This week, Vanity Fair tech correspondent Nick Bilton speaks with cohost Joe Hagan about the recent leaks from Facebook that reveal the company knew of the toxic impact of their platforms, including Instagram, on users, especially teenage girls. In a world in which the social media giants—FAANG, or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—are too rich and powerful to be contained by limp political and regulatory systems, “we’re left to the wolves,” says Bilton. After covering the social media world for a decade, Bilton says the only way to beat the media giants is to hack the system—ourselves—by reprogramming our behaviors, which are the literal coins of the social media realm.

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox sits down with the First Son to talk about his addiction, his dad, what makes a Biden love story, and why he thinks the GOP, and Don Jr. in particular, are obsessed with him.

Hive correspondents unpack Jared Kushner’s romantic and financial spin in his upcoming memoir and try making sense of Donald Trump burying his ex-wife, Ivanka’s mother, on a New Jersey golf course.

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham joins Inside the Hive to talk about what she witnessed on January 6th, Melania’s “lazy” run as First Lady, and what people should know ahead of 2024.

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Lis Smith, Democratic campaign veteran and author of the new memoir Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, which details her journey, the public one and the private one, through Democratic campaigns over the past 17 years, for candidates as varied as Jon Corzine, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and, most infamously, former governor Andrew Cuomo, whose lurid political demise she details down to the last moments of his time in office. A savvy political operator, Smith trains her sights on stubborn problems like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and what to do about President Joe Biden, who, despite his abysmal poll numbers, she says is preparing to come out swinging in advance of the midterms. “If the [midterms] are a referendum on Democrats, we will be screwed in November,” says Smith, but if Biden and his surrogates can effectively target Trump-tainted election deniers and antiabortion Republicans, “that’s a terrain we can win on. And that’s a switch that we need to flip—we need to flip that switch pretty soon. And we have the opportunity to now.” Smith, who helped take Buttigieg’s star to the national level, is now working with Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who went viral with a searing counterattack on anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans. Smith puts McMorrow on a short list of candidates, along with Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, to form the future of the party.

This week’s episode of Inside the Hive first dives into the latest revelations from the January 6th committee, and explores what could happen next as the panel draws to a close Then Chrysta Bilton, along with her husband Nick Bilton, join Emily Jane Fox to discuss “Normal Family,” Chrysta’s memoir that recounts her discovery of more than 35 biological siblings from the same sperm donor. She describes her colorful upbringing, the shock of a lifetime in finding out that she was perhaps unknowingly dating her half brother, and how this experience shaped her views on nature versus nurture

This week, Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet joins Inside the Hive to talk about his journey into the far-right world of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Qanon-ers and Trump cultists — who they are, what they’re saying, what they believe, and what their still-growing movement might portend (including the specter of civil war in America). Also: Willem Marx, a London-based contributor to Vanity Fair, discusses the fall of British PM Boris Johnson as well as his latest report on the undue influence of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs in the British establishment - including, allegedly, Johnson himself.

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, the former head of Planned Parenthood joins Emily Jane Fox to discuss abortion rights, contraception, and advocacy in the wake of Roe “I thought that at some point, there would be some group within the Republican party that would go, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too far,” she said.

This week Inside the Hive features two guests focused on the Jan. 6 hearings. First, Daniel Goldman, former federal prosecutor and newly-announced candidate for New York's 10th congressional district, analyzes the findings of the Select Committee investigating the insurrection from the point of view of a lead lawyer in the first Trump impeachment. “If [Merrick Garland] doesn't charge him because Trump is a former president, then that is political,” Goldman says. “And so if you want to de-politicize the Department of Justice, you can't not charge him.” Second, Inside the Hive talks to Alex Holder, the British filmmaker whose exclusive access to Donald Trump and his family before, during and after Jan. 6 has turned his forthcoming documentary, Unprecedented, into explosive new evidence for the Committee and the filmmaker himself into a possible witness. After witnessing Trump’s “tone of belligerence," says Holder, “I predicted that [the Jan. 6 insurrection] was going to happen the night before.”

This week, Inside the Hive co-host Joe Hagan talks to Jason Selvig and Davram Steifler, the comedy duo known as The Good Liars, about their viral prank on the National Rifle Association in late May. Selvig, posing as an NRA ally, stood before Wayne LaPierre and thanked him for his continual “thoughts and prayers” for mass shootings, presenting a brutally exhaustive list. The duo has attended 15 Trump rallies, poking at the QAnon insanity inside, and were eyewitnesses to the insurrection on Jan. 6th—which they also managed to turn into pointed comedy. “You couldn't help but feel like they were getting ready for a battle reenactment or something,” says Steifler. "Everyone we stopped was like, ‘This is 1776.’”

Author Dave Cullen, who has been covering mass shootings in America for two decades, joins Emily Jane Fox for this week’s episode of Inside The Hive, to talk about the slow progress he has witnessed in how new groups are taking on the NRA for the first time, and what he is hearing from survivors of mass shootings about how they are dealing with the repeated trauma.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a key member of the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the Capitol attack, gives Inside the Hive an exclusive preview of next week’s primetime hearings. After nearly a year of investigating the insurrection, Raskin says the most surprising discovery has been "the role that money played, and the role of a financial motive behind all these events, to keep the money pouring in.” The committee, he promises, will also draw direct and indirect lines between “the top of the Republican hierarchy” and the "violent hooligans and street fascists” who overran the Capitol. But will Donald J. Trump himself be implicated? Raskin has said the former president will get his “comeuppance" but whether he’ll face direct criminal justice for his “premeditated” role in an attempted coup remains an open question. Tantalizingly, Raskin deflects on the question of whether former VP Mike Pence has spoken to the committee or might testify against Trump. "I can't get into it,” he says. Plus: Raskin offers a powerful message and emotional plea to Democrats demoralized by the political landscape facing the party going into the midterms.

The only public figure with the guts to confront cynical Republicans over gun laws and the Texas massacre was a defiant Democrat who the media class long ago dismissed: gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke. Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan grapple with the horrors of this week's events in Uvalde and what they say about our broken politics and national backslide. When rare instances of idealism and courage are framed by political elites as mere opportunism, is there any hope left? Where do we go from here?

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running to be the state's next governor, joins Emily Jane Fox fresh on the heels of Tuesday's primary elections. In November, Shapiro, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, will face Republican Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed far-right candidate who wanted to overturn the 2020 election results, whom Shaprio called "extremely dangerous. Fox and Shapiro dive into his opponent's role in the January 6th insurrection and how to message to voters who believe in The Big Lie. Plus, Shapiro speaks to what he learned from Democrats' campaigning mistakes in 2016, why he believes freedom is on the ballot, and his thoughts on how to win in a swing state.

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan are joined by Hive political reporter Abigail Tracy to talk about the plight of the Democratic Party leading into this year’s midterms. With the right savaging Democrats on the economy and culture-war issues, and a total loss of congressional power to the Trumpist right looming, what is the Democrats' message to voters and why isn't Joe Biden delivering it?

Rebecca Traister, feminist, author and New York Magazine contributor, talks to co-host Joe Hagan about the shocking Supreme Court leak that all but confirms the impending death of Roe v. Wade. Democratic leadership from President Joe Biden to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi have failed, Traister says, to formulate a "robust and morally persuasive message” to counteract the decades-long march of anti-choice Republicans who are set on reengineering society to the past. With consequential elections on the horizon, the fall of Roe could very well mean the toppling of other progressive rulings, from the right to contraception to marriage equality and even interracial unions. Traister finds slivers of hope in a new generation of progressive female voices who are forcefully connecting abortion rights to economics, class, and race as they face "an era that none of us can imagine.”

Author James Pogue talks to cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan about the so-called New Right, the intellectual movement congealing around tech billionaire and MAGA mega-donor Peter Thiel and the Trumpist GOP, which he wrote about for this month’s Vanity Fair. After embedding himself with the vanguard of intellectuals whose reactionary politics, antagonism for democracy and visions of retro-patriarchy inform the agendas of people like Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, Pogue demystifies fringe ideas like the “black pill,” “trad wives,” and “ball tanning."

