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.