Think from KERA

Rachel Weiner, local transportation reporter for The Washington Post, who covers street safety and urban planning. She discusses why Vision Zero has struggled in the U.S. and how policies and politics shifted blame after a pedestrian death. Conversations cover speed limits, vehicle design, transit’s role in safety, and low-cost street fixes.

Walter Isaacson, historian and bestselling biographer, reflects on the Declaration's famous line as an aspirational mission for America. He explores the collaborative drafting, the switch from 'sacred' to 'self-evident', and how that sentence has driven movements from abolition to suffrage. He also probes the founders' compromises, religious views, and what inclusion meant in 1776.

Karen Weise, technology correspondent for The New York Times, covers data centers, AI, and energy infrastructure. She explains how massive server farms and AI workloads are driving electricity demand. She discusses tech companies buying and building power, grid upgrades cities need, and who ends up paying as energy use and costs rise.

Your doctor might take weeks to diagnose a complicated set of symptoms when A.I. can do it in seconds. Dhruv Khullar is a physician and contributing writer at The New Yorker, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the use of A.I. in medicine, whether doctors will lose the skills to properly diagnose, and how accurate these new computer-aided diagnoses actually are. His article is “If A.I. Can Diagnose Patients, What Are Doctors For?” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Drew Harwell, a Washington Post technology reporter who covers AI and society. He explores obituary-writing A.I., why funeral homes and families turn to it, and the tradeoffs between quick drafts and losing personal nuance. Conversations cover hallucinations, templated phrasing, time savings, and using A.I. as a starting point that still needs heavy personalization.

Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education at NYU and writer on tech’s social impacts, talks about AI-generated student papers and why writing trains deep learning. He explores productive struggle, how professors can redesign assessments, and when AI is a helpful study aid versus a shortcut that erodes hard-won skills.

Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and coauthor of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, warns about risks from superhuman A.I. He discusses how A.I. grows through training not programming. He explores model opacity, proxy goals that lead to harmful behavior, pathways for machines to gain power, and why regulatory coordination matters.

Mehrsa Baradaran, law professor and author who studies banking and racial economic inequality, offers a historical tour of policies that shaped today’s racial wealth gap. She explores redlining, failed Black financial institutions, shifts from anti-poverty to punitive policy, and debates over reparations and credit reforms. The conversation traces how law and politics kept disparities intact.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and science communicator, offers a compact primer on skepticism and the nature of truth. He discusses why misinformation spreads, how motivated reasoning and my-side bias trap us, the role of evidence and replication, and why pluralism, Bayesian updating and expert consensus matter for finding what’s provisionally true.

Ben Fritz, Wall Street Journal entertainment reporter and author, maps how mass media once created shared cultural touchstones. He traces blockbuster films, TV scheduling, and advertising that united audiences. He explores how streaming, algorithms, and platform-driven celebrity fragment culture and why live events and AI-driven niche content are changing how we relate.