Gary Shteyngart revisits the eerie prescience of Super Sad True Love Story and traces how a culture of ranking, optimization, and screen-mediated life has hollowed out intimacy and pleasure. The conversation turns toward beauty, craft, and conviviality as stubborn forms of resistance to a joyless, hyper-efficient age.

Ezra Klein and Republican strategist Liam Donovan argue over whether Donald Trump is sacrificing winnable races to tighten his grip on the GOP. Their conversation ranges from Ken Paxton and Susan Collins to Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance, tracing a party whose future may depend less on policy than on loyalty, attention and grievance.

Ezra Klein talks with historian Helena Rosenblatt about how liberalism narrowed from an older ethic of liberality, moral formation and devotion to the common good into a thinner politics of rights and individualism. Their conversation traces that history through revolution, religion and the welfare state to ask what kind of civic language might revive liberal democracy in an age of demagogues and institutional distrust.