Philosopher Alexandra Plakias says there are no awkward people, only awkward situations. In her book, Awkwardness: A Theory, Plakias explains the difference between embarrassment and awkwardness, how awkwardness can be used by people in power as a way of breaking social norms, and what exactly is happening when people aren’t on the same social script.

Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling), host, The Gray Area

Guest: Alexandra Plakias, author, Awkwardness: A Theory

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This has been an unusual week. Sean and the TGA team are still sifting through it all and figuring out what to think about the presidential election. In the meantime, our colleague Jonquilyn Hill has leapt into action. She and her team from the Explain It to Me podcast collected lots of listener questions in the aftermath of Trump's victory, and took them to the Vox reporters who know the most about what happened and what it all means. We'll be back with a new episode on Monday. Until then, check out Explain It to Me.

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Wow, what a week. The country has a new president-elect, and our listeners have a ton of questions about what comes next. Why did Latino voters swing right? How will Democrats respond? What’s going to happen to Donald Trump’s court cases? Will Trump really do all the things he said he would during the campaign? Host Jonquilyn Hill sits down with Vox correspondents Christian Paz, Ian Millhiser, and Zack Beauchamp to answer all that and more.

Submit your questions — about politics, or, if you need a break, about anything else — by calling 1-800-618-8545. You can also submit them here.

Credits:

Jonquilyn Hill, host

Sofi LaLonde and Gabrielle Berbey, producers

Cristian Ayala, engineer

Carla Javier, supervising producer

Caity PenzeyMoog, Anouck Dussaud, and Sarah Schweppe, fact checkers

Jorge Just, Julia Longoria, and Natalie Jennings, editors 

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What does it mean to be "woke"? It's become a catchall term to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. As a result, anytime you venture into an argument about “wokeness,” it becomes hopelessly entangled in a broader cultural battle. Today’s guest, journalist and professor Musa al-Gharbi, helps us untangle "wokeness" from its fraught political context. The author of a new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, al-Gharbi explains what effects the movement is and isn’t having on our society.

Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling), host, The Gray Area

Guest: Musa al-Gharbi (@Musa_alGharbi), author, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,

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What can ancient Rome teach us about American democracy?

The Roman Republic fell for a lot of reasons: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues. It sounds a lot like the problems America is facing today.

This week's guest, historian Edward Watts, tells us what we can learn about America's future by studying Rome's past.

Host: Sean Illing, (@SeanIlling), host, The Gray Area

Guest: Edward Watts, author, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome.

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Sean Illing speaks with one of his heroes: Werner Herzog.

Herzog is a filmmaker, poet, and author of the memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The two discuss "ecstatic truth," a term invented by Herzog to capture what he's really after in his work, why he's interested in Mars, and whether he thinks humanity is destroying itself.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area

Guest: Werner Herzog, author, Every Man for Himself and God Against All

This episode was originally published in October of 2023.

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

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How important is complexity? At The Gray Area, we value understanding the details. We revel in complexity. But does our desire to understand that complexity sometimes over-complicate an issue?

Journalist and bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks so.

This week on The Gray Area, Sean talks to Coates about his new book The Message, a collection of essays about storytelling, moral clarity, and the dangers of hiding behind complexity.

The Message covers a lot of ground, but the largest section of the book — and the focus of this week’s conversation — is about Coates’s trip to the Middle East and the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Coates argues that the situation is not as complicated as most of us believe.

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In part three of our series on creativity, guest host Oshan Jarow speaks with philosopher of neuroscience Mark Miller about how our minds actually work. They discuss the brain as a predictive engine that builds our conscious experience for us. We’re not seeing what we see. We’re predicting what we should see. Miller says that depression, opioid use, and our love of horror movies can all be explained by this theory. And that injecting beneficial kinds of uncertainty into our experiences — embracing chaos and creativity — ultimately make us even better at prediction, which is one of the keys to happiness and well-being.

 This is the third conversation in our three-part series about creativity.

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Sean revisits his interview with musician Laraaji, a pioneer of new age music who has recorded more than 50 albums since he was discovered busking in a park by Brian Eno. Laraaji and Sean discuss inspiration, flow states, and what moves us to create.

This is the second conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity.

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What is the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence? Creativity feels innately human, but is it? Can a machine be creative? Are we still being creative if we use machines to assist in our creative output?

To help answer those questions, Sean speaks with Meghan O'Gieblyn, the author of the book "God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning." She and Sean discuss how the rise of AI is forcing us to reflect on what it means to be a creative being and whether our relationship to the written word has already been changed forever.

This is the first conversation in our three shows in three days three-part series about creativity.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Meghan O'Gieblyn (https://www.meghanogieblyn.com/)

References:

God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn (Anchor; 2021)

Being human in the age of AI. The Gray Area. (Vox Media; 2023) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-human-in-the-age-of-ai/id1081584611?i=1000612148857

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

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Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that?

We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He offers his thoughts on optimism and pessimism and walks Sean Illing through the differences between what we think makes us happy versus what actually does.

Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)

Guest: Paul Bloom (@paulbloom), psychologist, author and writer of the Substack Small Potatoes

Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now

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Sean Illing has a special message for all you listeners: Look at me!

We’ve made our first-ever video episode. See Sean in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari. Watch it with your friends and family and your friend’s families and their family friends. It’s on YouTube right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhx1sdX2bow

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