The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Society & Culture:Philosophy
Jon Favreau was President Obama’s chief speechwriter. In those days, he was a frequent critic of the political media, frustrated, as many in the Obama administration were, with its focus on conflict, on ephemera, on appearing even-handed even when reality was persistently skewed.
Today, Favreau is changing the media from the inside. He’s a co-host on Pod Save America, and co-founder of Crooked Media, both of which have seen tremendous growth in 2017.
In this conversation, we look back on 2017, talk through the first year of the Trump White House (“a day-to-day shitshow”); the Democrats he’s watching for 2020; the mechanics of building a podcast empire; Favreau’s concern about the left (“we need to take the time to persuade other people of what we believe”); and the rot in the Republican Party.
To Favreau, the right-wing media is “the real center of gravity in that party; it’s not the Republicans in Congress, it’s not even really Donald Trump, although I guess you could say that he is, in some ways, a creation of that media machine.”
Books:
What Happened by Hillary Clinton
The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton
All the Truth is Out by Matt Bai
What a slow civil war looks like
How to listen
Why we can't give up on persuasion
Rep. Katie Porter's working-class politics
The climate apocalypse will be televised
A philosopher takes on religious life
Your brain isn't so private anymore
Brian Stelter thinks the news has a reliability problem
How corporations got all your data
The case for failure
Poetry as religion
Revisiting the American Dream
The cost of saving pandas
Breaking our family patterns
For Black horror fans, fact is scarier than fiction
Taking Nietzsche seriously
The dark history of Silicon Valley
The value of being a "hater"
Behind the blue wall
Best of: Imagine a future with no police
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