Dialogues with Richard Reeves – Details, episodes & analysis

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Dialogues with Richard Reeves

Richard V. Reeves

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/11d. Total Eps: 37

The motto of Dialogues with Richard Reeves is "thinking together in relationship". This podcast features in-depth, lively conversations with leading thinkers on the big questions facing modern societies. dialoguespod@gmail.com @richardvreeves

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Apple Podcasts

🇫🇷 France - philosophy
20/05/2026
#87
🇫🇷 France - philosophy
19/05/2026
#72
🇬🇧 Great Britain - philosophy
13/03/2026
#91
🇫🇷 France - philosophy
10/02/2026
#95

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Score global : 52%

Publication history

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Robert Tracy McKenzie on democracy for sinners

Episode 31

Monday, May 30, 2022 • Duration 55:03

"The main reason we find it difficult to think critically about democracy is that it requires us to think critically about ourselves." That's the view of my guest today, Robert Tracy McKenzie, a historian at Wheaton College. In his recent book We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy , he argues that Americans - and American Christians in particular have forgotten what the framers always knew: that human beings are flawed, broken, inclined towards sin - in other words, fallen. He contrasts this view of fallen humanity with what he calls the "democratic gospel", based on the "comforting fiction that we are naturally good". In this conversation we discuss the development of the idea that "America is great because America is good" (which Tocqueville never actually said); argue about the extent to which democracy is intrinsically good, or mostly good as means to other ends; discuss the balance between two different Christian anthropologies, one positive one negative; the use and misuse of history by political partisans; and the need for religious people, in particular, to take history more seriously. He's an interesting thinker, a terrific writer and this was a fun conversation.

(Robert) Tracy McKenzie

McKenzie is a Professor of History at Wheaton College, where he holds the Arthur F. Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning. He blogs about Christian faith and American History at faithandamericanhistory.wordpress.com

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Anne-Marie Slaughter on progressive patriotism

Season 1 · Episode 1

Monday, November 29, 2021 • Duration 01:08:08

Anne-Marie Slaughter is an optimist, and a patriot, and an advocate for both personal and national renewal. We talk about the difference between renewal and both reinvention (out with the old) and restoration (back in with the old), and what it means for our politics. We also discuss her work on women, men, families and equality, almost a decade on from her famous essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”; the need for more grace in both our public and private life; why we should be “calling in” in private, rather than “calling out” in public; the lessons in leadership from her role as head of the New American think-tank; the past and future of feminism; our long overdue reckoning on racial justice; how to prepare for the 250th birthday of our country; and the unique power of women after the menopause. Enjoy!

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America and Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011, she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, Anne-Marie was the Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002.

In 2012 she published the article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in the Atlantic, which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spawn a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality. Her books include Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (2015), The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (2017), and her latest, Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics (2021). Foreign Policy magazine named her to their annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. She received a B.A. from Princeton, and M.Phil and DPhil in international relations from Oxford.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the price of liberty

Season 1 · Episode 1

Monday, November 22, 2021 • Duration 01:03:37

My guest today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is one of the most important intellectuals working today on issues of free speech, human rights, feminism and foreign policy. She is no stranger to either controversy or danger, not least because of her fierce criticism of Islam and Islamic culture. We discuss her own journey from Somalia to Saudi Arabia, via asylum in Holland to escape an arranged marriage, and finally to an academic career in the U.S. We also trace her psychological journey from a tribal mindset to a zealous religious worldview, and finally to a fiercely-held liberalism. We discuss the limits of Islamic liberalization, the contest for free speech, critical race theory, the state of intellectual and academic debate, the risks of self-censorship, and much more besides. We also discuss her latest book, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021). We don’t agree on everything, of course, but as she says: “That’s the whole point!”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan is a former Member of the Dutch Parliament (2003-2006) and is now a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Founder of the AHA Foundation. She has written several books including Infidel (2007); Nomad (2010); Heretic (2015); and The Challenge of Dawa (2017). Her newest book Prey is available now. She also has her own podcast, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast.

