What if the real crisis isn’t aging leaders, but an aging democracy where power never seems to change hands?

My guest on this recentWhoWhatWhy podcast, Yale historian Samuel Moyn, believes America has quietly become something few of us have recognized: an aging society where the balance between generations has fundamentally shifted.

The cohort of people making the biggest political decisions, controlling the most valuable assets, dominating elections, and shaping the country’s future are getting older, not younger.

We’ve spent years arguing over whether this politician or that president is too old. But what if those debates have distracted us from a much larger story?

Water is the oldest promise we have. Baptism, ablution, the plunge that separates who you were from who you're about to be. Every summer we go back to it — lakes, rivers, the cold shock of an ocean in June — as if some part of us still believes the water knows something.

Kate Washington, on a recent California Sun Podcast, talks to me about the fifty immersions she did before her fiftieth birthday, after caregiving and motherhood and a dissolving marriage had emptied her out. The author of "Midstream: A Life Remade in 50 Swims" on depletion, endurance, and what it means to surface changed.

What if the real threat to democracy isn’t artificial intelligence, but a government that never learns to use it?

In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Beth Simone Noveck makes the unexpectedly optimistic case that AI is not just one more thing for government to regulate. It may be the tool that finally reinvents how government works, and more to the point, how it feels to deal with it.

For 50 years we have been told government is the problem: slow, bloated, hopeless, a relic that could never keep pace with the modern world. Then came DOGE, swinging a chainsaw in the name of efficiency and cutting out much that worked along with much that didn’t, as if the whole apparatus were beyond saving. But what if we have been asking the wrong question all along? Noveck’s question is why institutions built for an age when information was scarce still cannot listen, learn, and respond in a world drowning in it.