Sitemap - 2023 - Persuasion

Books We Loved Reading in 2023

A Note from Yascha: Thank You

Branko Milanovic on Globalization

Universities Are Drawing The Wrong Lessons From The Capitol Hill Hearing

Our Favorite Reads in 2023

Banning Hate Speech Is The Wrong Response to Ireland’s Riots

The Humanity of Evil

This Week at Persuasion

Why America Need Not Turn Every Country Into A Democracy

Episode 126: Nikki Vargas on the Roads Taken

The Inconvenient Truth About Climate Summits

Mary Harrington on Feminism

Our Events

Ridley Scott's Napoleonic Complex

We Need To Protect Election Workers

What Justice Requires in Gaza

Blind Faith

How Would Clausewitz See Modern War?

This Week at Persuasion

China’s Rising Anti-Semitism

Our Enemies Will Vanish

Philip Pettit on What It Means to Be Free

Say No To Police Profanity

Putin's Hostages

The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Spanish-American War

Genocide Is a Growing Menace

What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls

Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power

This Week at Persuasion

Episode 125: Daniel Schulman on the Jewish Titans

The West Flirts with Russia

The Forgotten Dispute that Could Ignite a War in South America

Tara Isabella Burton on the Myth of Self-Creation

Amanda Knox on the Harms of Public Shaming

Ending the War

China's Data War Against the U.S.

All COPs are Bastards

Episode 124: John Coates on the New Concentration of Financial Power

Ars Ex Machina

This Week at Persuasion

The Attacks Beyond Gaza

The Trouble with “Bidenomics”

December 4: The Closing of the Russian Mind

Economies of Scale, Part I: Artificial Intelligence

November 30: Live Taping of Bookstack with Richard Aldous (for Members)

Tim Urban on Everything

The Crisis in Medicine: A Provocation

A Midwest State of Mind

This Week at Persuasion

The Mind of Vladimir Putin

From the River to the Sea

The New Antisemitism

Bethany Allen on How China Abuses its Economic Might

Argentinians Pick Their Poison

U.S. Support for Pro-Terrorist Groups: What Can Be Done?

Making Race Skin Deep

A Bureaucrat by Any Other Name

Episode 123: Laurence Jurdem on TR and Henry Cabot Lodge

Determined

This Week at Persuasion

The Laws of War

The Lights Are On But There Is No One Home

Robert Sapolsky on Free Will

My Journey Out of Internalized Homophobia

Ukraine Is Not A “Frozen” War

Episode 122: Thomas Graham on Seeing Russia Clearly

This Week at Persuasion

European Dis-Union

Our Public and Private Selves

Could Trump Pardon Himself?

Where Have All The Democrats Gone?

Anshel Pfeffer on Israel and the War in the Middle East

When “Liberty” Means Censorship

Gaza and the De-Colonization Narrative

Episode 121: Uri Kaufman on the Yom Kippur War

Free Speech Defenders Must Be Consistent

Poland Pushes Back

This Week at Persuasion

The Cocktail That Won the Great War

The Radicalization of the American Mind

David Brooks on Knowing Others (and Ourselves)

November 16: Russian Scholars in Exile

Why I Just Quit Democratic Socialists of America

Uncovering Hidden Lives

The MAGAfication of the GOP is Complete

November 14: Wrongfully Detained: Alsu Kurmasheva and the Kremlin's Targeting of U.S. Journalists

Ukraine’s Resilient Religious Communities

The Case for University Silence

Israel-Hamas: Russia's Opening?

Episode 120: Katherine Turk on NOW’s Lesser-Known Feminists

This Week at Persuasion

The Brave Among Us

Shakespeare on Power

What “Latino” Misses

Regime Change, Israeli-Style

The Missing Context

Jonathan Rauch on Why Many People Are Unhappy in Middle Age (and How Life Gets Better After Fifty)

A Brighter Future for Poland

The Autocrats' Language Game

Trying to Make Sense of the Carnage

Israel’s War on Hamas: What to Know

Israel’s 9/11

A Quick Primer on Understanding 21st-Century Israel

It's Time to Drop 'Eurasia'

Episode 119: Alexandra Hudson on Civility

This Week at Persuasion

Sources of the Self

The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas

Terror and Tragedy in the Middle East

Misreading China

The Real Deep State

This Was Never Supposed to Happen

Episode 118: Joseph Horowitz on the Art-Freedom Nexus

Polish Fever

Ten Years That Shook the World

This Week at Persuasion

"Will AI Kill Us All?"

