Inside The Hive With Nick Bilton

This week, Katie Couric, legendary onetime cohost of NBC’s Today show, talks to Inside the Hive's Joe Hagan about her frank and searing new memoir, Going There, which pulls back the curtain on her starry and sometimes starcrossed life and career. Couric recounts the sexist culture of network TV but also examines her own place in a culture that allowed alleged abusers like Matt Lauer, Jeff Fager and Les Moonves (Couric allies all) to thrive. There’s plenty of blame to go around - including Couric's charge, in her book, that Hagan’s 2007 cover story on Couric in New York magazine was a “hit job.” Hagan and Couric visit the spirits of media Past, Present and Yet to Come. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox explore the crossroads of art and politics, discussing Hagan’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Hollywood director and democratic socialist Adam McKay, and Fox’s new profile of Hunter Biden, the son of the President of the United States who has taken up painting and developed a lucrative career in the shadow of ethical questions and his own lurid personal history. One wants to change the world with movies; the other wishes the world would just leave him alone. An exclusive peek behind the stories. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan invites resident Beatles fanatics Miriam Elder and Mike Hogan, Hive executive editor and VF.com digital director, respectively, to analyze, review, and otherwise obsess on Peter Jackson’s sprawling 7.8-hour Beatles docuseries Get Back, available on Disney+. From the George Harrison psychodrama to the John-Paul balancing act to the “fifth Beatle” to Ringo’s drumming to what’s up with Yoko, this is the conversation you need whether you’ve seen one, three, or none of the episodes. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan hash out the big Thanksgiving dinner-table talking points, from the confounding economy to Joe Biden’s political fortunes to what movies and TV shows everybody needs to watch. A survival guide and an offer of gratitude. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell starts up this week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Vanity Fair correspondents Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman about their reporting on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—what we know, what we don’t know, and what the whole sordid affair tells us about power and sexism in America. Grigoriadis’s latest podcast series, Fallen Angel: The Victoria’s Secret Story, details the fascinating history of the lingerie chain and the cultural damage it did to a generation of women, including its own models. Sherman, a featured voice, explains how Ohio-based owner Les Wexner came under Epstein’s spell and helped finance his predatory designs on women and girls. The ironies are rich: “This man who was so connected to Jeffrey Epstein is also the man who was making that lingerie that young girls were coveting,” observes Grigioriadis. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pod Save America host Jon Favreau stops by to talk about his new podcast series, Offline, about the ways in which the internet is changing and possibly breaking everything. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan reviews the news with Miriam Elder, executive editor of the Hive, examining Tuesday's election results and what they portend for Democrats and President Joe Biden. Are voters really afraid of critical race theory, or was Virginia's Terry McAuliffe just a terrible candidate? Also: What’s a metaverse, and will it save us from ourselves or become just another hothouse for the culture wars? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Hill House House founder and C.E.O. Nell Diamond talks with Emily Jane Fox about creating an "it" item on Instagram, building a community around a commodity, and how to get direct to consumer right. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk how climate change, shipping delays and local school boards could impact midterm elections. Plus: what they're watching and reading to get through the darkness. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Matthew Dowd, former Bush campaign adviser turned analyst, has spent his career behind the scenes. But now he’s running as a Democrat for lieutenant governor of Texas in 2022—with eyes locked on hard-right incumbent Dan Patrick, the man responsible for pushing through the infamous voter-suppression and antiabortion bills that have galvanized Republicans and alarmed Democrats. On this week’s Inside the Hive, Dowd analyzes the state of the Democratic Party and makes the case that if Texas can be turned blue (finally), the spread of Trumpism can be stopped nationally too. And even if the Biden administration can’t pull out of its current slump, he argues, Democrats can still beat Republicans at the state level. Dowd weighs in on Biden, congressional Democrats, Beto O’Rourke—and his favorite Matthew McConaughey film.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox talk about what COVID attitudes feel like in different cities, what the Facebook whistleblower revealed about social media algorithms, and debate whether or not we should ever talk about Trump again. