Nilay Patel fields listener criticism of Decoder’s AI coverage, from software’s limits and Google’s impact on publishing to surveillance, data centers and political backlash. The mailbag also examines the friction between social platforms’ growth ambitions and the communities that built them.

Kaya Henderson reflects on turning around Washington, D.C.’s public schools by replacing top-down certainty with shared problem-solving. The former chancellor makes a case for clear communication, authentic leadership and trusting the people closest to the work.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul defends aggressive guardrails for social media, 3D-printed guns and police surveillance while pressing AI companies to make data centers answer to local communities. She frames the fight over hyperscalers as a test of whether technological progress can serve workers, families and the public good.

A backlash against AI data centers is scrambling political loyalties, bringing conservative organizers, environmental concerns and anti-tech populism into uneasy alignment. Verge policy reporter Gabby DeVay traces how local fights over water, noise and development have become a tangible referendum on the AI boom.

Maggie Haberman joins Ezra Klein to trace Donald Trump’s second term as a government of improvisation, spectacle and unilateral power, where foreign policy, immigration crackdowns and self-dealing all orbit the president’s impulses. Their conversation argues that the administration’s chaos is less a coherent ideology than Trump reality: a White House shaped by flattery, grievance and a leader increasingly absorbed by monuments to himself.

Altana CEO Evan Smith describes a world where tariffs, customs friction, and military choke points are forcing global trade to become more traceable, automated, and politically fraught. The conversation tracks how AI is remaking both border paperwork and software development while doing little to revive U.S. manufacturing jobs in the way tariff advocates promised.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues that the privatization of public discourse, from polling and microtargeting to bots and AI platforms, is hollowing out liberal democracy and replacing it with an "artificial state." In conversation with Nilay Patel, she traces how Silicon Valley’s faith in quantification and efficiency has turned citizens into data points while leaving open the question of whether collective political action can still push back.

A weekend scramble over Anthropic’s newly released Claude Fable 5 became a test case for how the Trump administration may regulate AI: through formal safety policy or through panicked, personalized power. Nilay Patel and Verge reporter Hayden Field trace the model’s abrupt shutdown, the export controls that followed, and the industry’s growing fear that political risk now sits alongside technical risk.

A sudden U.S.-ordered shutdown of Anthropic’s Fable 5 has set off a fight over AI safety, export controls and who gets to decide when a jailbreak justifies pulling a frontier model offline. The conversation weighs incompetence against political theater, while warning that if the ban sticks, access to advanced AI could hinge on nationality, ID checks and a far broader crackdown across the industry.

Nilay Patel and New York Times reporter Ryan Mac sift through SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO filing to ask what Elon Musk’s ownership of X has actually become and why the company’s shrinking social platform may not matter. Their conversation turns into a broader indictment of a market structure that keeps rewarding Musk with more power even as corporate governance, shareholder accountability, and business fundamentals erode.

Labor economist Catherine Ann Edwards argues that the real danger is not an AI apocalypse but a government safety net too weak to handle ordinary job loss, recessions and worker disempowerment. As chip workers at Samsung win huge bonuses through union pressure, she makes the case for stronger unemployment insurance, labor power and tax policy instead of waiting for a technological crisis.

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.

As AI’s appetite for computing power fuels a nationwide build-out of data centers, local fights over noise, water, electricity, secrecy and tax revenue are turning obscure industrial projects into a volatile new political issue. The backlash is scrambling familiar partisan lines, with populists on the left and right converging against a technology many communities feel is being imposed on them.

Hardware veteran Caitlin Kalinowski argues that AI’s next great expansion will happen not on screens but in factories, robots and supply chains, where safety, manufacturing know-how and geopolitical risk matter as much as software. Drawing on stints at Apple, Meta and OpenAI, she sketches a future shaped by AR, drones and reindustrialization, while warning that war may change faster than consumer tech.

Brendan Ballou argues that forced arbitration has become a private justice system, built by courts and terms of service that strip consumers and workers of meaningful recourse. The conversation links that quiet legal machinery to a broader crisis of corporate power, public corruption and the feeling that ordinary people are locked out of real accountability.

A rerun organized around ordinary people confronting extraordinary responsibility moves from a wrongful-conviction case haunted by a daughter’s silence to a family besieged by a neighbor and, finally, to Shalom Auslander’s darkly comic theology of two starving hamsters. Across the hour, power appears less as authority than as the burden of what one person can do to another.

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.

A family’s daily long-distance intimacy is severed when Iran’s government plunges the country into an internet blackout during war, leaving one daughter in the U.S. desperate for any word from her parents. The hour gathers smuggled voice memos from inside Iran, where ordinary life, political terror, grief, love and rage all continue beneath bombardment and enforced silence.

Derek Thompson and Ross Douthat map the fractures opening inside Trump’s coalition as the Iran war strains the movement’s old promises and exposes its internal contradictions. Their conversation tracks the growing fights over foreign intervention, religion, Israel, health politics and AI, and asks what kind of Republican Party might survive after Trump.