Vetocracy and the Decline of American Global Power

Three Targets for Welfare Reform

Escaping a Massacre

Angus Deaton on America’s Deaths of Despair

Our Migrant Souls

The Democratic Duty

Episode 117: Yascha Mounk on the False Promise of Identity Ideology

Bargaining for Democracy

This Week at Persuasion

The Insidious Lie That We Can’t Understand Each Other

The Problem of the Mad King

Freeing Belarus

Take A Position, Not A Side

Yascha Mounk on The Identity Trap

The Eerie Normality of Life in Kyiv

The Persuasion Festival: 2023

Tyranny of the Minority

A New Cohort of Transgender Kids

This Week at Persuasion

Episode 116: Michael S. Roth on Loving Learning

Radical Moderation

Scotch with the President

October 5: Russian Political Opposition in Exile

The Friends and Foes of Democracy in Israel

Two Cheers for the French Revolution

The Central Asian Opportunity

Have You Read the Identity Trap? Then Start Here.

David Axelrod on 2024

What Lockdown Did to Africa

BRICS and Stones Can’t Break Western Bones

Bring Back Countervailing Power

America, Europe's Frenemy

Don't Think, Dear

This Week at Persuasion

Ask Me Anything with Francis Fukuyama

The Right's Anti-Corporate Turn

India Eyes a New Identity

Ukraine at War

Rory Stewart on How Not to Be a Politician

Donald Trump’s Politics of the Berserk

Stop Denmark's New Blasphemy Ban

A Case for Optimism in Latin America

Episode 115: Timothy Garton Ash on What It Means to Be European

In Defense of the Human Brain

Orbán’s Tainted Democracy

Vivek's Ten "Truths"?

This Week at Persuasion

Wagner's Next Target

The Supreme Court Isn’t Rogue

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt on the Tyranny of the Minority

A League of Their Own

Good Intentions Gone Awry

Chuck Your Privilege

September 19: I Lift My Lamp - Is the Golden Door Still Open?

Raymond Chandler: An American Classic

This Week at Persuasion

September 18: Russia's New Exiles: A Conversation on the Situation Facing Russian Exiles Today

Rediscovering Our Shared American Values

Leaving China

J.S. Mill vs the Post-Liberals

What Is Integralism?

Obsessing Over Elite College Admissions Is the Opposite of Progressive

The Lightness is Gone

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

Greg Lukianoff on How to Build a Culture of Free Speech

Hope for Guatemala, Redemption for the United States

Congress Asks: Are We Alone?

This Week at Persuasion

The Supreme Court Case That Exemplifies Our Culture War Blindness

Sohrab Ahmari on Post-Liberalism

This Week at Persuasion

America Has a Cruelty Problem

Keep Politics Out of Academic Hiring

Don't Give Up on the Dream of a Liberal Israel

Is Democracy More Resilient Than We Think?

The Madisonian Case Against Trump

Gestures

Dissent In Post-Covid China

This Week at Persuasion

How To Overhaul Higher Education

Democracy and the AI Revolution

What Are the Threats to Democracy Today?

Susan Neiman on Why Left ≠ Woke

Lessons from the Front

Humans Suck at Seeing Into the Future

The Prince

Episode 114: Tara Isabella Burton on Self Creation across the Ages

How Western Europe’s Far-Right Moderated

Selling the Army

This Week at Persuasion

Europe Takes a Page from the Populists

India's Failure

Slipping Past Taliban Censors

Colin Woodard on America’s Many Nations

The United Nations vs Free Speech

Episode 113: Yasmine El Rashidi on Egypt’s Fortunes

Biden's Antitrust Push

War and Peace

Not Just Putin

Ukraine Into NATO? Hold Your Breath

This Week at Persuasion

Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom

Obsessing Over Elite College Admissions Is the Opposite of Progressive

After Affirmative Action

Humane Liberalism Begins with Autonomy

Tribute to Dorothy Fields

Prigozhin's Other Rebellion

Episode 112: Hugh Howey on the Silo Series

Culture, Tyranny, and Universal Values

The Dark Side of Self-Making

Liberté, Disparité, Fraternité

Taking Exception: Poland's Anti-EU Stance

This Week at Persuasion

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

How Weak is America, Really?

