Apple News In Conversation

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author, discusses the difficulty of changing beliefs and the importance of being open-minded. They explore why people resist changing their minds, the fetishization of hypocrisy, growth mindset, and the challenges of changing people's opinions on vaccines and climate change.

Recent allegations of ethical violations have reignited a debate about establishing an enforceable code of conduct for Supreme Court justices. University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck argues the latest revelations concerning several justices speak to a much larger breakdown in the way the court operates today. He writes about this in his new book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. Vladeck spoke with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu about the absence of accountability on the court — and how reforming it could lead to a stronger, more trusted institution.

Documents marked “top secret” have been turning up in a lot of unexpected places recently. But America has another problem with classified documents: There’s too many of them. By some estimates, it would take 250 years for these documents to be reviewed and released to the public. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Matthew Connelly, author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, about the government’s culture of secrecy.

Nearly 30 years ago, James Bernard Belcher was sentenced to death for raping, strangling, and drowning 29-year-old Jennifer Embry. Recently, he was given a second chance: a resentencing, this time with new evidence unearthed by a mitigation specialist. These life-history investigators seek to contextualize a defendant’s violent crimes, often by surfacing childhood traumas. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Maurice Chammah, a reporter for the Marshall Project, about shadowing one specialist as she excavates Belcher’s past in a bid to spare his life.

The Showtime documentary series Couples Therapy allows viewers to watch real-life therapy sessions. Couples hash out their conflicts and challenges with Dr. Orna Guralnik as their guide. Guralnik is a psychoanalyst who prompts people to examine their instincts, listen to their partners, and do some deep self-discovery. Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu spoke with Guralnik about her approach to therapy — and her relationship advice.

What would a future look like where climate change has become a truly unavoidable part of all of our daily lives? This is one of the questions the new Apple TV+ show Extrapolations tries to answer. Series creator Scott Z. Burns was a producer of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the writer behind the eerily prescient 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic. Burns, along with one of the stars of the series, Sienna Miller, spoke with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu about the making of Extrapolations — and how dystopian portrayals of the future can mobilize and motivate people to take serious action.

The Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News is set to begin on April 17. At the core of Dominion’s case are pages of internal messages showing that many people at Fox didn’t believe the election lies they were promoting on the air. On the latest episode of Apple News In Conversation, host Shumita Basu spoke with Brian Stelter, the former chief media correspondent at CNN who spent years talking to people at Fox, mostly as anonymous sources, about the inner workings of the organization. He’ll also be covering the trial for Vanity Fair. Stelter breaks down the case, what’s at stake, and the potential consequences.

This episode includes descriptions of violence and mentions suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.Earlier this year, a woman named Lindsay Clancy was charged with the murder of her three children — who were 5 years, 3 years, and 7 months old. Though Clancy never formally received a PMAD diagnosis, her story has ignited conversations about postpartum care in the United States. Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu spoke with New Yorker editor Jessica Winter about the mental-health challenges many new birthing parents face — and the lack of support provided to them.

More than 38 million people live in poverty in the United States, one of the world’s richest countries. In a new book, Poverty, by America, sociologist and writer Matthew Desmond sets out to figure out why. In an interview with Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu, Desmond lays out the ways that so many of us benefit from a system that keeps people poor, and he offers concrete actions we can all take to dismantle the status quo.

Ever since the introduction of the artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, people can’t stop talking about what the latest wave of A.I. is able to do — from acing standardized tests to composing detailed essays to writing code. But it also has people asking: What does a world look like where A.I. plays a larger role in our lives? Apple News In Conversation host Shumita Basu spoke with editor in chief of the Verge, Nilay Patel, about this rapidly evolving technology and how it could shape our future.