Society & Culture

Mary in America

by Mary Childs

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Latest episodes

The Millionaires Hiding in Plain Sight

October 8, 2026 · 33 min

Over a decade ago, Eric Zwick got assigned an unusual project at the U.S. Treasury: Find out how much tax businesses were paying. But the data was a mess, so Eric and two friends helped comb through it and, in doing so, got to build a…
Min Jin Lee on Education, Grudges, and Her Current and Future Novels

October 1, 2026 · 36 min

When novelist Min Jin Lee writes a book, she goes deep. She spends years researching, interviewing relevant people whose experiences and jobs will comprise her characters and plot. In her new book American Hagwon, she threw herself into…
Why Being Unpopular is Expensive for Countries

September 24, 2026 · 38 min

Being a country’s central banker is a technical job. But, just like high school, if you are a popular central banker, it pays off. Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a political scientist at Brown University, and has researched just how much it pays…
Emily Oster Doesn't Mind the Haters

September 17, 2026 · 41 min

Emily Oster is not a doctor. She’s an economics professor at Brown University, and for years she’s been applying her economics lens and ability to read studies and analyze data to help decode health research. Her conclusions sometimes…
The Bond Market Rules Everything Around Me/You/Us

September 10, 2026 · 40 min

Bonds around the world have been selling off, kind of a lot. And that selloff has sent interest rates on government debt to or near their highest in decades— for US government debt, but also debt from the UK, Germany, France, Japan. What…

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Why do we love gold so much?

September 3, 2026 · 39 min

Gold was on a tear in August. People, investors, and central banks around the world were buying more and more, in large part because it’s seen as a stable alternative to the dollar, or to any currency. But…why? Why gold? What makes it so…
What Should Not Be For Sale?

August 27, 2026 · 41 min

If you live in the worlds of financial markets and economics, sometimes it can be hard to remember that not all of life can be neatly packaged into data points and lists of pros and cons. And Nobel-Prize-winning-economist and Stanford…
AI and Alienation

August 20, 2026 · 41 min

AI is creating unfathomable wealth for a handful of people, upending labor markets, and jacking up electricity bills for the rest of us. But somehow we have to figure out how to still be a society. We’ve done it before – AI is just the…
The AI Hedge Fund Implosion That Wasn't

August 13, 2026 · 40 min

At the end of July, you may have heard the sound of a hedge fund blowing up. Situational Awareness, a fund focused on the new AI world, had a sudden firesale of its holdings. It seemed like an AI bubble barometer—a way to tell whether the…
How to Get to Sesame Street

August 6, 2026 · 40 min

Making educational content for kids is fun, but also really hard to do well. Kids are not an ideal audience: they are prone to wandering away, getting distracted, not remembering the plot. Scott Cameron is the head of content & IP strategy…
AI can do it all. Chat, is that bad?

July 30, 2026 · 32 min

Jae Woo Lee loves coding. To him, it’s an art form, like poetry. He’s a legendary professor of computer science at Columbia, where he teaches advanced programming to hundreds of students a year. Which means he’s on the front lines of the…
What is the International Criminal Court and why are "we" "dismantling" it?

July 24, 2026 · 41 min

The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just announced his intention to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court “brick by brick.” Which raised some important questions. Like, what IS the ICC, actually? Where did it come from, and what…

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About the show

Mary in America is a weekly conversation about how the machine of society works. Journalist and author Mary Childs jumps into the minds of the greatest, most interesting people who are shaping the world we live in, to understand the structures we build, the stories we tell, the games we play, and the choices we make. Why is it like that? Who made it that way? Should we change it? Can we?