians, how the attack changed the psychology of Jews living in and out of Israel and what Israel is trying to achieve in its military response.

Mentioned:

“There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive.” by Peter Beinart

“A Deal Signed in Blood” by Spencer Ackerman

Book Recommendations:

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba edited by Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha

Israel’s Secret Wars by Ian Black

The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said

Strangers in the House by Raja Shehadeh

Hamas Contained by Tareq Baconi

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Matt Walsh gives advice to his fans, including a love sick man who wants to move to a different country for a girl he talks to via social media. Does Matt say go for it? Watch to find out.

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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the death cult known as the fat acceptance movement has claimed another victim, and she happens to have been one of its more visible advocates. Also, it's always bad news when Democrats and Republicans agree on something, which is evidenced by the disastrous bipartisan spending bill. Researchers supposedly discover a new cure for "long covid." But what the hell is Long Covid? Is it anything? And Media Matters names their top misinformers of the year. I could not be more honored to have made the list.

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The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the so-called critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt and graphite, that are essential to building out clean energy technologies. There is no clean energy revolution without China.

What would happen if China decided to weaponize its clean energy resources in the same way Russia recently weaponized its oil and gas? Is it possible for the U.S. to end its energy dependency on China by investing in clean energy at home? What does this geopolitical reality mean for the prospect of meeting the world’s climate goals?

Over the past few years, Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan have been at the forefront of mapping out the ways decarbonization will upend the world’s economic and geopolitical order. Bordoff is the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former senior director for energy and climate change for the National Security Council under Barack Obama. O’Sullivan is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and a former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.

In Bordoff and O’Sullivan’s view, decarbonization won’t just affect what kinds of cars we drive or how we power our homes. It will transform everything from the nature of international markets and trade relations to the global balance of military and diplomatic power. And it will create new economic superpowers, new alliances and new sources of geopolitical conflict in the process.

This conversation explores the contours of this transformation and what it will mean for the future of the climate and world politics.

Mentioned:

“The Age of Energy Insecurity” by Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O’Sullivan

“A Critical Minerals Policy for the United States” by Meghan L. O’Sullivan and Jason Bordoff

“Biden’s Historic Climate Bill Needs Smart Foreign Policy” by Jason Bordoff

“The Nuances of Energy Transition Investments” by Columbia Energy Exchange, with Larry Fink

Book Recommendations:

The Prize by Daniel Yergin

Silent Spring Revolution by Douglas Brinkley

The Avoidable War by Kevin Rudd

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates

This episode is guest-hosted by Rogé Karma, the senior editor for “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rogé has been with the show since July 2019, when it was based at Vox. At Vox, he also wrote and conducted interviews on topics ranging from policing and racial justice to democracy reform and the coronavirus pandemic.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

A jury decided the Google Play store unfairly stifles competition and maintains a monopoly. Kevin and Casey discuss how the ruling could reshape the digital economy. Then, a growing movement of developers and enthusiasts of artificial intelligence want the technology developed as quickly as possible, even if it has negative consequences for humanity. And finally, why the internet of the future could look totally different. 

Today’s guest: Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince. 

Additional Reading: 

• Epic Games won its lawsuit against Google.
• ‘Effective Accelerationism’ is Silicon Valley’s latest, and maybe weirdest, counterculture.
• Cloudflare tracked the biggest changes to the internet in 2023.

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com.

Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

It is too early to talk about a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. With the trauma of Oct. 7 still fresh for the Israeli public and with the ongoing devastation in Gaza, any talk of conflict-ending solutions is cruel fantasy.

But it wasn’t always. Peace efforts in the Middle East have been tried over and over again. It is not a history without breakthroughs. There was a time when a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt would have been unthinkable. But that agreement lives alongside a long list of collapsed negotiations. Why?

I wanted to have someone on the show who could help me read this checkered history. Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” Few people have been as intimately involved in the many Middle East peace processes as Miller. He’s a decades-long veteran of the State Department who has touched peace negotiations under the Reagan, the Clinton and both Bush administrations. His book is the best I’ve read on the peace processes and what went wrong.

In this conversation, we explore the frustrating, uneven history of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, Miller’s hard-won insights about the reality of peace negotiations and the idiosyncratic personalities who have most influenced the prospects for peace in the Middle East.

