The Permanent Questions With David Brooks

Carlos Eire arrived in Miami at age 11 in 1962, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Three years passed before his mother could join him, and he never saw his father again. This experience of dislocation profoundly shaped Eire’s work as a religious historian.  In his latest book, They Flew, Eire looks at early modern reports of miracles. Drawing on his own experience of moving between cultures and worldviews, he tries to imagine himself into the minds of those who claimed to have witnessed levitations, bilocations, and other impossible occurrences, and he asks what we can learn by taking these reports seriously. David Brooks talks with Eire about magic, empathy, and the past as a foreign country. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that obsession—and all the social division that comes with it. What if the clearest way out of our political crisis is taking politics less seriously? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with his old friend (and new boss), Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, about the pleasures and pitfalls of a life spent covering politicians, the limits of partisanship, and the need to see life from the redwood’s perspective. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at ⁠TheAtlantic.com/Listener⁠. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the assumption that physical reality is all there is. Which view is correct? In this episode of “The Permanent Questions,” self-described “spookiest” David Brooks talks with Shelly Kagan, a best-selling philosopher who insists souls do not exist—and that we don’t need them in order to embrace wonder, mystery, and human exceptionalism. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature. David and Haidt discuss the role of the emotions in moral decision making, how to design a system that produces less loathsome elites, and why AI is “the neutron bomb for education.”  Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What would it be like to wake up one day with the ability to greet the world with warmth, patience, grace, and affection? This is what happens to the main character in the Pulitzer Prize–winner Ayad Akhtar's magnificent new novel, The Radiance. It is a tale of spiritual transformation in which Akhtar gives a detailed description of our inner landscapes. David and Akhtar talk about what it's like to see the world with new eyes, and how difficult it is to move from the head to the heart. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For all of history, humans have been fascinated by the heavens above us. We’ve used the stars to navigate Earth, to predict the future, and to understand our place in the larger scheme of things. Changes in our view of the cosmos—from the Copernican revolution that “uncentered” the Earth to the discovery of the Big Bang and the recognition that the universe is expanding—have invariably changed our view of ourselves.  In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with the astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan about the latest scientific view of the universe and what it says about humanity’s place in the order of things. Natarajan is a world-renowned theoretical physicist who has made important breakthroughs in the study of black holes and dark matter; she is also a scholar of the history and philosophy of science and the author of Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.  Along the way, David and Natarajan discuss the place of emotion in scientific research, why science alone can’t solve human problems, and the greatest space movie ever made. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the debut episode of The Permanent Questions With David Brooks, David speaks with the philosopher Meghan Sullivan about perhaps the most important question of them all: How should we live our lives? Sullivan is a co-author of The Good Life Method, based on a popular course she teaches at Notre Dame. Leading a good life, she argues, means not just maximizing our positive impact in the world, but cultivating virtue within our own souls. Along the way, David and Sullivan discuss Iris Murdoch, finding bliss at CVS, and exercising our philosophical muscles before life slaps us in the face. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. “The Permanent Questions” is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How do you find your purpose? How do you confront your own mortality? How do you repair a broken community? There are a lot of podcasts about the latest developments in politics and finance, health and wellness, entertainment and tech. The Permanent Questions is a new show about the topics that never go away. Each week, the Atlantic staff writer David Brooks speaks with the world’s deepest thinkers about matters of enduring human concern. The Permanent Questions premieres on Sunday, September 13, and new episodes will appear every Sunday after that. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices