For this "Summer Friday" we've put together some of our favorite conversations this year:

• Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post columnist, host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, and the author of Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), looks back at other turbulent eras for insights into navigating this one.
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, host of "Finding Your Roots" on PBS and that author of The Black Box: Writing the Race (Penguin Press, 2024), talks about his new book that examines the history of Black self-definition.
• Judith Butler, professor at UC-Berkeley and the author of several books, including Gender Trouble and their latest, Who's Afraid of Gender? (Macmillan, 2024), talks about her pioneering academic work on the concept of gender and how fraught, and misunderstood, the topic has become.
• Appliances are rarely built to last, but many from the past are still as good as new. Anna Kramer, technology and climate journalist, author of the newsletter, "Bite into this," talks about her Atlantic article "KitchenAid Did It Right 87 Years Ago" as listeners call in to share which gadgets and technologies have survived years of use in their homes.

These interviews were polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:

Revolutionary Eras, Then and Now (May 21, 2024)

Defining 'Blackness' Through Literature (Mar 22, 2024)

Judith Butler on Gender (Apr 4, 2024)

Appliances That Lasted (Mar 1, 2024)