Book Recommendations:

The Peace Puzzle by Daniel C. Kurtzer, Scott B. Lasensky, William B. Quandt, Steven L. Spiegel and Shibley Telhami

Arabs and Israelis by Abdel Monem Said Aly, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki

The Missing Peace by Dennis Ross

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Rollin Hu. Mixing by Jeff Geld, with Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero. Archival clips from A.P. Archive, CBS, C-SPAN and NBC.

“Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible.” So writes Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent at Vox.

Almost a month has passed since Hamas fighters slaughtered over 1,400 people in Israel and the state mounted its furious response. For weeks, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, cutting off water and electricity to the tiny strip of land and carrying out airstrikes that have reportedly killed over 8,000 Palestinians. On Friday a ground invasion began, and the response across much of the globe has been horror. If Israel continues down this road, the cost in Palestinian lives, and in support for Israel, will be immense.

The question that hangs over the criticism is this: What, then, should Israel do? What would be a moral response to Hamas’s savagery and to the very real need Israelis have for security?

Beauchamp, who has covered Israel extensively in recent years, set out to answer that question. He spoke with counterterrorism experts, military historians, experts on Hamas, ethicists and more. I found his piece “What Israel Should Do Now” one of the best I’ve read since Oct. 7. So I asked him to join me on the show.

Mentioned:

"Fears Grow That Israel Has 'No Plan' Agreed for Postwar Gaza" by Neri Zilber and Felicia Schwartz

Book Recommendations:

A High Price by Daniel Byman

The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966 – 2006 by Edward W. Said

The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Efim Shapiro.

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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Hershey's became HeShe's as they appoint a trans activist to be the face of their women's history month campaign. But that's not even the worst of it. We'll discuss. Also, some Republicans push to ban TikTok as the ACLU objects. Tucker Carlson calls out Christian leaders for their failure to lead. The most notorious groomer on the internet keeps getting creepier. And in the Daily Cancellation, with women's history month now upon us, and black history month just past, it seems like one group is being left out.

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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, marriage is under attack from our society, and these attacks are not just coming from the Left. An increasing number of influencers on the Right are discouraging young people from getting married, claiming that marriages almost always lead to failure and misery. But is that true? No, not at all. We'll discuss. Also, new presidential polling has the media in a panic. Are they about to dump Biden and trade him in for a younger model? And a new report reveals that American taxpayer money is not just going to the military in Ukraine. It's propping up their entire economy. In our Daily Cancellation, a new sculpture in California looks suspiciously like a certain unspeakable body part. Why does this keep happening?

Ep.1229

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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the community is in mourning after a trans terrorist walked into a Christian school and murdered six people, including three children. The media is playing all of their expected blames, even finding a way to blame conservatives for this tragedy, but we will try to get to the heart of the matter. I have a lot to say about this.

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OpenAI responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit this week, with a blog post that included emails dating to 2015. We talk about whether the lawsuit could have any impact on the company, and who stands to benefit from it. Then, will the European Union’s Digital Markets Act make the tech industry a more competitive environment for entrepreneurs? We look at how some of the biggest tech giants are changing their services to comply with the law. And finally, Kevin Roose and the Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern compare notes on using the Apple Vision Pro.   

Today’s guest:

• Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal Personal Tech columnist

Additional Reading:

• Open AI Says Elon Musk Tried to Merge It With Tesla
• Forced to Change: Tech Giants Bow to Global Onslaught of Rules
• One Month With Apple Vision Pro: In the Air, on a Train … in a Drawer

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Google removed the ability to generate images of people from its Gemini chatbot. We talk about why, and about the brewing culture war over artificial intelligence. Then, did Kara Swisher start “Hard Fork”? We clear up some podcast drama and ask about her new book, “Burn Book.” And finally, the legal expert Daphne Keller tells us how the U.S. Supreme Court might rule on the most important First Amendment cases of the internet era, and what Star Trek and soy boys have to do with it.

Today’s guests:

• Kara Swisher, tech journalist and Casey Newton’s former landlord
• Daphne Keller, director of the program on platform regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center

Additional Reading: 

• Google CEO calls AI tool’s controversial responses ‘completely unacceptable’
• Kara Swisher Is Not Here to Make Friends in Her New Memoir
• Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher
• Daphne Keller’s FAQs About the NetChoice Cases at the Supreme Court

We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. 
Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a major victory for team sanity this week as a judge upholds Tennessee's ban of child gender transitions. Trans activists never saw this coming. We'll talk about it. Also, GOP donors are now trying to push Glenn Youngkin into the race to save the day. I'll explain why that's a horrible idea. And Britney Spears was freed from her conservatorship thanks to the internet mob. Now she's falling apart in front of her eyes. Good work, guys. In our Daily Cancellation, a woman explains her parenting strategy, which involves giving her child literally everything he wants all the time.