Lessons From Early Advocates of Academic Freedom

Michael Walzer on Liberalism and its Critics

The Case Against Longtermism

Cultural Freedom in Mitteleuropa

Episode 111: Daniel Gordis on Israel at 75

Europe’s Move Towards Post-Populism

This Week at Persuasion

Polarization and U.S. Foreign Policy

The Case For Effective Altruism

Why Were We in Iraq?

Recalibrating Liberalism

The Best of Persuasion: 2023

Tim Mak on the Ukrainian Counteroffensive

Burn Down the Admissions System

Misery in Minsk

Episode 110: Ronnie Janoff-Bulman on the Moral Divide in U.S. Politics

Our “Succession” Obsession

How Not To Cancel Russia

Why Congress?

This Week at Persuasion

Would Poland Fight with Russia and Dance with China?

Putin Is More Dangerous than Ever

Deals with Devils

2001: A Space Odyssey

After Putin

Michael Lind Makes the Case for Economic Populism

Beijing's Global Media Offensive

The Case Against Banning TikTok

Episode 109: Andrew Hoehn and Thom Shanker on a New Age of Danger

The Campus Chasm on Ukraine

Why We Are In Ukraine

Dispelling Illusions over Taiwan

This Week at Persuasion

June 29: America's Public Forum on Social Trust, National Cohesion, and American Resilience

A Trump Pardon Won’t Save Us

Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder on Fighting Illiberalism, Right and Left

Guilty Until Proven Innocent in Ireland

Being 'That Dad' at Baseball Games

Summertime

One Thousand Days Detained

Jack Smith Changed My Mind On Prosecuting Trump

Episode 108: Brett Forrest on the Unusual Disappearance of an American FBI Source

Imperfect Splendor

This Week at Persuasion

Countering Our Political Coarseness

Much Of America’s Political Divide Is An Illusion

June 22: How Japan Wrestles with Refugees, Immigration, and Identity ft. Saburo Takizawa

Tomiwa Owolade on What We Get Wrong About Race

A Middle Way for Abortion

America’s Fiscal Frontier, Part III: The Monetary Soul of Empire

Mahler at St. Patrick's

What's Happening in Florida

Ukraine's Most Important Battle this Summer

When Tragedy Becomes Routine

Bring Back Music's Gatekeepers

This Week at Persuasion

The Lightness is Gone

New Rules for Neoliberalism?

Why Erdoğan Won

America’s Fiscal Frontier, Part II: The Peace Dividend

The ‘I’ in BIPOC

Three Composers Born in June, Plus a Coda

The Methods of Moynihan

The Pseudo-Ethics of Hackers

Episode 107: Christopher de Bellaigue on Making Flight Carbon-Friendly

The Enemy Next Door

This Week at Persuasion

Reconsidering 'Neoliberalism'

Jason Furman on the Future of the World Economy

The Freedom to Read

America’s Fiscal Frontier, Part I: The Foundations of Our Budgetary Dysfunction

Billy the Kid and Aaron Copland

J.S. Mill vs the Post-Liberals

Episode 106: Frank Costigliola on George Kennan

Opera for a Broken World

The Two Faces of J. Edgar Hoover

June 8: Taming the Russian Beast ft. Amb. Michael McFaul (Leaders' Circle)

This Week at Persuasion

Why Russians Support the War

Why Democratic Candidates Should Challenge Biden

Will Humanity Survive AI?

Know Your Enemies

Frontline Fighting and Flourishing

The Fault Lines of George Kennan

Putting a Price on Human Rights

Episode 105: Kim Sherwood on Her Double O Novel

Collective Guilt is the Most Indefensible Form of Cancel Culture

Georgia vs. Its People

This Week at Persuasion

Yearning for the USSR

In Turkey, the Stakes Are Just Too High

May 24: Author Elliot Ackerman on His New Novel "Halcyon"

NATO Membership for Ukraine

Who Holds the High Ground?

May 18: Hungary’s Long Slide toward Authoritarianism ft. Zsuzsanna Szelenyi (Leaders' Circle)

Israel’s Democratic Crisis

A Note from Jeffrey Gedmin

When Populism Succeeds

Episode 104: Blythe Roberson on Embracing the Open Road

The New Right Loves the State

This Week at Persuasion

خواندن خطرناک [Reading Dangerously]

Reading Dangerously

Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity

Georgian Nightmare

William Deresiewicz on the “Excellent Sheep” of the American Elite

The Free Speech Case for Section 230

Henry Kissinger at 100

What's an American?

Democrats Must Renew Their Allegiance to the Working Class

Episode 103: Charles Dunst on Defeating the Dictators

This Week at Persuasion

Mission Accomplished?

