The Gray Area with Sean Illing

  • The stories soul food tells

    Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with Caroline Randall Williams, academic, poet, and co-author (with her mother, Alice Randall) of Soul Food Love. They discuss the ways in which the African American culinary tradition is interpreted, how…


  • The paradox of American freedom

    Sean Illing talks with Sebastian Junger, journalist, filmmaker, and author of the recent book Freedom. Informed by his experience hiking (and trespassing) along America’s rail lines, Junger discusses the paradoxes of a “free” society, his…


  • Nonbinary parenthood

    Anna North talks with Krys Malcolm Belc, nonbinary transmasculine parent, essayist, and author of the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child. They talk about what it means to be a parent, our gendered assumptions…


  • John McWhorter, the anti-antiracist

    Sean Illing talks with John McWhorter, linguist, New York Times columnist, and author of Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. They talk about the effects of modern antiracism, why McWhorter compares…


  • The overwhelming, invisible work of elder care

    Vox culture contributor Anne Helen Petersen talks with Liz O’Donnell, an advocate for working caregivers and the author of Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Making a Living. They talk…


  • How Big Tech benefits from the disinformation panic

    Sean Illing talks with Joe Bernstein of BuzzFeed News about online disinformation and what — if anything — can be done about it. They discuss the role of tech giants in the spread of propaganda,…


  • Fannie Lou Hamer and the meaning of freedom

    Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with Keisha Blain, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. They discuss the legacy of…


  • What the internet took from us

    Sean Illing talks with writer and New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul about her book 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet and the ways, big and small, that the internet has changed…


  • Trapped inside with Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

    Vox’s Constance Grady talks with novelist Susanna Clarke about her latest book, Piranesi, before a virtual audience for the Vox Book Club. They discuss how Clarke’s novel engages with themes that have come to characterize…


  • Bryan Stevenson on the legacy of enslavement

    Vox’s Jamil Smith talks with attorney, author, and activist Bryan Stevenson about the newly expanded Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. They discuss the museum’s project to connect America’s history of enslavement with the contemporary realities…