This week’s newsletter is a brief advertisement: As of this week, I have a new show, “Interesting Times,” with fresh episodes every Thursday, and I want to encourage you to subscribe.
The idea behind “Interesting Times” — which will be available in audio and video — starts with a case that I made soon after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory: I argued that we have entered a much more open and uncertain historical epoch, that the post-Cold War era has been left behind decisively and that the set of challenges and opportunities before us look very different from what we faced under George W. Bush or Barack Obama or even Trump in his first term.
That’s the terrain in which I’m hoping to have conversations. Some of them, like our debut episode, with Oren Cass, will be focused on the immediate policy shifts in which this new era is made manifest — in this case, Trump’s protectionist push and the rearrangement of world trade that it portends. Others will take on the big arguments and long-term trends that will give the open future its eventual shape: The rise of artificial intelligence, the possibility of religious revival (Christian or otherwise), the quest to renew the Western left, the struggles over mass migration, the effects of digital life on society and culture and (of course) the ongoing birthrate crash.
The first interview, like the three I did under the aegis of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast, is with an important figure on the Trump-era right, but the new show isn’t going to be just a conservative talking to other conservatives: I hope to talk to Democratic politicians, progressive intellectuals, far-left radicals, the works.
The goal is for the interviews to complement my writing and to enrich the portrait that I’m trying to offer of our strange and getting-stranger world.
And a final note — for regular readers familiar with my long-running arguments about decadence, there’s a natural question: Does the concept of “Interesting Times” represent a break with my prior view about drift, repetition, boredom and stagnation as defining features of our age?
The answer is yes, at least to some degree, which is one reason this newsletter no longer has a This Week in Decadence item at the end of every installment. Not that decadence has disappeared (especially at the movies), and there are definitely futures in which current disturbances could yield a deepening of stagnation down the road — in which the A.I. revolution makes online culture even more recursive and repetitive, the populist era ultimately produces more gridlock and political incapacity, and new technologies weave thicker cocoons around human creativity and independence.
But for this moment, at least, we have entered a time of technological acceleration rather than stagnation. Our demographic winter is deepening too quickly to be considered sustainably decadent — threatening the disappearance of nations, not just their slow decay. Our religious landscape has more experiments and surprises and fewer predictable culture-war debates. And our political and economic situation — well, you can look at the headlines to see how comfortable sclerosis has yielded to something much more uncertain and chaotic.
Or you can give this week’s episode a listen and then (hopefully) subscribe.