​​Focus on the Research, Not the Researcher

The Brilliance of Guo Pei

The Long Century

Ed Luce on an America—and a World—Divided

Crisis, Conflict, Turmoil

Checkmate

China’s Missing Million

Episode 102: Dana Sachs on Our Saviors at Sea

The Russian Choreographer Fascinated by America

It's Going to Be Biden

Prison or the History Books?

This Week at Persuasion

Not Your Grandmother’s Disinformation

Prisoners of the Opioid Crisis

When Conservatives Used to be Liberals

Valuing the Deep State: A Nine-Part Series by Francis Fukuyama

Timothy Garton Ash on Europe, Past and Present

Why We Created Harvard’s Academic Freedom Council

Free Press, Regardless

Exiles, Expression, Suppression

Episode 101: Ian Buruma on Three Legendary Fakes

The Autocrat Sliding into Your DMs

Heavyweight

Our Deep Blue Obsolescence

This Week at Persuasion

Gravedigger of Israeli Democracy?

25 Years for Criticizing the Kremlin

AI, Technology, and Equality

Ben Ansell on Why Politics Fail

Prepare for Iran's Nuclear Breakout

Our Deep Blue Moment

The Left, TikTok, and the World’s Biggest Police State

Yushchenko’s Advice for Zelenskyy

The Ghost at the Feast

May 18: Old & New American Songs: Fusion, Inclusion, and Social Progress

Episode 100: Robert D. Kaplan on Inescapable Tragedy

This Week at Persuasion

Russian Roulette

Les Misérables

Valuing the Deep State IX: Lessons from the Covid Crisis

Murtaza Hussain on How Immigrant and Minority Voters are Misunderstood

What's Missing From the Cultural Narrative About Gen Z

April 25: Author Greta Lynn Uehling on "Everyday War" in East Ukraine

Episode 99: Meredith Bagby on A New Kind of Astronaut

Young Ukraine

What Makes a Patriot?

Natasha Crampton on Building Responsible AI

Break the Monopolies!

This Week at Persuasion

How to Be Left Without Being Woke

Flickers of Democracy

Matthew Goodwin on Why the Last Decade of Politics Has Been So Bizarre

The Next Stage of Trumpism is Here

April 17: Do "Left" and "Right" Tell the Whole Story? Ft. Verlan and Hyrum Lewis

A Different Read on China

To Boost Democracy Abroad, Biden Needs a Real Strategy

Fueling Change in Iran

Episode 98: Derek Leebaert on FDR’s Circle of Four

This Week at Persuasion

Demining Ukraine

Why We Need a Serious Debate About Healthcare For Transgender Youth

Building Things

Martin Wolf on the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

A Shoutdown at Stanford

The Empire That Catherine Erased

The Iran That Could Be

The Wrong Way to Take Down Donald Trump

This Week at Persuasion

Can Baseball Survive the Computer Age?

The New York Times Is Finally Moving on From 2020

Episode 97: Adam Kirsch on Imagining Earth without Humans

Iraq, 20 Years Later

March 29: Why the Museum Matters ft. Daniel Weiss and Dorothy Kosinski

Jonathan Greenblatt on Anti-Semitism

Leaving China

Why Has the West Given Up on Aid?

March 27: France, Russia, and Ukraine, ft. French Deputé Benjamin Haddad (Leaders' Circle Event)

Propaganda (Almost) Never Works

The Legal Barriers to Ukraine-Russia Peace

Episode 96: Van Jackson on America’s Paradoxical Role in Asia

Waco Rising

This Week at Persuasion

Italy Needs Our Attention

The Left Case Against the "Restraint" Policy on Ukraine

Frans de Waal on Chimpanzee—and Human—Politics

The Illusion of a Frictionless Existence

Revisiting Broken Windows

As TIME Goes By

Erdoğan Is In Danger

Competing for Ukraine

This Week at Persuasion

The Ukraine War Has Transformed Europe—for Good

What Women Want—and Men Need

Why Middleware Is the Only Solution to Platform Power

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

Matthias Matthijs on the Future of Europe

Bring the War to Russia

India’s Lost Opposition

On the Frontlines of Ukraine's Cultural War

Anna Lembke on Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Episode 95: James E. Cronin on the Reinvention of the Liberal Democratic Order