More Ayaan

Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights (2021)
See this NYT profile, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Muslim Men and Western Women”
In January 2020, Ayaan spoke at The Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on “The Market for Victimhood”

Also Mentioned

Philip Collins on how words can save democracy

Episode 25

Monday, November 15, 2021 • Duration 01:13:55

If you find yourself saying, perhaps of a political speech, “Well, that’s just rhetoric”, you are getting things exactly wrong. That’s according to my guest today, Philip Collins, former chief speechwriter to Tony Blair and author of “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World - and Why We Need Them”. Phil is an old friend of mine and irritatingly good at very many things: he’s a philosopher, lecturer, policy wonk, journalist (now for both the New Statesman and the Evening Standard), and much else besides. I think of him now as “Mr. Rhetoric”. Phil believes that rhetoric is essential to the functioning of democracy and, now, to its saving. We talk about Donald Trump, Tony Blair, Boris Johson, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Pericles, sophistry, the role of emotion in political persuasion, the need for enchantment - and the importance of paying our respects.

Philip Collins

Philip Collins is a British journalist, author and academic. He served as the chief speechwriter for Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2004-2007, after serving as the director of The Social Market Foundation, an independent think tank in the UK. Collins is the founder and writer-in-chief at The Draft, a writing and rhetoric agency, and he also teaches a course on rhetoric at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. He is a contributing editor at The New Statesman, and a columnist for the Evening Standard.

More Collins

We discussed Collins’ vastly interesting book, “When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World - and Why We Need Them”
He also authored “Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics” and “,” among other books.

Ron Daniels on how to fix America‘s colleges

Episode 24

Monday, November 8, 2021 • Duration 01:04:14

I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect a book from someone leading a university to say anything terribly interesting. Maybe my view of higher education has become too cynical. I rather like the description from Clark Kerr, builder of the University of California system, of the modern American university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” But my guest today (from whom I learned that quote) proved me wrong. He is Ron Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins University, and author of the new book What Universities Owe Democracy. Daniels argues “the fates of higher education and liberal democracy are deeply, inextricably intertwined”, not just in the sense of universities needing democracy, but the other way round.

Daniels is the son of Jewish refugees to Canada before World War II, and a committed educationalist and institutionalist. We talk about his family background and how it has influenced his views of liberalism, democracy and education, and then discuss the four main contributions of universities: social mobility, democratic education, the production of knowledge, and dialogue across differences. We spend some time on his decision, at first quietly and then proudly, to end the practice of legacy preferences at Hopkins, and whether more colleges and universities will follow suit. We discuss his ideas on reforming admissions; on instituting a democracy requirement for college graduation; on the need for more openness and humility in academic research; and on ways to promote what he calls purposeful pluralism, including fostering more debates rather than just lectures, and the importance of allowing roommates to be random, rather than chosen.

Ron Daniels

Ronald J. Daniels is president of The Johns Hopkins University. He has previously served as vice-president and provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. Daniels received his B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, and his LL.M. degree from Yale Law School. In December 2016, Daniels was invested into the Order of Canada at the grade of Member. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the author of What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins Press, 2021).

Fiona Hill on Trump, Putin and populism

Episode 23

Monday, November 1, 2021 • Duration 01:25:12

“People should not underestimate Donald Trump’s abilities as a retail politician", says my guest today, fellow Brit-American Fiona Hill. "He knows how to connect with people, he knows how to get people riled up, he knows how to pit people against each other so that they can’t push back against what he’s doing”. Fiona is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. In November 2019, she testified in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump. In very personal terms, we discuss the class system and social mobility in the UK, and her childhood in the North East of England, which lost its economic heart as coal mining collapsed; as well as her experience in the Soviet Union and Russia, American academia, and the White House. Fiona compares and contrasts the authoritarian style of Trump and Putin (with some discussion of Erdogan too); the need for more aggressive social and economic policy for places devastated by the shift away from industry; and the real and present danger posed to so many nations by political populism. We conclude, as her book does, with a discussion of what we can do as individuals and our own communities to build a stronger infrastructure of opportunity.