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Nick Bilton--who literally wrote the book on Twitter--returns to dissect why Elon Musk is trying to buy the company, what employees and investors are talking about behind closed doors, and whether or not he thinks the deal will even go through.

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Bill Browder joins Emily Jane Fox to talk about how governments around the world can more effectively turn the screws on Russia, and how, if the Russian people begin to see Putin as what Browder calls a "failed, corrupt, tinpot dictator," he could be stripped of his power.

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Florida Congressman Charlie Crist, former Republican and one-time governor, about the culture wars emanating from his home state and specifically, from Governor Ron DeSantis. As DeSantis passes discriminatory new laws targeting gay and trans people, generating partisan bile for a potential presidential run, Crist is betting DeSantis is a “paper tiger” who is weaker than he appears. "I think he's terribly vulnerable,” he says. “[His] support is a mile wide and an inch deep.” Taking a page from Biden’s playbook against Trump in 2020, Crist thinks voters secretly want civility and not bullying, Disney and not DeSantis, even if current polling shows DeSantis trouncing Crist in a theoretical match up. "I'm an optimist, I'm idealistic, and I believe good will triumph over bad,” Crist says.

This week, cohost Joe Hagan digs into the latest on the Jan. 6 story with CBS New correspondent Robert Costa, who, along with legendary reporter Bob Woodward, broke the news that the House Committee investigating the insurrection discovered a 7 hour and 37 minute gap in Donald Trump’s call logs from that day. Costa explains the importance of that Watergate-like hole in Trump's story — when he was MIA while the Capitol burned — and what it may portend for the investigation. He also defends the Department of Justice against critics who believe AG Merrick Garland isn’t doing enough to probe Trump’s involvement in an attempted coup. “Maybe we just don't know the full story because they work like sharks,” he says. "They're underwater in a way congressional committees are not.”

People were grappling with "fake news" long before it became Donald Trump's favorite term. Fake news might feel new — but the concept has a long twisted history in the United States, as Andie Tucher, a Columbia Journalism School professor and author of the new book "Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History," tells Inside the Hive cohost Emily Jane Fox this week. How did we get to this moment, with its toxic mix of hyperpartisanship, disinformation, and seemingly endless turmoil? What is the role of social media, and of Donald Trump and Fox News in making our understanding of reality feel so dire? Tucher also explains how Democrats and Republicans, as well as liberal media and conservative media, communicate about truth differently, and explores how we can restore faith in our sources of news.

CNN senior international correspondent Matthew Chance flew to Kyiv in January as Russia began amassing troops on Ukraine's borders, and was in the capital on February 24 when it launched its brutal assault. He tells Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan about covering a war that has transformed a country overnight, sending millions fleeing and others into the resistance as Russia targets civilians in its quest to take over the country. Chance describes what he witnessed, and what it’s like to be a journalist on the ground, as fellow reporters lose their lives. He also mulls what the war could mean for the global order, and the hopeless quagmire Vladimir Putin now finds himself in. Now recouping in London, Chase says the Kyiv he last saw was the tragic shell of a formerly vibrant metropolis, a hollowed-out death trap awaiting Russian forces with "a javelin anti-tank missile in every window.”

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox talks to The Hive's editor and resident Russia-Ukraine expert Miriam Elderabout what is happening on the ground in Ukraine. As Russia escalates its war in Ukraine, including its bombing of a maternity and children's hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Elder talks through the human toll of this war: the impossible choices families are having to make, the horrors children are living through, the impact on a pediatric cancer hospital, and what Russian families are facing at the same time. Then, author Rebecca Fox Starr stops by to discuss how we talk about hard things with children, teach kids to take in events with empathy and how we process our own feelings about what is happening in this world.

This week, Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan talk to an expert on the ultrarich oligarchs behind Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Dartmouth sociologist and author Brooke Harrington. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has implicated Putin’s feudal system of corrupt oligarchs, rallying the West to trying to seize their offshore bank accounts and superyachts. Taking their stuff could weaken them, but Harrington says tarnishing and destroying their social status in London and New York, where they’ve built opulent fiefdoms, may be just as effective. Also, Harrington tells of her efforts to join the White House’s new anti-oligarch task force, KleptoCapture—with distressing results.