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Kamala Harris is in the midst of a media blitz this week, including an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes yesterday evening and an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight. But she is also dipping into the world of mega-popular, not straightforwardly journalistic podcasts—notably appearing on the show Call Her Daddy last weekend. I spoke with my colleague Helen Lewis, who covers the podcast-sphere, about why Donald Trump and Harris are both spending time on these sorts of shows, what these interviews avoid, and how independent podcasters became major players in political media.

The New Mainstream

Lora Kelley: How does the value to the viewer of a traditional press interview—one focused on the specific issues and policies of the race—differ from that of a lifestyle podcast?

Helen Lewis: Roughly speaking, there are two types of sit-down conversations in politics: the accountability interview and the talk-show appearance. One focuses on pinning down candidates on their past statements and their future promises; the other, which most podcasts fall into, tries to understand the candidate as a person. The latter aren’t necessarily soft options—being charismatic and engaging while making small talk or fielding deeply personal questions is a skill in itself. (And I found Donald Trump’s appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, where he talked about his elder brother’s struggle with alcoholism, very revealing indeed.)

But only with the accountability interviews do you get candidates pressed repeatedly on questions that they’re trying to dodge. On Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive, Trump was asked about the transmission of fentanyl over the border, and he got away with rambling about how “unbelievable” the German shepherds Border Patrol officers use are. On Lex Fridman’s podcast, Trump asserted that he could easily sort out the crisis in Ukraine—and that was it. Who needs details? When Kamala Harris went on Call Her Daddy, the host, Alex Cooper, gave her a chance to lay out her message on reproductive rights but didn’t, for example, challenge her on whether she supports third-trimester abortions, which are deeply divisive.

Lora: From the perspective of a political campaign, are there any downsides to appearing on a podcast such as Call Her Daddy?

Helen: The obvious criticism of Harris appearing on Call Her Daddy, which has a young, female audience, is that she already has a big lead among young women aged 18–25. You can say the same about Trump appearing on podcasts that are popular with young men. But both groups contain many people who will be undecided about whether to vote at all.

Lora: Harris has done some traditional press interviews during this campaign cycle, including her 60 Minutes interview yesterday. But are we in a new era in which chats with friendly podcasters rival (or even overtake) traditional media interviews?

Helen: Well, quite. An article I think about a lot is John Herrman’s 2015 “Access Denied,” in which he asked why an A-lister—someone like Kim Kardashian—would give an interview to a celebrity magazine if she had something to sell, instead of simply putting a picture on Instagram. Why cooperate with the old guard of media when they are no longer the gatekeepers of attention? Herrman argued that the traditional media was suffering a “loss of power resulting in a loss of access resulting in further loss of power.”

That dynamic has now migrated to politics. The legacy brands no longer have a monopoly on people’s attention, and the online right, in particular, has been extremely successful in building an alternative, highly partisan media. Fox News is no longer the rightmost end of the spectrum—beyond that is Tucker Carlson’s podcast, or the Daily Wire network, or Newsmax, or Elon Musk’s X.

Now candidates tend to talk to the traditional media only when they want to reset the narrative about them, because other journalists still watch 60 Minutes or whatever it might be. There’s still a noisiness around a big legacy interview that you don’t get with, say, Call Her Daddy—even if more people end up consuming the latter.

Lora: Are these podcasts really doing anything new, or are they largely replicating traditional media interviews without the same standards and accountability?

Helen: The better ones strive for impartiality and don’t, for example, reveal their questions in advance—but many political podcasts are wrapped in an ecosystem where big-name guests mean more advertising revenue, and thus bigger profits for the hosts personally; plus, their only hope of getting a second interview is if the candidate feels the first one was sympathetic. Compare that with 60 Minutes, which interviewed Trump so robustly in 2020 that he has asked for an apology.

I’m as guilty as anyone, but we need to stop treating these podcasts as the “alternative” media when they are absolutely the mainstream these days. The top ones have audiences as big as, if not bigger than, most legacy outlets. If they don’t want to hire all the editorial infrastructure that traditional journalism has (such as fact-checkers, research assistants, etc.), or risk being unpopular by asking difficult questions, that’s on them. Joe Rogan renewed his Spotify contract for $250 million. Alex Cooper signed a deal with SiriusXM this year worth $125 million. We should stop treating the mega-podcasts like mom-and-pop outfits competing with chain stores. They’re behemoths.

Lora: You recently wrote about The Joe Rogan Experience, which is the top-listened-to podcast on Spotify and arguably the most influential behemoth of them all. Why haven’t the candidates gone on the show yet? Who from each ticket do you think would make the most sense as a guest?

Helen: As I understand it, Team Trump would love to get on The Joe Rogan Experience. The two politicians that Rogan adores are Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are now both working with the Republicans, and Team Trump would hope to encourage some of Rogan’s audience of crunchy, COVID-skeptic libertarians to follow them in moving from the independent/Democrat column to the GOP. But Rogan isn’t a full MAGA partisan like some of his friends, and Trump recently said that Rogan hasn’t asked him to appear.

