The 10 Best The Gray Area with Sean Illing Podcast Episodes
1) Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle
In the past few months, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” Th...Show More
2) Is modern society making us depressed?
“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In hi...Show More
3) Yuval Harari, author of “Sapiens,” on AI, religion, and 60-day meditation retreats
Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, “Sapiens,” was an international sensation. The Israeli historian’s mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark ...Show More
4) Best of: Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance
The introduction to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, hit me hard. In her investigation of how American politics and culture had collapsed into “an unbearable supernova of pe...Show More
5) How to make meaning out of suffering
Vox’s Sean Illing talks with David Wolpe, senior rabbi of the Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, about the role and nature of God, how religion and spirituality can address our modern problems, and how to m...Show More
6) What Ellen Pao saw coming
Ellen Pao had a rough 2015. She lost her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest and most powerful venture capital firms. She also stepped d...Show More
7) Men and boys are struggling. Should we care?
Sean Illing talks with author, researcher, and Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard V. Reeves about his new book Of Boys and Men, which documents the ways that males all over the industrialized...Show More
8) The art of attention (with Jenny Odell)
“For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience,” writes Jenny Odell. “And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimu...Show More
9) Is big tech addictive? Nir Eyal and I debate.
“How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?” That’s the opening line of the description for Nir Eyal’s bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Hooked...Show More
10) A new philosophy of love
Sean Illing talks with Carrie Jenkins about her new book Sad Love, and her call to rethink the shape and boundaries of romantic love. In this far-ranging discussion about the meaning of romantic love,...Show More