Pushkin.

It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the story behind the

stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Right now on Deep Background, we're focusing on power and the media.

Today's guest is someone who can speak about this topic, perhaps better than almost anyone

else working in journalism today, because she's not merely a supremely successful journalist,

but she has also herself become the subject of a deep national discussion

around the power of journalism and the effects it can have. I'm talking about Nicole Hannah-Jones.

Nicole Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a staff writer for the New York Times,

and the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant.

She is the creator of the 1619 Project, a long-form journalism project,

drawing on history, sociology, and journalism together,

that seeks to highlight the contributions of African Americans to the story of the United States,

while simultaneously re-centering the historical

role of slavery and segregation to American history.

The 1619 project, as you know, both proved wildly successful in terms of stirring and

creating a national discussion and being adopted into curricula in some places, but it has also stirred

up a significant amount of controversy. That controversy has gone so far as to lead Republican state

legislators to propose laws that would ban the teaching of what's called critical race theory

in those laws. We'll leave aside the fact that it's not exactly the thing that has historically

...