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The Gray Area with Sean Illing

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The Gray Area with Sean Illing
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  • What the climate story gets wrong
    The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling faster than anyone predicted. Real progress is happening. It’s just not happening in the way we imagine it. Sean’s guest today is Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data and author of Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change. They discuss why our picture of the planet is so distorted, why despair can be as dangerous as denial, and what a truly energy-abundant, livable future could look like. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling) Guest: Hannah Ritchie, author of Clearing the Air We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you thought of this episode at [email protected] or leave a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members This episode was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • The Great Enshittening
    Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads. Services that used to be free, but are now behind paywalls. It’s not your imagination — it’s enshittification, the process by which good platforms turn bad… and it’s starting to happen outside the internet as well. Sean’s guest today is Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. They discuss how the web became enshittified, why monopolies are the true engine behind our digital decay, and what it would mean to build a freer, fairer, and more human internet. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling) Guest: Cory Doctorow (https://x.com/doctorow), author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you thought of this episode at [email protected] or leave a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • America chose violence. Now what?
    Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about how democracies unravel from within, and a professor at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Walter talks to Sean about the warning signs she’s seeing in the US, why polarization and party identity become combustible, and what lessons we can draw from other countries. They also discuss what an American civil war might look like in the 21st century, the social and informational dynamics that accelerate breakdown, and whether America still has a path away from the brink. Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling) Guest: Barbara Walter, professor at UC San Diego and author of How Civil Wars Start We would love to hear from you. To tell us what you thought of this episode, email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • What's worth remembering?
    We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true or not — are what we end up calling our life, and sometimes, our collective history. Sean’s guest today is Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. The two discuss the strange alchemy of remembering and how the stories our minds create end up creating us. Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling) Guest: Charan Ranganath, neuroscientist and author of Why We Remember We would love to hear from you. To tell us what we thought of this episode, email us at [email protected] or leave us a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your comments and questions help us make a better show. And you can watch new episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube.Listen to The Gray Area ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • Why TikTok matters
    This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and what happens when human editors inside the company can override the algorithm. A few days after they spoke, TikTok was in the headlines again. So they jumped on a follow-up call to unpack the latest twists in the saga of who will ultimately control the app's US-operations. Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling) Guest: Emily Baker-White, reporter and author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok The Gray Area has been nominated for a Signal Listener’s Choice Award. Vote for The Gray Area here: https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2025/shows/genre/thought-leadership We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected] or leave a voicemail at 1-800-214-5749. Your questions and feedback help us make a better show. Watch full episodes of The Gray Area on YouTube. Listen ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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About The Gray Area with Sean Illing

The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday. From the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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