Frank Luntz: Behind the Polls

A Sociopath Explains Sociopathy

Patric Gagne is a sociopath–as are 5% of the population generally. Growing up, she reports she “mostly felt nothing.” When she was diagnosed in her early adulthood, she finally understood why she experienced life so differently than those around her. She got her PhD in Psychology and wrote her memoir, Sociopath to demystify disorders like psychopathy and sociopathy.

Gagne doesn’t hold back, sharing with us what it feels like to be a sociopath and what neurotypical people so often get wrong about these disorders. It's not every day we get to hear about sociopathy from someone who lives it, so settle in for an extended episode and a conversation like no other.

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Living in an Age of Grievance with Frank Bruni

Katie sat down with eminent journalist Frank Bruni in this spirited live conversation hosted by Temple Emanu-el’s Streicker Cultural Center earlier this month. While their jumping off point was Frank’s new book, The Age of Grievance, Katie and Frank covered a lot of ground: the current climate on college campuses, political violence, and the corrosive nature of cancel culture. Frank centers today’s events in a longer historical context that lends a surprising note of optimism.

Calling our current moment an “Age of Grievance” may seem almost too polite, given the coarsening of public discourse and the curated, angry echo chambers many of us find ourselves in. But Bruni wants us to remember that grievance used to be a constructive American virtue. Grievance gave us the Revolutionary War (the word grievance appears in the first amendment after all!) and many civil rights movements. These high points in our history can still guide us today.

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No BS: Advice for In and Out of the Office With Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen

How do you bring your personal values to your public life? This question has animated Jim VandeHei’s and Mike Allen’s long career together; first at Politico and then as they went on to launch Axios. It’s not an easy feat to pull off. Jim’s new book, Just the Good Stuff: No-BS Secrets to Success (No Matter What Life Throws at You) explains how they did it–and all the mistakes, triumphs, and unexpected breakthroughs along the way.

In this wide-ranging interview, Katie, Jim and Mike talk about media past, present, and future, Trump and the election, and the future of AI. You’ve heard interviews about all of these things before, of course. But in this extended episode these three keen observers get to dive deeper than usual. The rare space for this added depth brings us to very universal and human questions: amidst all the noise politically, culturally, and digitally, what can we control? Only ourselves. This conversation ponders how we can act individually in a way that leads to more freedom, more transparency, and more opportunity for more people.

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How to Feel Better with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau

You’ve probably heard the name Sophie Trudeau, best known as the glamorous wife of Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada. But Sophie is a whole lot more than that. In her new book, Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other, she candidly shares a lot about her life and struggles. But Sophie has also incorporated the best science and interviewed the leading researchers about how our brain handles life’s biggest challenges–her book tackles everything from mindfulness to the function of the vagus nerve. Her endless hope and practical approach to knowing ourselves is an invitation to curiosity, progress, and inner peace.

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Jonathan Haidt on the Great Rewiring of Childhood

Social Psychologist and NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness lays it out emphatically: kids are being very negatively affected by ubiquitous phone use. The research on what phones and their attendant apps are doing to our kids is devastating, and these spikes in depression, anxiety, and even self-harm correlate pretty exactly with the rise of internet-connected smartphone use.

The good news is that the answer to possibly reversing this trend is simple, if not easy. In this urgent conversation, Haidt lays out exactly what parents need to know to help protect and prepare their kids as they navigate this complex technological era.

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