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
The paradox of American freedom
Nonbinary parenthood
John McWhorter, the anti-antiracist
The overwhelming, invisible work of elder care
How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic
Fannie Lou Hamer and the meaning of freedom
What the internet took from us
Trapped inside with Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
Bryan Stevenson on the legacy of enslavement
What's your status?
Is there a hack for enlightenment?
Fighting a world on fire with fire
Revolutionary Love
How to make meaning out of suffering
Ken Burns's latest on The Greatest
The road from 9/11 to Donald Trump
Rep. Pramila Jayapal on immigrants and America after 9/11
Why America's obsession with rights is wrong
The news is by — and for — rich, white liberals
Clint Smith III on confronting the legacy of slavery
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