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair tech correspondent Nick Bilton speaks with cohost Joe Hagan about the recent leaks from Facebook that reveal the company knew of the toxic impact of their platforms, including Instagram, on users, especially teenage girls. In a world in which the social media giants—FAANG, or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—are too rich and powerful to be contained by limp political and regulatory systems, “we’re left to the wolves,” says Bilton. After covering the social media world for a decade, Bilton says the only way to beat the media giants is to hack the system—ourselves—by reprogramming our behaviors, which are the literal coins of the social media realm. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Julián Castro, onetime Democratic presidential candidate and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Barack Obama, joins Inside the Hive to discuss the hard-right push on guns, abortion, and voting in Texas, which has become a blueprint for recalcitrant Trumpist states, and what Democrats are going to do about it. Castro is worried about what he calls Biden’s relatively weak leadership—especially his handling of the border crisis. “My hope is that the Biden administration is going to reverse course on this very soon,” he says. He also sketches out a scenario in which his former competitor, Beto O’Rourke, runs for governor of Texas in 2022 and helps Democrats retake power after years of dashed hopes: “I believe that he has a shot to beat Greg Abbott.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, photographer and author Gillian Laub talks about her beautiful new book, in which she documents her family’s love and their divide over President Trump. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, co-host Joe Hagan talks to novelist Elliot Ackerman, a veteran of both the Afghan and Iraq wars, on the meaning of 9/11 and the long-term impact on American life, politics and culture. A critic of the Biden administration’s exit from Afghanistan, Ackerman has struggled with feelings of bitterness over the wars that defined his life and redefined the nation. As media and politics have become more extreme and polarized in the 20 years since 9/11, the country has become more cynical and demoralized, less able to unify in a crisis. An optimist in a pessimistic time, Ackerman looks for signs of hope in America's founding ideals--enlightenment, reason--even if the country never quite lives up to them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the wake of the shocking Supreme Court move that has allowed Texas to effectively ban abortion, cohost Joe Hagan conducts back to back interviews with Amy Hagstrom Miller, of Whole Women’s Health, which operates abortion clinics in Texas, and Wendy Davis, a veteran of Texas politics and founder of Deeds Not Words, a nonprofit committed to gender equality. Addressing the law and its ramifications for women (and especially women of color), Miller and Davis bring front line news and historical context to this demoralizing moment in the years-long battle for women’s reproductive rights. They also consider the political fallout and offer ideas for a path forward in what is sure to be a long and rocky road ahead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan analyze the latest bad news from Afghanistan and the pandemic resurgence sweeping the country, especially Florida. Twenty years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in search of Al Qaeda, was a bloody and chaotic exit the only possibility? When Donald Trump can’t convince his own followers to get vaccinated (he was booed for suggesting as much), has the weaponized ignorance he helped foment finally gone rogue? How will these world-historical events be woven into our politics? Plus: a touch of good news with a bonus clip from a newly unearthed live recording of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, cohost Joe Hagan talks to Saad Mohseni, chief executive of the MOBY Group, which has been broadcasting television news and entertainment programming in Afghanistan since 2004. As the Taliban take over the country following the US’s chaotic exit last week, the fate of Mohseni’s media outlet in Kabul, staffed with 450 Afghans, hangs in the balance. Will the Taliban shut down or take over the TV network? Even as Mohseni looks for signs of hope in a young population weened on TV and Internet access (including the Taliban themselves), he remains wary of the Taliban's extremism, misogyny and censorship and expresses anger at the Biden administration’s handling of the pullout, which has left his beloved country to a grim fate after decades of cynical US foreign policy. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This week, Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman joins cohost Joe Hagan to discuss the “Floridization” of conservative politics, from the hanging chads of the 2000 election to Trump’s “Southern White House” in Palm Beach to Governor Ron DeSantis’s ostensible 2024 campaign slogan, “Make America Florida.” The Hive correspondents explore the history of tabloid and conservative media in Florida and the inevitable merger of the two in the form of Trumpism, expanding and riffing on Hagan’s feature in the September issue of Vanity Fair, “Postcards from the Edge." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan discuss the latest COVID wave and how it’s affecting our health, social lives, politics, and summer plans. Mask mandates are back, and not even Barack Obama can throw a birthday party on Martha’s Vineyard without it becoming a national incident. Also discussed: the Tokyo Olympics; what we’re reading on the beach this summer; and what you’ll find inside the newest issue of Vanity Fair. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices