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.
| Title | Date published | ||
| Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth. | 2024-10-14 | ||
| Your mind needs chaos | 2024-10-09 | ||
| Musician Laraaji on the origin of creativity | 2024-10-08 | ||
| Is AI creative? | 2024-10-07 | ||
| Happiness isn’t the goal | 2024-09-30 | ||
| A message from Sean | 2024-09-27 | ||
| What if we get climate change right? | 2024-09-23 | ||
| Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence | 2024-09-16 | ||
| Why cynicism is bad for you | 2024-09-09 | ||
| Poetry as religion | 2024-09-02 | ||
| The jazz musician’s guide to the universe | 2024-08-26 | ||
| Revisiting the "father of capitalism" | 2024-08-19 | ||
| Breaking our family patterns | 2024-08-12 | ||
| Why Orwell matters | 2024-08-05 | ||
| The timebomb the founding fathers left us | 2024-07-29 | ||
| Swear like a philosopher | 2024-07-22 | ||
| Taking Nietzsche seriously | 2024-07-15 | ||
| What India teaches us about liberalism — and its decline | 2024-07-08 | ||
| 1992: The year politics broke | 2024-07-01 | ||
| The existential struggle of being Black | 2024-06-24 |