The Examined Year: 2025—Uncut and Augmented
Senior Producer Devon Strolovitch here with your (more or less) annual look/listen behind the scenes of our end-of-year special. We knew this one was going to be a doozy, but as far as what to examine about this past year, to paraphrase one of our guests, it would be hard not to bring up (U.S.) politics. So we decided to focus on the Year in Shamelessness by looking at the explosion of shameless behavior in public life this year—the brazen lying, naked bigotry, and godzilla-scale corruption—and what could be done to combat it. In September, Georgetown University philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò published an article in the Boston Review titled “How Can We Live Together?” in which he explained why we should bring back shame as an informal mechanism for enforcing social norms. Listen to the (mostly) unedited interview here:
2025 was also a year in which A.I. continued to make inroads (if not intrusions) into more and more of our everyday lives. Some of it was relatively positive: Waymo issued a safety report about its self-driving taxis doing way better than the average human driver, while Anthropic settled a major copyright infringement lawsuit with a group of authors. But we also got a report about the damage done by chatbots, and every year we hear about more and more intimate deepfakes and incidents of chatbots advising self-harm. Even Pope Leo spoke about the dangers of A.I. this year! Since popes can be hard to book, we talked to Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan, co-author of AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, about the year in A.I. hype.
As for the Year in Philosophy, we turned our attention to The Bowl, a short documentary from earlier this year that follows a team of six North Carolina students on their journey to the National High School Ethics Bowl competition in 2023. The film’s director, Eli Yetter-Bowman, told us about what inspired him to make the documentary and how inspiring it turned out to be to make. Naturally I couldn’t not augment a segment about a movie with clips therefrom. But it also makes a great listen 📻.