At Gorbachev's Table

March 8: Race, Religion & Rebels: Why James Baldwin Still Matters

Four Who Made History

The Case For (Even More) Compromise

This Week at Persuasion

March 8: Women and Art in a Time of War

Safeguarding Ukraine’s Civil Society

The War is Changing Germany

Valuing the Deep State Part VIII: The Private Right of Action

Vincent Lloyd on What Happens When “Antiracism” Goes Wrong

Russia’s War in Ukraine: Putin’s Soviet Delusion

On War and Forgetting

Russia’s War in Ukraine: Views from the Region

Peru is a Warning

This Week at Persuasion

Episode 94: Shana Kushner Gadarian on Politics and the Pandemic

One Year Later

Think Like George Washington

Rachel Kleinfeld on Why America Isn’t About to Have a Civil War

Europe's New Conventional Wisdom (We Hope)

The Futility of Trigger Warnings

Don’t Forget About Iran

Keeping Our Nerve on Ukraine

Ghosts of Crimean War Past

This Week at Persuasion

Valuing the Deep State Part VII: Out-of-Control Bureaucracies

Episode 93: Frank Dikötter on China’s Uneven Rise

Rediscovering Our Shared American Values

Happy Birthday, Abe

Ro Khanna on the Progressive Case for Patriotism and Capitalism

Dark Times for Academic Freedom in the Sunshine State

Painting Our Principles

Chimes of Freedom

The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012

This Week at Persuasion

The New Leftist Latin America

Japan and the Russian Specter of War

Episode 92: Tom Dunkel on the Germans Sabotaging the Third Reich

The Case For Digital Minimalism

Richard Haass on Where America Went Wrong

When the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World

Why I Worry About Israeli Democracy

Black History, Black Classical Music

Three Cheers For Gradualism

The Iranian Struggle for Freedom: A Call for Global Solidarity

February 21: Russia’s War on Ukraine at Year One ft. Gen. (ret.) Philip Breedlove, Gen. (ret.) Ben Hodges, and Adm. (ret.) Jamie Foggo

How the Disinformation Gets Made

This Week at Persuasion

February 9: The Demands of the Iranian People ft. Amb. Samir Sumaida'ie & Roya Hakakian

What the Culture Wars Get Wrong

Twitter Just Caved To Modi

Episode 91: Dan Akst on the WWII Pacifists Who Revolutionized Resistance

Where Political Science Can Help Us Deal with Climate Change

February 8: "Women at War" Conversation with Dorothy Kosinski and Monika Fabijanska

Matt Bennett on The Democrats’ Image Problem

The Long War of Ideas

What Christopher Hitchens Knew

February 6: Election Reform in America ft. Katherine Gehl & Amb. James Glassman

Someone Else's Utopia

A Man of the Party

Winter in Kyiv

February 2: Vera Mironova on the Russia-Iran Axis (Leaders' Circle Event)

This Week at Persuasion

The Sources of Chinese Conduct

Japan's Zeitenwende

January 25: "Women at War" Conversation with Artist Alevtina Kakhidze

Episode 90: John Lahr on How Arthur Miller Captured American Life

Episode 90: John Lahr on How Arthur Miller Captured American Life

Episode 90: John Lahr on How Arthur Miller Captured American Life

The Red-Pill Pusher

Charles Kenny on the Material Progress of the Developing World

The Green Technology That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Rough Road to Ramstein

January 25: Author Beverly Gage on "G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century"

Towards a True 'Zeitenwende'

It’s Lonely in Russia

American Midnight

This Week at Persuasion

How to Think about Climate Policy

Episode 89: William Inboden on How Reagan Kept the Cold War Cold

Episode 89: William Inboden on How Reagan Kept the Cold War Cold

Episode 89: William Inboden on How Reagan Kept the Cold War Cold

How Evangelicals Learned to Stop Worrying...

Brandon Terry on King's philosophy

Bart Somers on Sustaining Diverse Cities in Tough Circumstances

USSR: Four Letters, Four Lies

How to Prosecute a Former President

New Year, New Alliance

Searching for Iran's Secular Heritage

Don't Ban Depictions of Muhammad From the Classroom

This Week at Persuasion

Ukraine Displaced

Reason To Believe

January 12 – March 21: “Women at War," an exhibition of works by leading women artists in Ukraine

January 6

Tabata Amaral on Brazil’s Future

Ukraine's Harvest of Sorrow

Guns Are Not Speech

The Problem with Primaries

Microchips and the Future of International Politics

What We Owe to Animals

This Week at Persuasion

Reasons for Optimism in 2023