War without strategy. Drones without limits. Data without wisdom. How the Iran conflict is stumbling toward World War III — and no one can explain why.

My guest on this recent WhoWhatWhy podcast, RAND senior defense analyst David Shlapak, has for decades made a living by imagining how wars spiral out of control — war-gaming the scenarios where miscalculation becomes catastrophe, where deterrence fails, where World War III stops being theoretical.

Today, those scenarios are no longer simulations. They’re unfolding in real time over Iranian airspace, and the people running them may not have thought through what happens next.

Miriam Pawel, author of the definitive Cesar Chavez biography, "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," joins me on this recent California Sun Podcast to reflect on the shattering of the Cesar Chavez myth — and the harder questions beneath it: what was known, what was ignored, and why movements so often need saints. In this wide-ranging conversation, Pawel explores Chavez’s charisma, control, contradictions, and the challenge of holding both his historic achievements and the harm he may have caused in the same frame.

On this recent TalkCocktial podcast I’m joined by Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper, who has spent a decade studying when corporate scandals force actual change—Dieselgate, Cambridge Analytica, Goldman Sachs—and when they just fade away. His book Billionaire Backlash argues scandals briefly overwhelm corporate lobbying when they tap simmering public resentment. He pushes back hard on whether billionaire wealth reflects value creation for society or corruption, and whether making policy through outrage is democracy working or failing.

China loses two oil partners to US action in Iran. Their response? Strategic patience. Are we watching restraint or preparation for what’s next?

There’s an old saying: When your enemy is digging himself a hole, the smart move is to hand them a bigger shovel. China appears to be doing exactly that — watching, waiting, keeping its powder dry while America commits massive military resources to the other side of the world.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, USC professor of international affairs David C. Kang returns to examine whether China’s restraint vindicates his contrarian thesis, or reveals something more calculated.

Chef Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Oakland to cook the soul food his grandmothers made — a distinct American cuisine rooted in migration and adaptation rather than Southern tradition. In 2024, Food & Wine named Burdell the “Restaurant of the Year.”

On our recent California Sun podcast, he expalins how it was a 20% service fee at the bottom of Burdell’s receipts that recently started a national conversation about labor, class, and whether we’ve ever really reckoned with the racial history of tipping.

We imagine the internet as invisible—wireless, ethereal, everywhere and nowhere. The truth is far more precarious. Nearly 95% of global data moves through 900,000 miles of fiber optic cable lying unprotected on the ocean floor, controlled increasingly by four American tech giants. When Tonga's single cable was severed in 2022, ATMs went dark and the country vanished from the world. That was an accident. Samanth Subramanian, author of The Web Beneath the Waves, reveals that what comes next might not be.

Jeff Schechtman 03/06/26

Iran didn’t ask for regime change. It asked for bread. How a protest movement got hijacked — and turned into a war nobody planned for.

And the man who saw all of this coming has been saying so, loudly and at personal cost, for 20 years.

My guest on this very recent WhoWhatWhy podcast is Hooman Majd, the grandson of an ayatollah, the son of a diplomat who served the shah, a contributor to NBC News and The New Yorker, and the author of four books on modern Iran — most recently the memoir Minister Without Portfolio. He has spent his career as the voice in the room insisting that Iran is always more complicated than Washington wants to believe. He has never been more right, and the moment has never been more dangerous.

The guardrails weren’t real — they were simply norms. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall. And the Madisonian dream? Always more myth than reality. So now what?

The Federalist Papers, argues our guest, University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns, belongs in the fiction section of the library. And after watching the Trump years dismantle everything we were told would hold, it’s getting harder to disagree.

Back in 2024, we asked the hypothetical question of Stearns whether American democracy had reached its sell-by date? It’s no longer hypothetical.

Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, returns to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast to talk to me about what’s been lost — and more provocatively, what might still be salvageable. His diagnosis is clear: We have thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it.The guardrails weren’t structural; they were customary. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall; it was a framework held together by norms that turned out to be entirely optional. And the Madisonian dream of competing institutional jealousies keeping power in check? That, Stearns says, was always more mythology than reality.