Fiona Hill

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. She is a foreign policy expert on Russian and European affairs, and has served under three presidents: Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. Hill is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held numerous positions directing research at Harvard University, where she obtained her PhD in History.

More Hill

Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, is an exceptionally honest tale of dwindling opportunity in the UK and the US.
You can read more of her work at Brookings, , , and

Sheryll Cashin on white spaces and Black hoods

Episode 22

Monday, October 25, 2021 • Duration 01:00:28

“Residential segregation not only affects opportunity, it alters politics”. That’s one of the claims of my guest today, Georgetown scholar Sheryll Cashin. In this episode, we discuss Cashin’s new book, titled White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality. She describes her own upbringing as a daughter of civil rights activists and how this has animated her own work; how affluent white spaces are not only separate to low-poverty areas, but require them; the group of people she calls Descendants, whose ancestors were enslaved, and who live today in low-opportunity spaces; and what it means for white people to have “cultural dexterity”. We end up talking about what love has to do with pretty much all of this.

Sheryll Cashin

Sheryll Cashin is a Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University working on topics including race relations and inequality in the United States. She is the author of several books and numerous articles including commentary for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and is currently serving as a contributing editor to Politico. Cashin is also a board member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Previously, she was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and worked in the Clinton administration as an advisor on urban and economic policy.

More Cashin

In this episode, we discuss Cashin’s new book, titled “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality”
Cashin is a contributing editor of Politico Magazine, and she recently wrote a piece on this same topic, titled “It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System”
She is also the author of Loving, , , and .

Nick Gillespie on canceling yourself

Episode 21

Monday, October 18, 2021 • Duration 01:11:47

What does “cancel culture” really mean, and how big a problem is it? Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason, has given these questions more thought than most. Nick is one of the leading lights of libertarian public intellectual life, and just wrote an essay, “Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” that we dig into here. Nick is worried about the shift towards censorship in politics, in our organizations, including corporations, and in our own lives. We differ on whether the problem is more personal or political, but in the end we do agree that a healthy liberal culture is one that welcomes a robust exchange of diverse views. Along the way, we get into Nick’s particular beef with Facebook, some similarities in our backgrounds as journalists, and how his view of the world has some Marxist traces.

Nick Gillespie

Nick is an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine and host of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. “Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock ‘n’ roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit,” wrote Robert Draper in The New York Times Magazine.

A two-time finalist for digital National Magazine Awards, Nick is co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America (2012).

More Gillespie

“Self-Cancellation, Deplatforming, and Censorship” (Sep 2021)
The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie (including his latest here with Steven Pinker)

Kathryn Paige Harden on genetic egalitarianism

Episode 20

Monday, October 11, 2021 • Duration 01:08:00

What have genes got to do with inequality? It’s a thorny question. But it one that Kathryn Paige Harden squarely addresses in her book and in this episode of Dialogues. She explains the new science of genetics and how it can help understand outcomes like college completion. Along the way we discuss the importance of the disability rights movement, the nature of meritocracy, what luck has to do with it, designer babies, regional inequality, and how one byproduct of her Christian upbringing is an appreciation for the unique and equal value of every person.

Kathryn Paige Harden

Kathryn Paige Harden is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project. Harden is also a fellow at the Jacobs Foundation. Having received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia, her work has focused on genetic influences on complex human behavior, including child cognitive development, academic achievement, risk-taking, mental health, sexual activity, and childbearing.

More Harden

Her thought-provoking new book, The Genetic Lottery, can be purchased here.
Harden’s previous New York Times op-ed is a great starting place for learning more on this topic.
Read her recent profile in the New Yorker, “Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters?”
For more, check out her website and follow her on twitter: @kph3k

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Dialogues with Richard Reeves – Details, episodes & analysis

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Dialogues with Richard Reeves – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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Apple Podcasts

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Other99+

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