Ep.1233

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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a christian music awards show became a forum for men to parade around in drag. In fact, this kind of debauchery is becoming increasingly common in supposedly Christian environments, including at church. Also, Joe Biden addresses the nation about the war in Israel, and tries to explain why Americans should fund two global conflicts at the same time. A college professor apologizes after saying that Israelis are pigs and savages who should burn in hell. Plus, Victoria's Secret tried to rebrand and get away from attractive female models. Turns out the new marketing strategy was not a major success. We'll talk about all of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.

Ep.1247
 

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This summer has been a parade of broken climate records. June was the hottest June and July was not just the hottest July but the hottest month ever on record. At the same time, it looks like we are at the start of a green revolution: Decarbonization efforts have gone far better than what many had hoped for just a few years ago, and renewable energy is getting cheaper.

How should we make sense of these seemingly mixed signals? What does it mean to hold the pessimism of climate disaster and the optimism of climate action together?

There are few individuals better suited to navigate these questions than Kate Marvel, a senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown. In a conversation with guest host David Wallace-Wells, Marvel explores whether climate change is “accelerating,” why reducing air pollution will lead to more warming before it leads to less; how the human response to a changing climate can be more unpredictable than the climate itself; how witch burnings increased during the last major change in climate; what the relationship is between hotter weather and social unrest; how decarbonization sets us on track to avoiding the worst-case climate models; why, despite all the challenges ahead, there are still immeasurable benefits to fighting for a cleaner planet and much more.

This episode was hosted by David Wallace-Wells, a writer at The New York Times Magazine and the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” He also writes a newsletter for New York Times Opinion that explores climate change, technology and the future of the planet and how we live on it.

Mentioned:

Beyond Catastrophe by David Wallace-Wells

Book Recommendations:

“On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Troubled Waters by Mary Annaïse Heglar

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.


OPENING DISCUSSION: How I schedule podcasting

LISTENER CALLS:

- My thoughts on psychedelics and the pursuit of awe. [8:38]
- Time-block planning for the visually impaired. [19:07]
- Struggling to escape a job. [23:24]
- Concerns about book editors. [33:26]
- My blog writing process. [43:41]
- The deep life vs. the good life [48:49]





Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time” is about an advanced civilization built by sentient spiders. A sequel, “Children of Ruin,” is about a society run by superintelligent octopuses. I love these books. They’re remarkably serious about their premises, and by the end, it’s human civilization and our limited sensorium that come to seem strange.

But Tchaikovsky’s latest book, “Children of Memory,” ostensibly about crows, read as something very different to me: the best fictional representation I’ve read of what it is like to interact with, and perhaps even be, an artificial intelligence system like ChatGPT. It was a very strange read at this moment. And it made possible an episode I’ve been wanting to do for months.

Long before we have to face the question of whether A.I. is sentient, we will have to face the question of whether it is creative, and that will turn into the question of whether we, truly, are creative. And so Tchaikovsky and I talk about whether there’s a meaningful difference between human creativity and A.I. problem solving, why he believes this is a “profoundly scary time” to be a writer or a designer, what an explosion of A.I.-produced content would mean for human society and the human spirit, whether the advancement of A.I. could exhaust avenues for human originality and much more.

Mentioned:

"Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson

Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve

Book Recommendations:

Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolf

After Atlas by Emma Newman

Babel by R. F. Kuang

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Carol Sabouraud and Kristina Samulewski.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.

ANNOUNCEMENT: Videos of the podcast are now live! (You can find then here: https://tinyurl.com/b2rkctfj


DEEP WORK QUESTIONS:

- How do I decide how much work is enough? [13:35] 
- How do I eliminate post-shutdown anxiety? [28:15]
- How do I get back to work effectively after a lunch break? [37:43]
- Why don’t you (Cal) use Zettelkasten? [40:09]
- How do I limit activities that aren’t important for my long-term success a new job? [46:20]


DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:

- How do you (Cal) stay focused on campus when surrounded by “woke-ness”? [52:44] 
- How do you (Cal) keep sane as a published author? [58:31]
- How do you “count” time that is between deep work and deep leisure? [1:02:24]

Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering.