Inside the Hive

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Lis Smith, Democratic campaign veteran and author of the new memoir Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, which details her journey, the public one and the private one, through Democratic campaigns over the past 17 years, for candidates as varied as Jon Corzine, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and, most infamously, former governor Andrew Cuomo, whose lurid political demise she details down to the last moments of his time in office. A savvy political operator, Smith trains her sights on stubborn problems like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and what to do about President Joe Biden, who, despite his abysmal poll numbers, she says is preparing to come out swinging in advance of the midterms. “If the [midterms] are a referendum on Democrats, we will be screwed in November,” says Smith, but if Biden and his surrogates can effectively target Trump-tainted election deniers and antiabortion Republicans, “that’s a terrain we can win on. And that’s a switch that we need to flip—we need to flip that switch pretty soon. And we have the opportunity to now.” Smith, who helped take Buttigieg’s star to the national level, is now working with Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who went viral with a searing counterattack on anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans. Smith puts McMorrow on a short list of candidates, along with Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, to form the future of the party.Listen to Joe's record: "Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week’s episode of Inside the Hive first dives into the latest revelations from the January 6th committee, and explores what could happen next as the panel draws to a closeThen Chrysta Bilton, along with her husband Nick Bilton, join Emily Jane Fox to discuss “Normal Family,” Chrysta’s memoir that recounts her discovery of more than 35 biological siblings from the same sperm donor. She describes her colorful upbringing, the shock of a lifetime in finding out that she was perhaps unknowingly dating her half brother, and how this experience shaped her views on nature versus nurture Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet joins Inside the Hive to talk about his journey into the far-right world of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Qanon-ers and Trump cultists — who they are, what they’re saying, what they believe, and what their still-growing movement might portend (including the specter of civil war in America). Also: Willem Marx, a London-based contributor to Vanity Fair, discusses the fall of British PM Boris Johnson as well as his latest report on the undue influence of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs in the British establishment - including, allegedly, Johnson himself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, the former head of Planned Parenthood joins Emily Jane Fox to discuss abortion rights, contraception, and advocacy in the wake of Roe “I thought that at some point, there would be some group within the Republican party that would go, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too far,” she said. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week Inside the Hive features two guests focused on the Jan. 6 hearings. First, Daniel Goldman, former federal prosecutor and newly-announced candidate for New York's 10th congressional district, analyzes the findings of the Select Committee investigating the insurrection from the point of view of a lead lawyer in the first Trump impeachment. “If [Merrick Garland] doesn't charge him because Trump is a former president, then that is political,” Goldman says. “And so if you want to de-politicize the Department of Justice, you can't not charge him.”Second, Inside the Hive talks to Alex Holder, the British filmmaker whose exclusive access to Donald Trump and his family before, during and after Jan. 6 has turned his forthcoming documentary, Unprecedented, into explosive new evidence for the Committee and the filmmaker himself into a possible witness. After witnessing Trump’s “tone of belligerence," says Holder, “I predicted that [the Jan. 6 insurrection] was going to happen the night before.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive co-host Joe Hagan talks to Jason Selvig and Davram Steifler, the comedy duo known as The Good Liars, about their viral prank on the National Rifle Association in late May. Selvig, posing as an NRA ally, stood before Wayne LaPierre and thanked him for his continual “thoughts and prayers” for mass shootings, presenting a brutally exhaustive list. The duo has attended 15 Trump rallies, poking at the QAnon insanity inside, and were eyewitnesses to the insurrection on Jan. 6th—which they also managed to turn into pointed comedy. “You couldn't help but feel like they were getting ready for a battle reenactment or something,” says Steifler. "Everyone we stopped was like, ‘This is 1776.’” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Author Dave Cullen, who has been covering mass shootings in America for two decades, joins Emily Jane Fox for this week’s episode of Inside The Hive, to talk about the slow progress he has witnessed in how new groups are taking on the NRA for the first time, and what he is hearing from survivors of mass shootings about how they are dealing with the repeated trauma. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a key member of the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the Capitol attack, gives Inside the Hive an exclusive preview of next week’s primetime hearings. After nearly a year of investigating the insurrection, Raskin says the most surprising discovery has been "the role that money played, and the role of a financial motive behind all these events, to keep the money pouring in.” The committee, he promises, will also draw direct and indirect lines between “the top of the Republican hierarchy” and the "violent hooligans and street fascists” who overran the Capitol. But will Donald J. Trump himself be implicated? Raskin has said the former president will get his “comeuppance" but whether he’ll face direct criminal justice for his “premeditated” role in an attempted coup remains an open question. Tantalizingly, Raskin deflects on the question of whether former VP Mike Pence has spoken to the committee or might testify against Trump. "I can't get into it,” he says. Plus: Raskin offers a powerful message and emotional plea to Democrats demoralized by the political landscape facing the party going into the midterms. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The only public figure with the guts to confront cynical Republicans over gun laws and the Texas massacre was a defiant Democrat who the media class long ago dismissed: gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke. Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan grapple with the horrors of this week's events in Uvalde and what they say about our broken politics and national backslide. When rare instances of idealism and courage are framed by political elites as mere opportunism, is there any hope left? Where do we go from here? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running to be the state's next governor, joins Emily Jane Fox fresh on the heels of Tuesday's primary elections. In November, Shapiro, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, will face Republican Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed far-right candidate who wanted to overturn the 2020 election results, whom Shaprio called "extremely dangerous. Fox and Shapiro dive into his opponent's role in the January 6th insurrection and how to message to voters who believe in The Big Lie. Plus, Shapiro speaks to what he learned from Democrats' campaigning mistakes in 2016, why he believes freedom is on the ballot, and his thoughts on how to win in a swing state. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan are joined by Hive political reporter Abigail Tracy to talk about the plight of the Democratic Party leading into this year’s midterms. With the right savaging Democrats on the economy and culture-war issues, and a total loss of congressional power to the Trumpist right looming, what is the Democrats' message to voters and why isn't Joe Biden delivering it? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Rebecca Traister, feminist, author and New York Magazine contributor, talks to co-host Joe Hagan about the shocking Supreme Court leak that all but confirms the impending death of Roe v. Wade. Democratic leadership from President Joe Biden to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi have failed, Traister says, to formulate a "robust and morally persuasive message” to counteract the decades-long march of anti-choice Republicans who are set on reengineering society to the past. With consequential elections on the horizon, the fall of Roe could very well mean the toppling of other progressive rulings, from the right to contraception to marriage equality and even interracial unions. Traister finds slivers of hope in a new generation of progressive female voices who are forcefully connecting abortion rights to economics, class, and race as they face "an era that none of us can imagine.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Author James Pogue talks to cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan about the so-called New Right, the intellectual movement congealing around tech billionaire and MAGA mega-donor Peter Thiel and the Trumpist GOP, which he wrote about for this month’s Vanity Fair. After embedding himself with the vanguard of intellectuals whose reactionary politics, antagonism for democracy and visions of retro-patriarchy inform the agendas of people like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, Pogue demystifies fringe ideas like the “black pill,” “trad wives,” and “ball tanning." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Nick Bilton--who literally wrote the book on Twitter--returns to dissect why Elon Musk is trying to buy the company, what employees and investors are talking about behind closed doors, and whether or not he thinks the deal will even go through. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Bill Browder joins Emily Jane Fox to talk about how governments around the world can more effectively turn the screws on Russia, and how, if the Russian people begin to see Putin as what Browder calls a "failed, corrupt, tinpot dictator," he could be stripped of his power. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Florida Congressman Charlie Crist, former Republican and one-time governor, about the culture wars emanating from his home state and specifically, from Governor Ron DeSantis. As DeSantis passes discriminatory new laws targeting gay and trans people, generating partisan bile for a potential presidential run, Crist is betting DeSantis is a “paper tiger” who is weaker than he appears. "I think he's terribly vulnerable,” he says. “[His] support is a mile wide and an inch deep.”Taking a page from Biden’s playbook against Trump in 2020, Crist thinks voters secretly want civility and not bullying, Disney and not DeSantis, even if current polling shows DeSantis trouncing Crist in a theoretical match up. "I'm an optimist, I'm idealistic, and I believe good will triumph over bad,” Crist says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan digs into the latest on the Jan. 6 story with CBS New correspondent Robert Costa, who, along with legendary reporter Bob Woodward, broke the news that the House Committee investigating the insurrection discovered a 7 hour and 37 minute gap in Donald Trump’s call logs from that day. Costa explains the importance of that Watergate-like hole in Trump's story — when he was MIA while the Capitol burned — and what it may portend for the investigation. He also defends the Department of Justice against critics who believe AG Merrick Garland isn’t doing enough to probe Trump’s involvement in an attempted coup. “Maybe we just don't know the full story because they work like sharks,” he says. "They're underwater in a way congressional committees are not.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

People were grappling with "fake news" long before it became Donald Trump's favorite term.Fake news might feel new — but the concept has a long twisted history in the United States, as Andie Tucher, a Columbia Journalism School professor and author of the new book "Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History," tells Inside the Hive cohost Emily Jane Fox this week. How did we get to this moment, with its toxic mix of hyperpartisanship, disinformation, and seemingly endless turmoil? What is the role of social media, and of Donald Trump and Fox News in making our understanding of reality feel so dire? Tucher also explains how Democrats and Republicans, as well as liberal media and conservative media, communicate about truth differently, and explores how we can restore faith in our sources of news. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

CNN senior international correspondent Matthew Chance flew to Kyiv in January as Russia began amassing troops on Ukraine's borders, and was in the capital on February 24 when it launched its brutal assault. He tells Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan about covering a war that has transformed a country overnight, sending millions fleeing and others into the resistance as Russia targets civilians in its quest to take over the country. Chance describes what he witnessed, and what it’s like to be a journalist on the ground, as fellow reporters lose their lives. He also mulls what the war could mean for the global order, and the hopeless quagmire Vladimir Putin now finds himself in. Now recouping in London, Chase says the Kyiv he last saw was the tragic shell of a formerly vibrant metropolis, a hollowed-out death trap awaiting Russian forces with "a javelin anti-tank missile in every window.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox talks to The Hive's editor and resident Russia-Ukraine expert Miriam Elderabout what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. As Russia escalates its war in Ukraine, including its bombing of a maternity and children's hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Elder talks through the human toll of this war: the impossible choices families are having to make, the horrors children are living through, the impact on a pediatric cancer hospital, and what Russian families are facing at the same time. Then, author Rebecca Fox Starr stops by to discuss how we talk about hard things with children, teach kids to take in events with empathy and how we process our own feelings about what is happening in this world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan talk to an expert on the ultrarich oligarchs behind Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Dartmouth sociologist and author Brooke Harrington. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has implicated Putin’s feudal system of corrupt oligarchs, rallying the West to trying to seize their offshore bank accounts and superyachts. Taking their stuff could weaken them, but Harrington says tarnishing and destroying their social status in London and New York, where they’ve built opulent fiefdoms, may be just as effective. Also, Harrington tells of her efforts to join the White House’s new anti-oligarch task force, KleptoCapture—with distressing results.Follow our guest, Brooke Harrington:https://twitter.com/EBHarringtonFollow Emily and Joe on Twitter:https://twitter.com/emilyjanefoxhttps://twitter.com/joehagansays Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Russia expert Nina Khrushcheva and Trump impeachment hero Alexander Vindman explain what is driving Putin's assault on Ukraine — and how Republicans also have blood on their hands.Cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan interview two leading experts about Russia's invasion of Ukraine — how it happened and how it could reshape the world as we know it. First, Nina Krushcheva, a Russia expert and professor at the New School in New York, takes us inside the mind of Vladimir Putin, how he was underestimated and whether the cold, calculated ex-KGB man has finally succumbed to a world-historic megalomania. Next, Hagan talks to Alexander Vindman, the former Army Lt. Colonel and outspoken participant in Trump's first impeachment trial that revolved around the then president's attempts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine. Vindman reserves his harshest criticism for Putin sympathizers in the GOP: “These folks have blood on their hands. They're going to own this.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan talks to renowned writer, culture critic, and scholar Lucy Sante, whose essay in the February issue of Vanity Fair describes her transition at age 67. Sante expands on her many stages of personal revelation—how the “egg” was cracked—and the relief and liberation she experienced in embracing her long-denied gender as well as the challenges she still faces, personally, socially, and romantically. While she works on a new book about her self discovery, the author of nonfiction classics like Low Life and Factory of Facts is navigating the misunderstood nexus of gender and sexuality with her signature erudition, wit and curiosity. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan examine potential cracks in the American ice. On one side of the aisle, Republicans Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell appear to have distanced themselves from the Jan. 6 insurrection. On the other, Democrats have begun backing away from COVID restrictions. Are these maneuvers for political advantage in advance of the 2022 midterms, or signs of something more? Plus: Fox and Hagan weigh in on this year's Oscar nominations. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan talks to Hive media correspondent Joe Pompeo, who helps unwind the Succession-worthy melodrama around the departure of CNN president Jeff Zucker in the wake of the ouster of anchor Chris Cuomo, which itself came in the wake of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s resignation following accusations of sexual harassment. How does one ouster connect to the other? And was the reason Zucker gave for his exit — failing to disclose a romantic relationship with a top CNN executive — the true reason he left or is there something more at work? Pompeo explores the possibilities and reveals new details. All this and the drama surrounding Joe Rogan too on the latest episode of Inside the Hive. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The week’s episode of Inside the Hive gets to the heart of this puzzling economic moment—with inflation on the rise and the supply chain a mess but the rest of the fundamentals stronger than they have been in years. Economist Beth Ann Bovino breaks it down and looks ahead to what comes next. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s Inside the Hive, cohost Joe Hagan and Paul Begala, CNN analyst and former counselor to Bill Clinton, discuss the woeful state of the Biden White House and the fate of the Democrats, including the latest defeat over the Voting Rights Act and the filibuster. With Biden trying to be both a “normal” President and an FDR change agent for the ages, he’s managed to do neither and please no one as his polls sink. Begala offers his analysis and advice for rebuilding Democratic prospects in the midterms and countering a Republican Party hellbent on destroying democracy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The CDC's messaging around Omicron has been a disaster, and with cases surging and despair on the rise, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina stops by this episode of Inside the Hive to give a clear picture of what we should know about the virus right now. The epidemiologist, professor and author of the popular "Your Local Epidemiologist" newsletter answers all of our questions about when the variant might peak, what comes next, what we should know about schools, and where to find some silver linings. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox are joined by their colleague Abigail Tracy to talk about what's next for the January 6 commission, what is at stake in an election year, and whether it will practically mean anything to half of the country. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan discuss strategies for surviving holiday isolation and anxiety during the COVID resurgence. In that spirit, Hagan talks to Don Was, famed record producer and president of Blue Note Records, about the transporting power of music, taking listeners through his own personal playlist of favorite recordings and the stories behind them, from Norah Jones and Iggy Pop to the Wayne Shorter and Charles Lloyd. A holiday special for the news weary. (Find an exclusive playlist on Spotify under "Inside the Hive Holiday Special.")https://open.spotify.com/playlist/26EFfPAJpggIMELvWuy30u?si=c59e5615593c46e9 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Katie Couric, legendary onetime cohost of NBC’s Today show, talks to Inside the Hive's Joe Hagan about her frank and searing new memoir, Going There, which pulls back the curtain on her starry and sometimes starcrossed life and career. Couric recounts the sexist culture of network TV but also examines her own place in a culture that allowed alleged abusers like Matt Lauer, Jeff Fager and Les Moonves (Couric allies all) to thrive. There’s plenty of blame to go around - including Couric's charge, in her book, that Hagan’s 2007 cover story on Couric in New York magazine was a “hit job.” Hagan and Couric visit the spirits of media Past, Present and Yet to Come. