The Returns: Project X

Elon Musk has claimed that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat.” Paradoxically, Musk is also working to create artificial intelligence. Why? Jill Lepore tours through a century of imagined robot rebellions, and argues that these stories are never only about robots. So wh ...  Show more

In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a lot about something he called the “woke mind virus.” Where does the idea of a mind virus come from? Jill Lepore looks to Cold War science f ...  Show more

Presidential elections have taken place in America every four years since 1788, but the 2020 election was unlike anything we had experienced before. Amid a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a long overdue reckoning with systemic racism, Americans made their votes and voices heard ...  Show more

In the 2000 presidential election, results weren't known in one night, a week, or even a month. This week, we share an episode we loved from It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders that revisits one of the most turbulent elections in U.S. history and what it could teach us as we wait ...  Show more

We’ve always said that this series was about so much more than this election. As we’ve shown in the first four episodes, the voting issues of our past — and how we respond to them — pave the way forward, shaping future elections, including the history-making moment we are living ...  Show more

Our series on the Ideas Behind American Elections has reached 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan. David and Gary discuss whether Jimmy Carter was always doomed, what made Reaganomics different and how Reagan succeeded in being an optimist and a scaremonger at the same time. D ...  Show more