The Free Press: Conversations with Coleman

Why You Shouldn’t Be Scared of AI

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:01:49 GMT

Every generation has its bubble. Tulips in 1630s Amsterdam. Railways in 1840s England. Dot-com in 1999. And in each case, the story we tell afterward is roughly the same: irrational mania, easy money, and a crash that was obvious in retrospect. But what if that story is more complicated than it looks?

Aman Verjee has spent years studying the biggest fina…

What People Who Choose Assisted Death Actually Say

Coleman Hughes — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:01:41 GMT

Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016, with a promise that it would be “narrow, cautious,” and reserved for those within months of death. It hasn’t stayed that way. The law has since expanded to cover people with chronic but nonterminal conditions, people with disabilities, and people whose suffering is entirely psychological. Now a parliamentary comm…

Michael Shellenberger on the Psychology of Left-Wing Violence

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:02:22 GMT

Michael Shellenberger is the kind of person with the intellectual honesty to change his mind. He’s a former progressive activist who changed his tune publicly on nuclear energy, homelessness, and a bunch of other issues where the left-wing consensus turned out to be wrong. He’s also the author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and runs Public, one …

The War Before the War: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:01:54 GMT

Most people with strong opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have never heard of the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939. That’s a problem, because it’s arguably the moment when the modern conflict took shape.

Historian and political analyst Oren Kessler spent five years researching this period, resulting in his book Palestine 1936, one of the only compr…

Walter Russell Mead on Christian Zionism, the ‘Israel Lobby’ Myth, and the Psychology of Antisemitism

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:01:57 GMT

On one of the most polarizing questions in American foreign policy—U.S. support for Israel— historian and geopolitical expert Walter Russell Mead argues that nearly everyone has the story wrong.

The standard explanations focus on lobbying power, campaign donations, and media influence. But, as Mead explains, this ignores the fact that American interest i…

The Case for Drinking Alcohol

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:16:09 GMT

I am not a big drinker by most people’s standards. I don’t do shots. I rarely drink alone. But a few times a week, usually over dinner or a long conversation with a friend, I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer. And over the years, I’ve noticed that those moments have a quality that’s hard to replicate any other way. Friendships that started over drinks i…

Who Decides What’s True on Wikipedia?

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:02:01 GMT

I have noticed firsthand the way that Wikipedia—the internet’s encyclopedia, widely treated as an objective reference—can become, in small but persistent ways, an ideological battleground. After I testified to Congress against reparations for slavery, my own Wikipedia page became a site of competing edits. At one point, an editor removed the fact—well-d…

The Liberal Case for American Power

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:02:23 GMT

Shadi Hamid came of age in an environment where America was often seen as a font of destruction, the root cause of the world’s problems rather than their solution. He marched against the Iraq War. He read Noam Chomsky. Like many on the left, he saw the United States primarily as a source of global harm. But over time, he came to see American power as a …

What People Get Wrong About Birthright Citizenship

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:01:56 GMT

Linda Chavez once held the highest-ranking position of any woman in Ronald Reagan’s White House, serving as director of the Office of Public Liaison. But when she was nominated to be secretary of labor under George W. Bush, her candidacy unraveled when it emerged that she had been sheltering an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala in her home. She hadn…

What Tyler Cowen Thinks About (Almost) Everything

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:02:09 GMT

Tyler Cowen is an economist at George Mason University, co-founder of my favorite blog, Marginal Revolution, and a contributor to The Free Press. A true polymath known for his short but extremely substantive answers to questions, Tyler is one of my favorite people with whom to have a long conversation. On the show this week, I got to do the kind of inte…

Coleman Hughes and Glenn Greenwald Debate Israel’s Influence in Washington

Coleman Hughes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:02:37 GMT

Earlier this year, I was set to debate the influence of the Israel lobby on the U.S. at a live event in New York. That event was canceled. So instead, I invited my would-be opponent, journalist Glenn Greenwald, onto the podcast to have the conversation anyway.

Glenn and I disagree on a lot, including how much influence Israel has over American foreign po…

Nonviolence in a Violent Age: Coleman Hughes Live in Atlanta

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:54:12 GMT

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the wave of campus protests since, I have been struck by how far modern activism seems to have drifted from the strategies and philosophies of the civil rights era—which, in my opinion, should have remained the model. In the 1950s and ’60s, political change was pursued with discipline, pre…

What Keeps Sam Harris Up at Night

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:02:54 GMT

Sam Harris is one of the great thinkers of our time. The philosopher, neuroscientist, and host of the Making Sense podcast joined me to discuss some of the defining issues of the moment. We began with the ongoing war in Iran. While Harris is in favor of regime change given the Islamic regime’s hostility to its own people as well as the United States, he…

The Forgotten History of Slavery in the Islamic World

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:03:14 GMT

Justin Marozzi is a historian and travel writer whose work has long explored the history of the Islamic world. In his new book, Captives and Companions, he turns to a subject that remains surprisingly under-examined: the history of slavery across Islamic societies. Stretching from the time of the prophet Muhammad to the modern era, the system he describ…

Niall Ferguson vs. Richard Haass: Is Regime Change in Iran Possible?

Coleman Hughes — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:01:32 GMT

The question on the minds of many Americans is: What should we make of the war in Iran?

To explore that, I brought together historian and Free Press contributor Niall Ferguson and veteran diplomat Richard Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, to discuss their differing views on the operation.

While Ferguson is broadly supportive o…

He Wanted to Teach Western Civilization. So He Quit Harvard.

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:02:59 GMT

A Renaissance historian, James Hankins left his longtime post at Harvard University in December to join the little-known Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. As he wrote in an essay that sent shock waves through higher education, he says he did so because the Hamilton School is committed to teaching the history…

What Does ‘Winning’ Look Like in Iran?

Coleman Hughes — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:46:02 GMT

As coordinated American and Israeli strikes on Iran continue, I wanted to sit down with Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a leading expert on Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. sanctions policy.

I asked Mark the most pressing questions to emerge since the major conflict began over the weekend: How does this serve Americ…

Yuval Levin on What Conservatism Is for Today

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:00:57 GMT

Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has spent his career studying the institutions that shape American life. I wanted to sit down with him to discuss this unsettled moment in American politics—one in which both parties are fractured and go…

Why Longer Prison Sentences Don’t Work

Coleman Hughes — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:02:27 GMT

Debates over crime policy are often driven by emotion. People argue based on their feelings about police presence on their streets, or narratives about the social conditions they believe produce criminals. But Jennifer Doleac, an economist who focuses on criminal justice, contends that emotion shouldn’t be the basis of this conversation. Like sound econ…

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories with Michael Shermer

Coleman Hughes — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:00:00 GMT

As the founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer has long been defending reason against pseudoscience, investigating claims about life after death, paranormal phenomena, and even the mysteries of firewalking. In the early 2000s, he became widely known for his critiques of religion alongside other major figures in the New Atheism movement. In his new …