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox explore the crossroads of art and politics, discussing Hagan’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Hollywood director and democratic socialist Adam McKay, and Fox’s new profile of Hunter Biden, the son of the President of the United States who has taken up painting and developed a lucrative career in the shadow of ethical questions and his own lurid personal history. One wants to change the world with movies; the other wishes the world would just leave him alone. An exclusive peek behind the stories. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan invites resident Beatles fanatics Miriam Elder and Mike Hogan, Hive executive editor and VF.com digital director, respectively, to analyze, review, and otherwise obsess on Peter Jackson’s sprawling 7.8-hour Beatles docuseries Get Back, available on Disney+. From the George Harrison psychodrama to the John-Paul balancing act to the “fifth Beatle” to Ringo’s drumming to what’s up with Yoko, this is the conversation you need whether you’ve seen one, three, or none of the episodes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan hash out the big Thanksgiving dinner-table talking points, from the confounding economy to Joe Biden’s political fortunes to what movies and TV shows everybody needs to watch. A survival guide and an offer of gratitude. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell starts up this week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Vanity Fair correspondents Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman about their reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—what we know, what we don’t know, and what the whole sordid affair tells us about power and sexism in America. Grigoriadis’s latest podcast series, Fallen Angel: The Victoria’s Secret Story, details the fascinating history of the lingerie chain and the cultural damage it did to a generation of women, including its own models. Sherman, a featured voice, explains how Ohio-based owner Les Wexner came under Epstein’s spell and helped finance his predatory designs on women and girls. The ironies are rich: “This man who was so connected to Jeffrey Epstein is also the man who was making that lingerie that young girls were coveting,” observes Grigioriadis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pod Save America host Jon Favreau stops by to talk about his new podcast series, Offline, about the ways in which the internet is changing and possibly breaking everything. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan reviews the news with Miriam Elder, executive editor of the Hive, examining Tuesday's election results and what they portend for Democrats and President Joe Biden. Are voters really afraid of critical race theory, or was Virginia's Terry McAuliffe just a terrible candidate? Also: What’s a metaverse, and will it save us from ourselves or become just another hothouse for the culture wars? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Hill House House founder and C.E.O. Nell Diamond talks with Emily Jane Fox about creating an "it" item on Instagram, building a community around a commodity, and how to get direct to consumer right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk how climate change, shipping delays and local school boards could impact midterm elections. Plus: what they're watching and reading to get through the darkness. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Matthew Dowd, former Bush campaign adviser turned analyst, has spent his career behind the scenes. But now he’s running as a Democrat for lieutenant governor of Texas in 2022—with eyes locked on hard-right incumbent Dan Patrick, the man responsible for pushing through the infamous voter-suppression and antiabortion bills that have galvanized Republicans and alarmed Democrats. On this week’s Inside the Hive, Dowd analyzes the state of the Democratic Party and makes the case that if Texas can be turned blue (finally), the spread of Trumpism can be stopped nationally too. And even if the Biden administration can’t pull out of its current slump, he argues, Democrats can still beat Republicans at the state level. Dowd weighs in on Biden, congressional Democrats, Beto O’Rourke—and his favorite Matthew McConaughey film. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about what COVID attitudes feel like in different cities, what the Facebook whistleblower revealed about social media algorithms, and debate whether or not we should ever talk about Trump again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair tech correspondent Nick Bilton speaks with cohost Joe Hagan about the recent leaks from Facebook that reveal the company knew of the toxic impact of their platforms, including Instagram, on users, especially teenage girls. In a world in which the social media giants—FAANG, or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—are too rich and powerful to be contained by limp political and regulatory systems, “we’re left to the wolves,” says Bilton. After covering the social media world for a decade, Bilton says the only way to beat the media giants is to hack the system—ourselves—by reprogramming our behaviors, which are the literal coins of the social media realm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Julián Castro, onetime Democratic presidential candidate and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Barack Obama, joins Inside the Hive to discuss the hard-right push on guns, abortion, and voting in Texas, which has become a blueprint for recalcitrant Trumpist states, and what Democrats are going to do about it. Castro is worried about what he calls Biden’s relatively weak leadership—especially his handling of the border crisis. “My hope is that the Biden administration is going to reverse course on this very soon,” he says. He also sketches out a scenario in which his former competitor, Beto O’Rourke, runs for governor of Texas in 2022 and helps Democrats retake power after years of dashed hopes: “I believe that he has a shot to beat Greg Abbott.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, photographer and author Gillian Laub talks about her beautiful new book, in which she documents her family’s love and their divide over President Trump. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, co-host Joe Hagan talks to novelist Elliot Ackerman, a veteran of both the Afghan and Iraq wars, on the meaning of 9/11 and the long-term impact on American life, politics and culture. A critic of the Biden administration’s exit from Afghanistan, Ackerman has struggled with feelings of bitterness over the wars that defined his life and redefined the nation. As media and politics have become more extreme and polarized in the 20 years since 9/11, the country has become more cynical and demoralized, less able to unify in a crisis. An optimist in a pessimistic time, Ackerman looks for signs of hope in America's founding ideals--enlightenment, reason--even if the country never quite lives up to them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the wake of the shocking Supreme Court move that has allowed Texas to effectively ban abortion, cohost Joe Hagan conducts back to back interviews with Amy Hagstrom Miller, of Whole Women’s Health, which operates abortion clinics in Texas, and Wendy Davis, a veteran of Texas politics and founder of Deeds Not Words, a nonprofit committed to gender equality. Addressing the law and its ramifications for women (and especially women of color), Miller and Davis bring front line news and historical context to this demoralizing moment in the years-long battle for women’s reproductive rights. They also consider the political fallout and offer ideas for a path forward in what is sure to be a long and rocky road ahead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan analyze the latest bad news from Afghanistan and the pandemic resurgence sweeping the country, especially Florida. Twenty years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in search of Al Qaeda, was a bloody and chaotic exit the only possibility? When Donald Trump can’t convince his own followers to get vaccinated (he was booed for suggesting as much), has the weaponized ignorance he helped foment finally gone rogue? How will these world-historical events be woven into our politics? Plus: a touch of good news with a bonus clip from a newly unearthed live recording of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan talks to Saad Mohseni, chief executive of the MOBY Group, which has been broadcasting television news and entertainment programming in Afghanistan since 2004. As the Taliban take over the country following the US’s chaotic exit last week, the fate of Mohseni’s media outlet in Kabul, staffed with 450 Afghans, hangs in the balance. Will the Taliban shut down or take over the TV network? Even as Mohseni looks for signs of hope in a young population weened on TV and Internet access (including the Taliban themselves), he remains wary of the Taliban's extremism, misogyny and censorship and expresses anger at the Biden administration’s handling of the pullout, which has left his beloved country to a grim fate after decades of cynical US foreign policy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman joins cohost Joe Hagan to discuss the “Floridization” of conservative politics, from the hanging chads of the 2000 election to Trump’s “Southern White House” in Palm Beach to Governor Ron DeSantis’s ostensible 2024 campaign slogan, “Make America Florida.” The Hive correspondents explore the history of tabloid and conservative media in Florida and the inevitable merger of the two in the form of Trumpism, expanding and riffing on Hagan’s feature in the September issue of Vanity Fair, “Postcards from the Edge." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan discuss the latest COVID wave and how it’s affecting our health, social lives, politics, and summer plans. Mask mandates are back, and not even Barack Obama can throw a birthday party on Martha’s Vineyard without it becoming a national incident. Also discussed: the Tokyo Olympics; what we’re reading on the beach this summer; and what you’ll find inside the newest issue of Vanity Fair. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices