595. Why Don't We Have Better Candidates for ...

Insurance forms that make no sense. Subscriptions that can’t be cancelled. A never-ending blizzard of automated notifications. In this update of a 2025 episode, Stephen Dubner discovers where all this sludge comes from — and how much it’s costing us. SOURCES: Benjamin Handel, pro ...  Show more

New York is the latest state to legalize medical aid in dying. Stephen Dubner speaks with the governor who signed the law, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a death doula — and an ethicist who thinks the very idea is wrong. SOURCES: Kathy Hochul, governor of New York. Suzanne O'Br ...  Show more

Katherine Gehl, a former CEO and the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, and Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, apply his Five Forces framework to explain why U.S. politics are dysfunctional. They argue that the Republican and Democratic partie ...  Show more

Economist Daron Acemoglu likes to tackle big questions. He tells Steve how colonialism still affects us today, who benefits from new technology, and why democracy wasn’t always a sure thing.

In this episode, I talk to Forward Party’s founder Andrew Yang about the future of American democracy. Andrew shares the insights he’s learned from his presidential and mayoral campaigns. His major realization is that America’s two-party system is designed for polarization and dy ...  Show more

In the year of a Presidential election, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode investigate the murky world of American Elections on screen.Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 Presidential election, inspired many film lovers to reconnect with two films - John Frankenheimer’s 1962 political ...  Show more