The Delve

Episodes

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  Brazil: The Comeback Nobody Saw Coming with Guilherme Casarões 30.10.2026 52m

  Three weeks. Ten million additional votes. One extraordinary political comeback.After trailing Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round of Brazil's presidential election, 80-year-old President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did something few thought possible: he reinvented his campaign, mobilized millions of voters, and won a historic fourth term.But the drama didn't end on election night.Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede, his own party accepted the results, and the defeated candidate departed Brazil through Argentina and Ecuador before arriving in Miami.So how did Lula turn the election around in just three weeks? Can Bolsonarismo survive without the Bolsonaro family at its center? And has Brazil's democracy emerged stronger, or merely survived another test?Chalin Askew is joined by Guilherme Casarões, political scientist at Florida International University and an expert on the international far right, to examine one of Brazil's most remarkable elections — and what comes next.
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  Brazil’s Runoff and the Politics of Disintegration with Rodrigo Nunes 23.10.2026 51m

  The Delve is on a break, but some elections are too important to let slide. Ahead of Brazil’s October 25 runoff, we talk with philosopher Rodrigo Nunes of PUC-Rio, author of Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right (Haymarket Books).Flavio Bolsonaro finished the first round ahead of Lula, and the far right now holds majorities in both houses of Congress. Rodrigo explains what the polls missed, why both candidates have such a low ceiling, and how abstention could decide a tight race.Then we go deeper: how decades of neoliberalism, the attention economy and the shadow of climate change have fed the far right’s rise, and why he calls it a politics for a sinking ship. We also get into memory, why two halves of Brazil remember the Lula years and the dictatorship so differently, the strange pairing of order and permissiveness, and the role of religion.And what a Bolsonaro victory would mean beyond Brazil, from the Amazon to the US-China balance of power.A special episode of The Delve, hosted by Chalin Askew.Rodrigo Nunes’s Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right is out now from Haymarket Books.Rodrigo is touring the book in the UK and then the US. Find dates on Haymarket’s socials.
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  Season 10 Finale: Don't Be So Technological 10.09.2026 15m

  A UFO story from 1994 Zimbabwe sends Chalin down a rabbit hole — and it turns out the aliens may have had a point. From the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing to a Reuters investigation into China's military robotics ambitions to a Pentagon-backed startup racing to build something "better than anything China has," Chalin traces how a technology built for search-and-rescue quietly became a global arms race — and asks what kind of future we're actually choosing to build.Then: the season closes with gratitude, a few personal thank-yous, and news about what's next for The Delve.
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  The Box Didn’t Hold: OpenAI, Hugging Face, and the AI That Cheated 04.09.2026 15m

  In July 2026, OpenAI put two powerful AI models inside a sealed testing environment and gave them a simple assignment: hack as far as they could. The sandbox was supposed to contain them. It didn’t.One model found a flaw, reached the open internet, and compromised Hugging Face while apparently looking for the answer key to its own benchmark test. Then, when Hugging Face tried to use an American AI model to analyze the attack logs, the model refused — and the company turned to a Chinese open-weight model instead.This week on The Delve: Chalin explores what happens when AI systems learn the gaps between our rules and our goals — and whether we can build a box smart enough to hold something that is learning how boxes work.
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  Cleared for Secrets 28.08.2026 11m

  FBI agents search a quiet house in Alexandria, Virginia and find 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches. The man who lives there has a top secret clearance and seventeen years at the CIA. Chalin walks through what a security clearance actually requires — the polygraphs, the reinvestigations, the questions designed to catch exactly this kind of lie — and asks how none of it caught David Rush. Plus: the U.S. hits $40 trillion in debt, and a look inside the secretive process for choosing the UN's next Secretary-General.
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  What's Going Down in Argentina 14.08.2026 14m

  Thousands of Argentines marched through the rain outside Congress last week — tear gas, rubber bullets, a water cannon — over a bill that would have let foreigners buy unlimited land in the country. Except the government had already pulled that provision the day before. So why did people still show up furious? Chalin breaks down what's actually in the bill, what it means for Argentina's borders and water supply, and why a president who's pulled off a real economic turnaround still can't get the country behind him. Plus: a major new defense pact reshapes the Middle East, and a humanitarian catastrophe getting lost in the noise.
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  Ceuta: Five Hundred Years, One Week 07.08.2026 9m

