On this episode of Start Making Sense, John Nichols has our political update, and Sean Wilentz talks about the latest release in the Dylan Bootleg series.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer speaks during the Senate Democrats’ news conference on extending expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits in the US Capitol on December 4, 2025. (Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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Republicans are about to end Obamcare subsidies, driving up premiums for 20 million people during the year of the midterm elections. How have they managed to end up after all these years with no health insurance plan of their own? John Nichols comments.
Also: Bob Dylan’s earliest recordings have just been released—the first is from 1956 when he was 15 years old—on the 8-CD set ‘Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series vol. 18” – which ends in 1963, with his historic performance at Carnegie Hall. Sean Wilentz explains – he wrote the 120 page book that accompanies the release.
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Republicans are about to end Obamacare subsidies, driving up premiums for 20 million people during the year of the midterm elections. How have they managed to end up after all these years with no health insurance plan of their own? John Nichols comments.
Also: Bob Dylan’s earliest recordings have just been released—the first is from 1956 when he was 15 years old—on the eight-CD set Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series vol. 18—which ends in 1963 with his historic performance at Carnegie Hall. Sean Wilentz explains—he wrote the 120 page book that accompanies the release.
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Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
The landscape of resistance in Minneapolis, John Nichols reports, includes surprisingly powerful and effective faith groups, plus unions, neighborhood mutual aid and community safety networks, ICE observer teams, and direct action groups, plus the ACLU and its allies, as well as the outspoken mayor and the fighting state attorney general.
Also: DOGE did NOT reduce spending – at all. But it did reduce federal employment; 271,000 people lost their jobs in the federal government, according to CATO. Sasha Abramsky set out to find out what it was like for some of those people — his new book reports on the experiences of eleven fired federal workers: American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE butchered the US Government.
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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.