For our final episode, Omar sits down with his dear friend Lydia Kiesling to discuss something near and dear: literature.... more

More! More! More! Today, Omar speaks with Jon D. Erickson about society’s seemingly insatiable appetite for growth. Can the scales... more

“Is the system functioning exactly as it’s meant to?” That’s the question on Omar’s mind in today’s episode–a conversation with... more

A world without advertising? Wishful thinking. Or is it? Omar’s interrogating how and why ads weave through our lives, and... more

What does the one percent really mean? What do people get wrong when they think about their own wealth? And... more

Is having a gun an expression of some sort of freedom? The ubiquity of guns in the United States certainly... more

What does the world look like without … us? This week, Omar speaks with David Farrier and imagines what the... more

E.R. Fightmaster, Tien Tran, and Katie Kershaw are talking sports. Namely all things queer and woman-forward in the world of... more

Today, Omar speaks with Alicia Kennedy about the food-industrial complex, the massive climate footprint of our eating habits, and what... more

Resources we use to power our lives aren’t going to be employed in the same way in the very near... more

Omar sits down with Adam McKay to discuss the state of our environment and society. This is part-one of our... more

All over the United States, more and more communities are losing their most important source of  information: local newspapers. At... more

Mosquitoes and the deadly diseases they carry are a public health crisis. Today, thanks to climate change, they're even starting... more

Social security has provided relief for millions of elderly, bereaved, and disabled Americans, but just about everyone on all sides... more

Thwaites is maybe the most famous glacier on earth. And to get a sense of why, you should also know... more

It’s undeniable–touch is growing scarcer in our increasingly digital world. We learn about the physiological importance of touch and speak... more

According to the CDC, deaths from opioids more than doubled to 105,000 from January 2015 to January 2023. Some states... more

Whatever going green is – be it using electric cars or installing solar panels – it doesn’t happen without big,... more

Today, a whopping one million species are on the verge of extinction, with animals dying off at a rate not... more

Over the past few years, some of the richest people (mostly men) on the planet have funded all kinds of... more

Today, libraries are shouldering societal burdens like addiction, and have become a central battleground in this country’s raging culture wars.  A... more

The prison abolition movement has long called for the end of mass incarceration. What are the consequences and why should... more

So much of what we take for granted about the American labor force, from weekends to work hours, comes from... more

What does a world without cash look like? Who isn’t able to participate and why is a cashless society something... more

If we run out of phosphorus, which is what we use to enable massive-scale farming, millions of people will starve... more

We have been losing public spaces for years, and though it’s a defining architectural feature of many major cities, we... more

Omar’s birthplace, Qatar, is essentially disappearing, not as a result of climate change, but because it’s become something entirely different.... more

Politicians, economists, and sleep specialists debate instituting a permanent standard time. Should we keep one time all year, split it... more

The last time scientists produced a new batch of effective antibiotics was in 1987. Since then, we've seen virtually no... more

People love coffee, but climate change is fundamentally altering where and how coffee is grown. Because of the damage being... more

We use sand more than almost any other resource on earth - for everything from glass to concrete – and... more

Hosted by international bestselling author and journalist Omar El Akkad, every episode of Without is a thought experiment – what... more