In any case, I think Rogan would prefer to talk to J. D. Vance, who is very much part of the heterodox Silicon Valley–refugee tendency that he admires. For the Democrats, Harris might struggle to relax into the stoner-wonderment vibe of Rogan, given the tight-laced campaign she’s running. Rogan and Tim Walz could probably have a good chat about shooting deer and the best way to barbecue.

Related:

What going on Call Her Daddy did for Kamala Harris How Joe Rogan remade Austin

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading. David Frum: Behind the curtain of Mexico’s progress Donald Trump flirts with race science.

Today’s News

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that roughly 8,000 National Guard members will be mobilized by the time Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm, makes landfall this week. The Supreme Court appears likely to uphold the Biden administration’s regulation of “ghost gun” kits, which allow people to buy gun parts and build the weapons at home. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Israeli military has killed the replacement successors of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike last month.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The list of Nobel laureates now contains two physicists whose 1980s research laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence, Matteo Wong writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

They Were Made Without Eggs or Sperm. Are They Human?

By Kristen V. Brown

The little clump of cells looked almost like a human embryo. Created from stem cells, without eggs, sperm, or a womb, the embryo model had a yolk sac and a proto-placenta, resembling a state that real human embryos reach after approximately 14 days of development. It even secreted hormones that turned a drugstore pregnancy test positive.

To Jacob Hanna’s expert eye, the model wasn’t perfect—more like a rough sketch … But in 2022, when two students burst into his office and dragged him to a microscope to show him the cluster of cells, he knew his team had unlocked a door to understanding a crucial stage of human development. Hanna, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, also knew that the model would raise some profound ethical questions.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Israel and Hamas are kidding themselves, Hussein Ibish argues. The New York race that could tip the House

Culture Break

Warner Bros. / Everett Collection

Read. Lauren Elkin’s latest novel, Scaffolding, suggests that total honesty can take a marriage only so far, Lily Meyer writes.

Watch (or skip). Joker: Folie à Deux (out now in theaters) has nothing interesting to say about the challenges of fame, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Is bad behavior in marriage back? In fictional marriage, I mean. For years, heterosexual matrimony in American novels has seemed rather like it’s become a trap for the female protagonist: Unhappy or misunderstood by her spouse, she may act out or seek retribution; whatever her behavior, though, readers are meant to see that it’s attributable to her environment—in other words, that she’s not really in the wrong. For this plotline to work, the wife must be attuned, sometimes newly so, to herself, her unhappiness, her desires—a fictional extension of the powerful, if reductive, idea that women can protect themselves from harm by understanding their own wants and limits.

In daily life, of course, human desires and boundaries are changeable. The feminist philosopher Katherine Angel writes, “Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal.” Self-awareness has certainly killed sex (and sexiness) in a lot of novels; it’s killed a lot of novels, in fact. A story without badness isn’t much of a story, and a story whose hero has perfect self-knowledge is a story utterly devoid of suspense.

Stories about marriage are no exception to this rule. There’s an unbearable flatness to any book whose protagonist is always justified in her actions—or, for that matter, always able to justify them to herself. After years of reading such dead tales, I found both delight and hope in the critic and memoirist Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a tale of two slippery adulterers who consider understanding oneself an impossible—or, at best, incompletely possible—task. Its protagonists, Anna and Florence, are psychoanalysts who live in the same Parisian apartment nearly five decades apart, in the 2010s and 1970s, respectively. Both women have crises of faith in language, in intellectualism, in their role as a therapist and as a wife. Neither wants to leave their marriage, but both launch intense, clandestine affairs.

Anna and Florence don’t totally understand their motivations for cheating. They act on impulse—in Anna’s case, for what seems like the first time in her life—and yet each seems to recognize that her affair is a voyage of discovery. Elkin writes these events as complicated adventures in wrong decisions—which, crucially, she neither justifies nor condemns. She lets her characters be bad yet ordinary, bad yet sympathy-inducing, bad yet worthy of a good life. In a sense, their badness improves their situation. Their lack of self-awareness, their tendency or ability to submit to their id, gets them closer to what they consciously want: some privacy within their marriage. Just as Scaffolding argues that we can’t know ourselves fully, it makes plain that we can never completely know one another—and that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, even when it leads to bad behavior; even when it breaks our hearts.

Scaffolding is about feminism as much as it is about marriage. Florence, its ’70s protagonist, is a psychoanalysis student who spends her free time with consciousness-raising groups. She commits herself to flouting convention, even though her marriage is fairly traditional: She cooks and cleans, and is busy redecorating the apartment that she and her husband, Henry, inherited from her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. Elkin swiftly makes apparent to readers that Florence’s feminist rebellion is also a rejection of the (largely Christian) “Franco-Français” society that deported her family—something Florence herself seems not to notice. She’s too busy thinking about the affair she’s having with one of her professors. Anna, in the 21st century, is less rebellious and much less happy. She’s suffering from depression after a miscarriage, spending hours immobile in bed, “as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.” Sexually, she’s shut down; her husband, David, is working in London, and she declines to go with him and struggles to engage in any intimacy when he visits her in Paris. Her only live connection—very live, it turns out—is with Clémentine, a feminist artist in her 20s who grows determined, and successfully so, to draw Anna out of herself and into the world.