  Sixty thousand people crossed into Ceuta in a matter of days. At least eighty-eight died trying. Reporting from Morocco, Chalin traces what actually happened at Spain's five-hundred-year-old African enclave — the policy signal from Madrid, the history nobody talks about, and what it means that a modest garrison built to hold a fence line couldn't hold a fence line. Plus: Spain's own government points fingers everywhere but at itself, and a preview of what's coming next on The Delve.
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  Overturn This: Inside the White House Campaign to Reverse a Red Card 17.07.2026 12m

  A red card. A trophy ceremony seven months earlier. An office inside Trump Tower. A phone call to FIFA's president. Chalin lays out, in order, exactly what happened between a controversial ejection at the World Cup and a rule that hadn't been touched since 1962 — plus what happened when the ball actually started rolling again. Then: a long look at Iran's invisible new Supreme Leader, who has not appeared in public once — not at his inauguration, not during the war he inherited, not even at his own father's funeral.
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  Darializa Avila Chevalier: The Woman Without a Mandate 10.07.2026 15m

  Two years before she won the Democratic nomination for New York's 13th Congressional District, Darializa Avila Chevalier stood at a chained door inside Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, singing as police moved in. Chalin traces the full escalation — from the first encampment to the overnight occupation to the arrests — and asks who actually paid the price for that night. Then: her record, her positions, and what a district that once sent Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Rangel to Washington deserves now.
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  No Limits: Inside the Secret Cold War Between Russia and China 12.06.2026 14m

  While Putin and Xi shake hands for the cameras, a classified FSB document reveals what's really happening behind the "no limits" partnership — espionage, stolen military tech, and a territorial grudge over the Russian Far East that goes back to 1860. Chalin breaks down why Russia's most powerful ally might also be its most dangerous rival, plus a fresh Five Eyes warning on Chinese espionage and a few thoughts on Europe's continued Russian energy habit.
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  The Strait of Hormuz: 23 Sailors. 5 Votes. A Hail of Bullets. 05.06.2026 10m

  An all-Filipino crew of 23 had been stranded at anchor in the Persian Gulf for more than a month. There was one way out. Through the Strait of Hormuz — through mines, through Iranian gunboats, through a waterway Iran had declared its hunting ground. They voted four times. The answer was no. On the fifth vote, the dominos fell. This is the story of 23 sailors caught in the middle of a war they had no part in — and the most important waterway in the world effectively closed while 20,000 seafarers waited, wondered, and prayed.
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  Brothers to the Rescue: Operation Scorpion 29.05.2026 15m

  Welcome to Season 10 of The Delve. A new sound. A new format. And stories that put you inside the moment rather than just briefing you on it.We're starting where the news won't — with four names almost nobody remembers. Armando Alejandre Jr. Carlos Costa. Mario de la Peña. Pablo Morales. Four unarmed American civilians shot out of the sky over international waters by the Cuban Air Force on February 24th, 1996.Last week, Raúl Castro was indicted for their murders.This is the story of Brothers to the Rescue, Operation Scorpion, a spy who kissed his wife goodbye at 3am and turned up on Cuban television the next day — and thirty years of four families waiting for justice.
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  Season 10 is coming. And it sounds different. 22.05.2026

  Season 9 took The Delve to 75 countries. Season 10 takes it somewhere else entirely. New sound design. New format. Cinematic, story-driven episodes that will make you feel like you're inside the story — not just hearing about it. Brothers to the Rescue. The Strait of Hormuz. No Limits. Puerto Rico. These are the stories Season 10 is built on. We'll see you very soon.
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  [BRIEFING] That's Not a Decolonization Conference 08.05.2026 10m

  As a junior at Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh, Chalin took an African Liberation Movements class at the University of Pittsburgh. It changed how he saw the world. This week, a conference called the World Decolonization Forum opens in Istanbul — organized by a Turkish think tank, partnered with Al Jazeera and a Chinese government-adjacent university, held in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. Its agenda dedicates a roundtable exclusively to Palestine. The Uyghurs don't have one. The Kurds don't have one. The Rohingya don't have one. The Sahrawi — whose cause is being actively undermined by the conference's own funders — don't have one. The question this episode asks is simple: if decolonization is the cause, why are tens of millions of colonized people missing from the conversation?
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  [BRIEFING] The Pope vs. The President: A 1,500-Year Pattern 01.05.2026 14m

