Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books program at St. Thomas University, a liberal arts college in New Brunswick, Canada. It brings together longtime preoccupations of the show — Saul Bellow's late novel, Ravelstein, Allan Bloom, Straussian political philosophy — with the fraught emergence of LLMs like ChatGPT. This past semester, Dinan took a fairly radical approach to confronting AI in the classroom, and it seemed to work. We consider the art of teaching, the qualities of great teachers, and what it all reveals about an insidious technology's effect on how we live and learn as citizens in, at least for now, a democratic republic.

Listen again: "Unraveling Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow," June 21, 2021

Sources:

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2000)

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)

Matt Dinan, "Saul Bellow's Ravelstein," Hedgehog Review, Spring 2025

— "Permission Structures," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025

— "It's Not Just a Calculator," Prefaces, Aug 28, 2024

Jorge Luis Borges, "The Lottery in Babylon," Collected Fictions (1999)

Jonathan Malesic, "ChatGPT Is a Gimmick: AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die," Hedgehog Review, May 21, 2025

— "Taming the Demon: How desert monks put work in its place," Commonweal, Feb 2, 2019

This episode originally aired November 17, 2025 on Patreon — we're unlocking it as a holiday treat.

If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoing arguments about architecture that his ascension has occasioned. Proponents of a RETVRN to the architectural ideals of ancient Greece and Rome are prominent in MAGA circles; partisans of a neo-classical revival populate government commissions, and their prescriptions find expression in various executive orders again. To understand who these people are, what their movement wants, and the kernel of truth in their grievances, we talked to architectural critic and proprietor of McMansion Hell Kate Wagner. We start by analyzing Trump's ballroom and the demolishing the East Wing of the White House — the perfect way into MAGA architecture and the mind of their Beautiful Builder himself, Donald J. Trump.

Sources:

Kate Wagner, "Duncing About Architecture," New Republic, Feb 8, 2020

— "Trump Will Not Make Architecture Great Again," The Nation, Jan 7, 2025

— "The Real Problem With Trump’s Cheesy Neoclassical Building Fetish," Feb 12, 2025

— "what the fuck are we doing anymore," The Late Review, Jan 9, 2025.

— "Wrecking Ballroom," The New York Review of Architecture, Dec 17, 2025.

Charlie Nash, "Trump Admits He Could've Built Ballroom Without Destroying the East Wing, But 'It Looked Like Hell,'" Mediate, Nov 10, 2025

Jonathan Edwards & Dan Diamond, "Trump hires new White House ballroom architect," WaPo, Dec 4, 2025.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.

As the end of the year approaches, we wanted to look back at another year of trying to understand the American right—what we got wrong, what we got right, and what to expect in 2026. The conversation begins with the cracks showing in Trump's coalition, his plummeting approval ratings, and the possibility that Charlie Kirk really was helping hold the marriage of MAGA and the GOP together, then consider if we should have seen this coming (or not) and what it might say about our understanding of Trump, Vance, Kirk, Musk, and others we've considered on KYE in 2025.

Sources:

Christopher Flavelle, "How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration," New York Times, Dec 7, 2025

Bilal Baydoun, "What Musk's DOGE Really Cut: Trust, Safety, and Democracy," Roosevelt Institute, May 29, 2025

Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (2025)

"Jill Lepore on Nationalism, Populism, and the State of America," EconTalk, April 15, 2019

Ryan Burge, "Religion Has Become A Luxury Good For The Middle Class, Married College Graduate With Children," ReligionUnplugged, July 12, 2023

Matt Dinan, "Permission Structures: How AI-skeptic Professors Can Still Help Students Write Papers," Prefaces, Dec 10, 2025