Chris Blattman on War and Centralized Power

Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engin ...  Show more

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Coll ...  Show more

Chris Blattman is a professor at the University of Chicago studying the causes and consequences of violence and war. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Truebill: https://truebill.com/lex – Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 ...  Show more

We often suppose that wars are fought over things like resources, border disputes, and ideologies. My guest calls this "the spreadsheet approach to war" and argues that, in reality, such factors only come in as justifications for the much deeper drives at play.Mike Martin is a Se ...  Show more

Send us Fan MailJoin Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian, Professor Richard Overy for an insightful conversation on one of humanity’s most unsettling questions: Why do we wage war? In his book, Why War? Overy takes us on a journey across time, from the ancient battlefields of t ...  Show more

Send us Fan MailJoin Professor Jeffrey Sachs and political and media analyst Norman Solomon as they discuss Solomon’s important new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. Listen in as Solomon and Sachs explore the intricate interplay b ...  Show more