  When Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope in history — entered a public dispute with the White House over the war in the Middle East, Chalin was surprised. When JD Vance, a Catholic convert, started citing Catholic just war doctrine to justify a war the head of the Catholic Church says doesn't qualify, he was floored. Then he found an article. Turns out popes have been going toe to toe with the most powerful leaders of their era for fifteen centuries. From Attila the Hun to Napoleon to Hitler — the pattern is remarkably consistent. And it doesn't tend to end well for the world leader.
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  [BRIEFING] Lebanon, Israel... and France? 24.04.2026 14m

  Two French soldiers killed in Lebanon by Hezbollah sends Chalin down a rabbit hole. France has had troops in Lebanon since 1978. In those 48 years, Hezbollah went from a nascent militia to the most powerful non-state armed group in the Middle East. France was there for all of it. This is the story of a country that designed Lebanon, embedded its language and laws into its DNA, and then watched from the sidelines as everyone else tore it apart. With Hezbollah at its weakest in 40 years, Lebanon's government declaring its military actions illegal, and Israel and Lebanon talking for the first time since 1983 — the window is open. The question isn't whether France should leave. The question is whether France has the will to finally show up.
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  Inside the Machine with Kerry Healey 10.04.2026 51m

  Chalin talks with former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and Forward Party Chairwoman Kerry Healey about what it actually looks like to govern from inside a broken system — and why she finally walked away from the Republican Party on January 7th. They dig into how primaries have been engineered to reward extremism, why 50,000 elected offices in America are sitting completely empty, and what the Forward Party is building to fill the gap. Plus: what John Adams understood about democracy in 1780 that we've somehow managed to forget.
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  Who Governs a “Freedom City”? with Rick McGahey 03.04.2026 25m

  “Freedom Cities” are being sold as a way to unlock innovation: fewer rules, faster building, and a clean-slate approach to growth. But what is a Freedom City—really—and who would it answer to?In this episode, Chalin is joined by Rick McGahey, economist at The New School and former Clinton-era Assistant Secretary of Labor, to break down the Freedom Cities idea and the paradox at the center of it: cities are governed by states, so why is this being pushed at the federal level? Rick argues the answer is the point—Freedom City proponents want zones that can dodge not only state constraints, but also wide swaths of federal rules, from taxation to labor protections to environmental regulation. We also zoom out to the bigger story Rick explores in his work on inequality: metro areas generate the overwhelming share of U.S. GDP, yet both federal and state policy often treat cities with suspicion or hostility—making it harder for them to deliver the basics (schools, housing, transit, safety) that keep a city healthy. If “Freedom Cities” are built near thriving metros to siphon their economic gravity—while trying to opt out of the rules that protect the people living around them—what exactly are we building: a housing solution, an innovation lab… or a modern company town?
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  The Algorithm Trap with Dr. Jean Twenge 27.03.2026 30m

  This week, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for deliberately designing their platforms to addict children. The verdict didn't come out of nowhere — the science has been building for over a decade. Chalin talks with Dr. Jean Twenge, psychologist and author of iGen, about what the data has been saying since 2012, why the law protecting kids online was written in 1998 before social media existed, and what it means that the next version of this problem isn't an app — it's an AI that will date your teenager.
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  Techno-Feudalism: Who Really Owns Your Devices? with Cory Doctorow 20.03.2026 54m

  What does it mean to “own” something in 2026?More and more, we buy devices—and then discover we’re renting access to them: app stores that take a cut of everything, software locks that block repairs, and platforms that decide what you’re allowed to install, use, or fix.In this episode, Chalin is joined by Cory Doctorow—science fiction writer, journalist, and one of the sharpest critics of concentrated tech power—to unpack his idea of techno-feudalism: a system where the biggest companies don’t just compete in a market… they act like landlords, extracting rent from the roads everyone else has to travel.We talk about the App Store economy, antitrust, “interoperability” as a real-world escape hatch, why right-to-repair is a power issue (not a hobbyist issue), and what it would actually take to make the digital world work for users again.