[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]

But even as Anna begins recovering from her depression, its effect on her career is devastating. Formerly devoted to her analysis practice, she’s now stopped valuing her profession. “Why look in other people’s narratives for the metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you to what they themselves may or may not realise?” she asks herself. “Maybe the words merely point to themselves.” Readers see her apply this feeling to her own life, expending less and less effort on making sense of her behavior. Florence follows a similar trajectory, though as a result not of trauma but of going to Jacques Lacan’s lectures and having an affair with a Lacanian psychology professor. (Don’t worry: Although Lacan famously deconstructed language, which led, in his case, to highly abstruse writing, Scaffolding does not. Elkin’s prose is elegant and straightforward, with just enough experimentation to suit its ideas.) “We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language,” she tells a friend—no easy job for a shrink. But both Florence and Anna learn to see conscious thought as a scaffold, with impulse and desire as the real, substantial building it encases and supports.

Florence tries and fails to explain the intensity of her feelings for the professor she’s having an affair with; she tells herself he’s a stand-in for something but has no idea what. At the same time, she’s mystified by the fact that the affair is a “big, big deal” to her when she’s out and about in the daytime, but the moment she returns to her “evening life” with Henry (a cheater himself, not incidentally), thoughts of her lover either vanish or fuel the sex life that is the core of her marriage. Secrecy and deception as aphrodisiac—this may not be moral, and yet, Florence decides, it’s “exactly how [marriage] should work, and exactly not how it is supposed to work.”

Anna, for her part, keeps more secrets from herself than from David. She nurtures an attraction to her neighbor Clémentine without permitting herself to notice, though the reader can’t miss it: Anna, otherwise cut off from her body, is so physically attuned to her friend’s presence that she describes her as “her own charged atmosphere.” It’s through Clémentine, in fact, that Anna reencounters an ex whom she desires so intensely, she sleeps with him almost instantly, even though doing so means betraying both David and Clémentine. Unlike Florence, Anna doesn’t attempt to explain her feelings or actions to herself. She knows her behavior is wrong, yet she also knows how alone she’s been, how solitary and isolated from her husband her depression has made her. Having an affair punctures her cling film. It might be bad, but it also returns her to her marriage and her life.

Scaffolding isn’t really suggesting that adultery and secrecy are good for a marriage. Rather, the novel treats these things as bad but normal and manageable—and preferable to a total loss of connection. When Clémentine cheats on her boyfriend, she tells Anna the cheating is a disruption that can be “absorbed back into the relationship.” Novels that leave wrongdoing out of their worlds imply that no transgression, marital or otherwise, could be that small, and that for a character to do something genuinely harmful would bring their whole life crashing down. Our broader cultural impulse toward hyperconsciousness is rooted in the same idea. It reflects an inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between big bad things and the small bad ones—and, by extension, to forgive the latter.

[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]

Elkin puts some big badness in Scaffolding to draw out this distinction. Clémentine is part of a brigade of women who graffiti anti–domestic abuse messages on Paris’s walls. Their work presents a vision of feminism very different from the one in Florence’s consciousness-raising groups, which are all about knowing oneself: For Clémentine, protest is the only way women can resist misogyny. Anna’s first positive emotion in the novel is a response to the graffiti: “Aren’t they incredible?” she says, pointing one out to David on one of his visits from London. Florence, meanwhile, isn’t just involved in raising her own consciousness. She also keenly follows the Bobigny trial, France’s equivalent of Roe v. Wade. Both characters are highly aware of how dangerous life can be for women. Compared with unsafe clandestine abortions or spousal violence, some cheating means nothing; but compared with the flatness of Anna’s day-to-day life and the conventionality of Florence’s marriage, their affairs have immensely high stakes.

Scaffolding strikes this balance well. Elkin is deft but clear in reminding readers that there’s a distinction between badness and evil, or badness and hate. She writes Florence’s and Anna’s marriages as immensely loving ones, despite their holes and wobbles; in such relationships, the novel seems to argue, it is conceivable—though not guaranteed—that almost anything can be forgiven or absorbed.

Neither Florence nor Anna knows why they cheat on their husband. Perhaps more important, neither of them knows why they love their husband. In a novel less invested in psychological mystery, this would signal crisis for the fictional marriage. In life, it’s the most normal thing there is. Complete self-awareness is both an unattainable standard and a false promise, as is complete transparency with someone else, no matter what your wedding vows say or suggest. Accepting this fact is terrifying. It turns commitment into suspense. In reality, many of us prefer not to acknowledge that, which is more than reasonable: Who goes into their marriage wanting deception and drama?

Novels, though, are built to let us test-drive uncertainty—to feel it without living it. Where marriage is concerned, this is an important option for many of us to have. Marriage stories whose protagonists never slip up don’t give readers this option; if anything, they flatten our views of intimacy rather than letting us expand them through imagination.