Thank You For Being Some of Our Best Friends

In the final episode of the show, Khalil and Ben talk with Chicago poet laureate avery r. young. He’s the multitalented interdisciplinary artist behind the podcast’s theme song, ‘Lil Lillie.’ They discuss the story behind the song and how racial justice influences his work. Ben and Khalil also refl…

Samantha Irby is Quietly Hostile & Raucously Funny

Ben and Khalil get personal with author and TV writer Samantha Irby on this week's show. Her bestselling essay collections Wow, No Thank You and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life are super intimate, full of gory details, and laugh-out-loud funny. She joins Ben and Khalil to talk about her latest bo…

The End of Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court recently issued a decision banning race-conscious admission in higher education. In this episode, Ben and Khalil talk with Anurima Bhargava, who served in the Civil Rights Division of Obama’s Department of Justice focusing on education. Anurima also went to high school with Ben an…

Fantastic Future: Reimagining the American City

This week, Ben and Khalil are talking about the future of cities. Their guest, Toni Griffin, is an architect, urban planner, and artist. She teaches at the Harvard School of Design, where she leads the Just City Lab, a team focused on community revitalization in city planning. Toni joins Ben and Kh…

From The Last Archive: Acting Out

Here’s a special episode from another Pushkin show we love -- The Last Archive. In the 1930s, at a women's reformatory in upstate New York, an upstart social scientist made a study that launched the field of social network analysis. It was revolutionary, but missed something happening at the same t…

America’s Poverty is by Design

America is the richest country on earth, and yet we have the highest levels of poverty of any advanced democracy. Why is that? And what should we do about it? Matthew Desmond joins Ben and Khalil to discuss the rousing arguments of his new book Poverty, By America: we are all culpable for this prob…

Ben and Khalil Go South

Ben and Khalil take a trip down South to Sewanee University, otherwise known as the University of the South. The school’s history is rooted in the Confederacy, and Ben and Khalil look at how that history belongs to all of America. Through various conversations and excursions, they explore what it m…

The FBI’s War on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. needs no introduction. The man changed the course of American history, and paid the ultimate price for his work. But in Jonathan Eig’s biography, King: A Life, we learn more about his personal life and struggle to overcome his own doubts about the Civil Rights movement. E…

Immigrants Aren't the Problem

Immigration in America is a humanitarian crisis and a political disaster. It has been for years. In this episode, Khalil and Ben talk to immigration lawyer, artist and activist Carolina Rubio-MacWright about current immigration policy, and what’s happening today in cities like Chicago and New York …

Are We in a Civil War?

Jeff Sharlet started reporting from Donald Trump’s rallies in 2015, when his presidential campaign stoked a resurgence of white nationalism and white supremacy. Since then, Jeff has traveled the country exploring the growing threats and eruptions of political violence. He writes about these experie…